The Nurburgring. The most famous circuit in all the world is not actually a race track but a public toll road. Before we left there were some things that we knew we must do, things we were very excited about. Sadly we didn't get to do all of them. Driving up the Himalayas to see how high we could get our little Alfa was one that I particularly wanted to do that wasn't possible due to the absurdity of Indian beauracracy. Driving over the 'Bridge in the clouds' was another. Top of that list however was lapping the Nurburgring. It has a legendary status among motoring enthusiasts. There is nothing else like it on the planet. Perhaps this isn't a good time to get too philosophical but one of the things that I have taken away from this trip is a sense of proportion on a planetary scale. I am not sure if this makes any sense but I will try. Astronauts talk about how seeing the world from the outside gives a sense of it being 'a place'. It has finite proportions. It's not that anyone actually thinks otherwise it just isn't obvious until you see it that way. From the ground the world seems infinite, not just for the magnitude of it's proportions but because you are on the surface of a sphere so it has no edges. having driven half way around the world and seen that on a small globe of the world sitting on a desk you really have a sense of the limits of the planet and of the human societies that exist there. It makes the world seem less scary, less vast. It makes my achievements seem larger. I realise there isn't that many places or people like it. I can drive on the Nurburgring and know that this is the best that humanity possesses. There is no higher pinacle. It's nice to have a passion :)

Our first stop in Nurburg (after looking at the track :) was to visit RSR. RSR are a company that, among other things, rent out cars for people to drive on the Nurburgring. Their favourite car of choice is the Alfa 75! :) For Alfistis, especially Alfetta enthusiasts, this was paradise. He had another yard with about 50 more Alfa 75s in it but we didn't get to see that unfortunately. The selection of vehicles that Ron Simons has to rent is impressive. Maclarens, GT3s, lots of Lotuses, GTRs, Clios and everthing inbetween. There were quite a lot of ring specialised hire cars on the track and it makes good sense if you don't have or can't bring something of interest. The 75 makes a great choice, not so much for it's out and out performance but for the predictablity and fun of it's handling and low repair cost if things don't go well. As you can see from the selection of damaged Lotus fenders pictured below that does certainly happen.

On our way to visiting the Nurburg castle itself we drove past a bespoke track car with a group of men gathered around it and wondered what it was. The group of men saw an Alfa 75 drive past and wondered if the Aus sticker on the back meant it really was from Australia. A couple of them came over and we discovered that they had had Alfa 75s in the past. They had come to the Nurburgring to test an electric car they had built as part of the an ongoing university project. It was quite an impressive car. One motor for each wheel, mounted inboard and a lot of lithium polymer batteries. They had been here before and where hoping to break the eight minute barrier after upgrading their car with torque vectoring and improved aerodynamics. They have a website. Being an electric car they can only do one lap before they have to go away and recharge. One of their main technical problems was the heating of the batteries which suprised me.

We arrived on a Monday. The track had been hired out for the whole day by Nissan who were testing their latest Godzilla. We had the privelige of watching the two factory drivers pushing these extra-ordinary vehicles to their limits. Watching them negotiate the Pflanzgarten corner at full tilt will stay with me for a long time. As Nissan had booked the track for most of the day the track was only open to 'tourists' (ie the public) for two hours that day, from five till seven. One of the effects of this is that not many people make the effort of turning up for just a few hours. This means thew track is relatively quiet. Apparently there was a queue half a kilometer long on Sunday with ten cars written off and four people in hospital. Quiet Mondays were looking good. The weather was perfect. We drove Dad around to a famous spectator spot and set him up with the camera and as much warm clothes as we could muster. Then it was off to do a lap! It costs €26 to do a lap which will last anywhere between about seven and a half to twenty minutes depending on whether you're in a 911GT3RS or a tour bus. Gathering in the car park before it opens was great fun. We had never known a car park to be so much fun. The gathering comrised all sorts of exotica - Maclarens, loads of 911s, Lamborghinis, Corvettes, Caterhams, M3s the list goes on. We also met the guys with their ERA car mentioned above. They had come to do their lap and try and crack eight minutes. I was excited for them and really wished them the best. Hopefully I will get a chance to work on a project like that some day. Then there was our car. A twenty five year old Alfa 75 that was set up for driving through India and the unknown and had just done so. It's lights were a bit cross eyed as a result of being backed into by a truck, there was some vibrations in the suspension that we couldn't source and it was generally in need of a service. Worst of all though was the tyres we had fitted which were the largest ones we could fit into the wheel arches and they appeared to have the same amount of tread as they had when we left Perth which says a lot about the hardness of the compound...

The lap starts when you wipe your access card onto the slot and the boom gate rises just like a car park. Ahead looms the bridge. Bridge to gantry. We are here! Julian is driving the first lap which makes sense as he has a lot more time spent with this car. It was his daily driver before we left. There are 144 corners and every one of them is interesting. It is completely unlike any other circuit I have been on. With so many corners and some traffic it is not possible to start identifying braking points, turn in points and ideal lines unless you had the opportunity to do a lot of laps. Subsequently it's more like a driving on a public road at maximum attack. Dealing with the road and the conditions as you see them. I have watched quite a lot of utube videos of people doing laps but what I wasn't expecting was the vertical changes. The road goes up and down a lot. Apparently it's also bumpy but with our car set up for circum-navigating half the planet it seemed very smooth. Even the almight carousel didn't really seem to have any bumps. In the end the ring was even better, far better, than I thought it would be. It wasn't as scary as I was expecting. Jackie Stewart nicknamed it the Green Hell and it's claimed hundreds of lives and untold numbers of cars but I didn't find any really 'ugly' corners. Days afterwards and I was still reflecting on our laps. I can't think of many things that I have done where I am still thinking about it days afterwards. The foxhole compression, the Pflanzgarten, the list goes on. It's fair to say I was bitten by the bug. Every city should have an Nurburgring! Necessary public infrastructure, like an airport! ;-) I am determined to go back there again although it won't happen in the near future. We only did one lap each and that was enough for that day. I would have like to have gone back again the next day but we were so far behind schedule that we had to keep on pushing so we didn't. I was happy with our times, meaningless though they may be for a first ever lap. Julian did 12:35 and I did 12:55 with a yellow flag incident. It sounds very slow when you are used to hearing about the GTRs time of 7:22 but under the circumstances it was better than I was expecting. Sadly the ERA team didn't get to do their lap. They had some electrical issues but went back to put in a fast lap of 8:23 a few days later. I really wish them all the best of luck with their car

I am still chuffed that we finally got to go to the Nurburgring  :-)