Facing Fears, Living the Dream: Driving the Notoriously Dangerous Nürburgring for the First Time
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NURBURG, GERMANY — Before flying to Germany to drive the most dangerous racetrack in the known universe — the Nürburgring Nordschleife, or the ‘Ring or Green Hell to its friends — you might think it wise to get some advice from an expert. You know, someone who knows something about this deadly circuit that holds a special place in the heart of every gearhead. But you’d be wrong. The experts all scared the living schnitzel out of me.
“Schwedenkreuz or Flugplatz, at those corners way above 200 km/h,” says decorated racer Jörg Bergmeister. “You can imagine what happens when you’re hitting the guardrail at the wrong angle.”
Actually, I hadn’t imagined that, Jörg, but I have now…
“A lot of cars start rolling there,” he adds.
I’ll be thinking about that image — and the myriad other nightmarish scenarios that could play out — later as I lie awake in a German hotel room, unable to sleep the night before I’m set to do BMW’s two-day M Experience driving school at the Nordschleife.
There are many ways to drive the Nordschleife for the first time, but the BMW M Experience is probably the best. BMW rents the entire track for two days and divides 70 participants into groups of eight, each led by one of the company’s elite driving instructors.
The catch? It costs 4,590 euros for two days of driving. Hotels, meals, and the use of a 523-horsepower BMW M4 Competition (the rear-wheel-drive model) are all included.
At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a bucket list thing for me, a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I’ve seen races at the ‘Ring before. I’ve stayed up all night at the 24-hour race and come back with boots so muddy and reeking of beer that they went straight in the trash afterwards. But I’ve never actually driven this 100-year-old ribbon of tarmac that meanders through the rolling hills of western Germany.
Part of me is wondering what’s so special about this place. Are my expectations too high? Why do legions of drivers — professional racers, YouTubers, British TV shows and even F1 champion Max Verstappen — keep coming back to the same track?
Fascination and Obsession
Like everyone I spoke to for this story, Bergmeister has a deep personal connection to the Nordschleife. He grew up in Leverkusen, Germany, 100 kilometres from the Nordschleife. His father was a car dealer and successful racecar driver, who made young Jörg memorize all 73 corners of the Nordschleife before he could drive it. Jörg did as he was told and completed his first laps when he was 13 with his father supervising from the passenger seat. Later, in his career as a professional racer, the younger Bergmeister earned wins at the Nürburgring 24 Hours, Le Mans, Spa, Daytona, Sebring, and pretty much every major racetrack. Still, the ‘Ring is in a different league, he says.
“It's just the ultimate track. I mean, there's nothing like it. It's the ultimate challenge for a driver,” he explains. Why? Because it’s unusually long and unusually narrow, he says.
“At every other modern track, you start at the limit or maybe even a little bit over the limit, then you work backwards to find your pace,” Bergmeister explains. That’s because at almost every modern circuit, there’s ample run-off area, space to make a mistake and get back on track safely. At the Nordschleife, he says, there is almost no runoff, and therefore little margin for error, so you must work up carefully to the limit.
If he was trying to scare me straight, it worked. I’ll be careful when we hit the track and try not to let my enthusiasm overtake my ability.
At dinner with the 70 participants who signed up for the M Experience at the Nordschleife, I’m surprised to see Dirk Häcker, vice president of engineering at BMW M, casually sitting at a table with a group of guests.
“I like to come here to spend time with customers and get their feedback,” he explains. “I only do it sometimes.”
Häcker, too, did his first laps of the Nordschleife when he was a teenager. He’s spent the last 30 years instructing and testing cars here. But he’s still just as fascinated with the track today as he was then, he tells me with wide-eyed enthusiasm.
“To drive with a very precise car on the Nürburgring is more like playing a musical instrument,” he says. “It's to come into a flow, to come with a feeling.”
As for me, my first laps of the ‘Ring were virtual, on my family’s computer in or around 1999. I was 12 years old. I don’t remember what ancient PC game it was — GP Legends? Sports Car GT? — but I do remember a red Logitech steering wheel and how utterly and hopelessly obsessed I became with the Nordschleife, with learning the track, and shaving seconds off my personal best. It was all probably fuelled by copies of EVO and CAR magazine purchased when visiting my grandparents in England. (Anybody else remember Jethro Bovingdon’s series of articles on his failed sub-eight-minute Nordschleife BMW E36 project car?)
