My Favorite Race Track: Nürburgring Nordschleife

    I've written about music for the past few weeks, so I thought I might switch the flavor for this week, since I'm feeling like it. And I think it is pretty obvious by now, the fact that I have two major hobbies: music and cars, but I also love anything that comes with them. Many people don't know that, but music and cars actually intertwine with each other throughout the history of them. The Pixar movie CARS is a really good example of this, especially the first episode. If you haven't watched it, please do, because it is bloody amazing, amazing shots, soundtrack, and culture. Anyway, back to the topic for this week, the Nürburgring. If you wonder why you couldn't pronounce the name really well or even don't know how to read it, don't worry, it's not English. It is actually German, and that is the place where this race track of all race tracks is located.

    Just to give you an Idea, it normally takes one to 2 minutes for a common type of race car like GT3 cars to go around one lap of the race track. Famous tracks like Suzuka, Fuji Speedway, Daytona, Laguna Seca all fall within that time period. The longest one of them being Suzuka, being 5.8 kilometers long. But compare to the absolute behemoth Nürburgring, they're all little babies. With around 157 corners(The image of "corner" is different to many people, some of them just look like long curves) and 20.8 kilometers long, the Nürburgring is THE longest race track in the entire world, it would take around 6 and half minutes for a GT3 race car to go around for just one lap. Not only is it SUUUUUPER long, it is also THE most fearsome race track there is. It earned the name "green hell" from Scottish driver Jackie Stewart(Very legendary btw), and it absolutely deserves it. The sheer size isn't the only thing that made Green Hell the hell it is, it is also super tight and extremely rough. The guardrails are so narrow that modern race cars(They're bigger) could hardly over take throughout the entire lap, and the road surface is so bumpy and rough that anything more extreme than a GT3 car are almost impossible to race on it. To show you what that looks like I'll provide a few famous on-board laps recorded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSMCfPASImQ This is the lap done by Stephan Rozer, car company RUF's test driver in the RUF CTR3 "Yellowbird". From the way the car breaks traction and slides all over the place, you could see just how bumpy the track surface is. On top of that, all of the corners are extremely high speed and long while being "blind" corners, requiring the driver to memorize every inch of the tarmac in order to come back alive. And because of the long and twisted corners, anyone who wants to go fast(Or survive) needs to master an extremely high level braking technique called Trail-Braking. It's a bit hard to explain what it is, but just imagine trying to maximize the grip of the tire by balancing the amount of braking and steering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGKvZjzCeyY&t=846s This is another lap done by one of my favorite racing driver Kurosawa Motoharu(黑澤元治) in a 964 911 turbo, it is an absolute sight to behold.

    I hope you haven't fallen asleep yet from reading all this rant by me, but the Nürburgring is a truly special place for all car lovers, I really hope I can visit there one day and take a "Ring Taxi" myself to experience it in real life. There is so much heritage and history to unpack about this race track that no one would be interested enough to read all of them, especially written by me, so I think I am just going to leave it here with a few video footages for you to enjoy, so that's it, thanks for reading and have a good week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmSUHhP3ug

Nürburgring Nordschleife von Neil Kampherbeek

    



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