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Why I'll never take a car around the Nurburgring.

Tony Lockhart

Avoiding Stress, at Every Opportunity
This video is quite shocking, and shows how amateurish the whole set up is. People understandably treat it like a race track on the public days, and then this sort of clusterf**k occurs:

 
I've done it on a Ducati on a mixed vehicle day. It's exactly that type of car - E30, or Mk2 Gti with roll-cage etc that I remember being scared of the most. The surface is quite lumpy and they all put the hardest suspension you can get on them. And so these cars don't corner, they're all over the placing, skipping wide towards me at quite a fast pace. Certainly as fast I was going. I think I did it in under 11 minutes, which is a bit shit, hence me getting caught up a lot by cars

I'll only ever do it again on a bike-only day. I reckon I'd easily shave a minute off my time If I didn't have cars to think about.

My business partner goes every year on his Fireblade for 2 days. About 5 laps per day
 
It's a 'public toll road': no minimum standard required (of car or driver) or scrutineering requirements prior to explicit high-speed antics, while mixing it alongside with the tour buses, tourists, caravans (yes, really) and neophytes & nutjobs. Most UK insurers will not cover your car there; an explicit exclusion, in fact - hardly a surprise.

Once upon a time, I fancied the idea of taking the toy over for a play, but really ...nah; can find rather more pleasure, at far lower speed & risk while out of anyone's sight / risk-radius down here in the nearby lumpy bits of Zummerzet/Wilts/Dorset.
 
A lot of uninsured big bills in that footage. Tony, you're right. I'd sort of vaguely thought it might be fun, one day, in the right car (ie, preferably somebody else's) but having seen that, I think not. Are there days when conditions are more controlled (ie, for grown ups) and others best avoided, perhaps?
 
A lot of uninsured big bills in that footage. Tony, you're right. I'd sort of vaguely thought it might be fun, one day, in the right car (ie, preferably somebody else's) but having seen that, I think not. Are there days when conditions are more controlled (ie, for grown ups) and others best avoided, perhaps?

You can go in a ring taxi....expensive but you get more of the thrill with less of the risk. Sabine Schmidt used to do it.
 
Yes, unless I'm mistaken he doesn't even get the car in to top gear. It's the speed it carries through the corners that's impressive though and resulting time. The Cup cars with the aero package always suffer on top end speed too.
 
Ah, didn't watch to the end. There were a couple of long-ish, straight-ish sections where he was clearly at the rev limit, indicating 218kmh and there was time for another gear if he had one (I would have thought) so I assumed it had been geared for acceleration rather than Vmax.
 
"i saw 243kmh a couple of times but oddly there was an apparent flat-out straight in the middle when it seemed to be limited at 218"

Yes, good spot. The flat out bit in the middle surprised me as he did have another gear left to change up to.
 
This is my favourite Ring lap as it's great for learning the circuit and because he annoys a 430 Scuderia in his VW. Also very awesome how everything he says works in the sim as well (where my best GT3 time is laughably north of 10 mins).

Lap starts about 3mins in and annoyingly the forum wont left me link directly to that:

 
Notbothering-Nurburgring-Decal-Sticker.jpg
 


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