Noodleguitar
Admin
This is what I've been driving last Sunday. In itself not that special. What makes it special is where I've driven it. You probably guessed it, I'm talking about the Green Hell, Maker of Death and Feeder of Scrapyards: the Nordschleife.
I went there with my stepdad and we set off early in the morning to make it by mid day. The weather was nice and dry which was great for turning my very first lap.
It took some time to get used to the car of course but the track was very familiar to iRacing. All the curbs, bumps and elevation changes were exactly the same so I had no problem finding out where to turn in etcetera. I wasn't pushing the car hard in any lap during that day of course, because it was my first time there and the price for getting it wrong was a max of 5000 Euros (probably 6 billion Canadian dollars). And I didn't know what the little Suzuki would do if you do something silly in it.
After I did two laps we went to cool off in the car park and switch drivers (the inside gets very hot when the engine is running at 4000-7000 rpm).
Now, my stepdad doesn't know the track at all so he said: "just give me directions on where the track goes." You could see how that made me slightly nervous being at the Nordschleife as he tried to go quite fast straight away. It all went fine though, some understeer at Brünnchen was the worst of it.
After he did a few laps the track closed for about an hour, most likely because of an accident. When it opened again I did another 3 laps. My intention was to record these and see if I could go faster but it was now Sunday mid-afternoon and everybody was eager to drive. A lot of traffic, first timers combined with veterans.
I still recorded these 3 laps, which contain chasing around some cars with more power than us. You can see them here (English subtitles for most of it):
In the first one I'm chasing a Ford Fiesta. He didn't really know the track which was slightly annoying until it became slightly frightening when he put wheels off the track in the double left.
[video=youtube;gWWYLTUlNKE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWWYLTUlNKE[/video]
Then in the second one I'm chasing a BMW. He was pretty confident but he got the lines mostly wrong. A lot of cars here towards the end of the lap in addition to a blinking safety car.
[video=youtube;f_hKWV1rWks]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_hKWV1rWks[/video]
On the last one the Volkswagen that let me past on the previous lap got past me when I mistook him for someone who knew what he was doing. It wasn't too horrible because he took off on the Kesselchen straight. At the end was some more slowing down.
[video=youtube;_98ye0dE0gA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_98ye0dE0gA[/video]
I had a great time that day. Initially I was worried about some rain that they had forecast but all we had was dry weather which is perfect to try out the Nordschleife for the first time. I also wasn't expecting the vast amount of Porsches, in addition to many other exclusive cars such as a few Lamborghinis, a KTM crossbow, Ferraris, Nissan GTRs and a suprising amount of Corvettes. And of course many, many BMWs.
