Nurburgring, Germany, has been called the world’s most terrifying motor race track. TNT’s Rebecca Kent discovers you don’t have to be a petrolhead to enjoy the thrills…
For some it is the sound of whale song that gets the hair standing on end. But from the moment I pull up alongside the imposing Nurburgring, home to the world’s most treacherous and the most beautiful motor racing track, I know I have found my new high. It’s the sound of racing cars tearing down an asphalt straight at 225 miles per hour. Even for someone like me, who doesn’t know her spark plugs from her bath plugs, finding myself in the thick of motor racing action is a surprisingly enthralling experience.
We arrive on the day of the VLN Endurance Championship in October, where, for £10.50, the paddock, the pits, the crews and the drivers themselves are all within my reach. This is the most fan-friendly meet on the Nurburgring racing calendar and I feel like a kid who has misappropriated an ‘access-all-areas’ pass.
The air fills with the sound of spanners clunking, valves hissing and pnuematic guns shuddering. Drivers in their fireproofs chat with officials and engineers. They appear insouciant. God knows why. The Nordschleif, or northern loop, on which they’re about to embark is not called ‘The Green Hell’, or ‘Grune Holle’ in German, for nothing. Former racing car champion, Jackie ‘The Flying Scotsman’ Stewart coined the term in the late 1960s, and it was without irony. For more than 80 years, Nürburgring Nordschleife has stood as the definitive one-lap test of man and machine. Nestled among the endless dark green trees of the precipitous Eifel mountains in western Germany, this 20.8km circuit is arguably the most famous, and most feared, anywhere in the world, with a roll call of deaths to its name to prove it.
I don’t know any of the drivers, nor anything about the cars around me – a Porsche 911 GT- something-or-rather here and a BMW M3-GT-whatchyamacallit there. But resisting the buzz of it all is futile.
The VLN is only one of a host of meets at Nurburgring. In June, it will host the legendary 24-hour race, where thousands of people – more party people than petrolheads – witness more than 200 speed machines on the throttle through day and night.
In the same month, the crowds turn out for an entirely different reason – the Rock AM Ring music festival. However, the European Grand Prix is the pinnacle of the events calendar. It follows a 5.148km circuit built in 1984 after Niki Lauda, the only driver to ever lap the Nordschleife in under seven minutes, almost met his fate in a nasty crash in 1976 on the Green Hell.
But despite the course’s 73 infamously perilous bends, it’s only £20 to drive a lap in your own car, or you can pay a pro to whisk you around in a BMW and enjoy views of the green, woody landscape – which, it should be noted, is criss-crossed with miles of hiking trails if you fancy taking a completely different perspective. Fans have described the track as the most beautiful country road in the world. Just take a sick bag.
Alternatively, soar above the circuit’s stands in a rollercoaster that runs along the starting and home stretches of the track. But with an ability to accelerate from 0 to 217km/h (134.84mph) in only 2.5 seconds, making it faster than Formula 1 car, be warned, it isn’t for the faint-hearted.
» Rebecca Kent was a guest of Sunparks Eifel and Nurburgring.