Facing Fears, Living the Dream
There’s still fog hanging over the track as our group of eight drivers in four cars heads out onto the Nordschleife for the first time.
“Welcome to the Nordschleife,” says our teacher Ricardo Sanchez over the radio. He’s driving a BMW M3 sedan in front, while the rest of us follow in the M4 coupes. (If you’ve ever seen the movie Gran Turismo about Jann Mardenborough, the video-game racer who won a competition to become a real racecar driver, well, Sanchez won that same competition after Mardenborough and also went on to a professional racing career, although with no Hollywood biopic.)
My first thought is: it’s sooo narrow, how is this a racetrack? It’s more like a twisty country backroad. My next thought is: this place is absolutely gorgeous.
The sun dazzles through the trees that line the circuit. Light cuts through the fog and gives the Nordschleife a dream-like feel for those first laps.
Sanchez talks us through every turn: “After the crest, touch the brake, off the brake, back to the power to put some weight on the back, and now we brake hard, brake hard, behind me behind me, go in go in go in,” he says through the terrifyingly fast left at Schwedenkreuz and the long right of Aremburg.
I develop a newfound appreciation for the rear-drive M4 Competition — if not its beaver-tooth face — as it proves to be less of a tail-happy hooligan than I remember and more of a precise, predictable and transparent driving partner. (The fact that we drove with all the electric aids on, not M Dynamic Mode, certainly helped.)
“Then Niki Lauda corner, which is named after him, where his famous accident happened,” Sanchez continues. Approaching the corner, it looks as if I’m driving straight into a wall; only at the last second does an exit appear. I brake hard. Later, with growing confidence, I’ll take it almost flat with just a little lift.
There’s a seductive flow to the circuit. The rapid-fire corners come at me as fast as I can think. At least I’m no longer thinking (too much) about how horrific a crash here would be.
“And then Bergwerk, tricky corner,” says Sanchez. “Braking in the middle towards the outside and then we start going down, looking for grip, compression, back on the power and open the wheel.”
Going uphill towards Mutkurve, it’s easy to come in at well over 200 km/h, but it’s a blind left with about one metre of wet grass as runoff on the outside. I tell myself not to look at the patchwork of metal guardrails but focus on the apex.
Then, Karussell, the famous banked turn. It’s bigger than I imagined and also more violent. The uneven surfaces bounce me around the cabin, but it seems there’s no limit to how aggressively you can accelerate around the corner. The car flings itself out of the banking like a kid jumping off a moving merry-go-round.
The next section of the track is my favourite: Hohe Acht, the highest point on the circuit, through Wippermann and then Brunchen. The latter is known as YouTube corner because so many drivers crash there on the off-camber downhill right. Go too fast or turn too early, and you run out of road on the exit. Get it right, though, and each turn flows perfectly into the next.
Pflanzgarten 2 is another “very tricky corner” — almost all of them are — according to Sanchez. You can’t even see the turn until the last moment, and then the road drops away under the car. “If you don’t land properly, you go straight into the inside wall at 200 km/h. We had an accident there yesterday,” he says.
I never got comfortable with Pflanzgarten 2. It always just felt scary.
Back on the main straight is the only chance to breathe, relax, and gather your thoughts. What just happened? Try to lock in some memories to write about later. And then do it all again.
Over the course of two days, we must’ve turned a couple dozen laps in total. Each M4 needed a fresh set of Michelins by the time we were done.
Were my expectations too high? No, I’m happy to report. Why do drivers keep coming back here? Well, I think it’s because the Nordschleife — its 73 turns and 20 kilometres — are ultimately unknowable. The track evolves over time, and so do cars. There’s only the smallest margin for error. The stakes are life and death. The dream of a perfect lap gets closer but is always just out of reach, like a curve tending towards an asymptote.
On our last afternoon, Sanchez took only a few of us out and we went for it, pushing faster, braking harder. He wasn’t talking much, but I could still hear his voice in my head, noting the turn-in points and visual cues to watch for. The sun was getting low above the trees. We caught another group of M4s and chased them into the setting sun, flowing through the corners that arrive like a stream of consciousness. It was sublime. It was beautiful. It reaffirmed my obsession with the Nordschleife, with cars, with driving, and with this silly career writing about all of it.
