Within three hours of landing at Frankfurt International Airport, I was suited up in a driving suit and strapped into a 300-wheel-hp Audi A3 race car. Even with the excitement of taking my first and probably only lap as a passenger on the famous German Nrburgring Nordschleife, I was ready to pass out from the jet lag and 20-hour travel ordeal to get to this mecca of international motorsports. This was going to be an interesting weekend whirlwind trip to witness German motorsports with my host, KW Suspension.
Day One:
Germany is a place of wonderful things: the Autobahn, the Nordschleife, amazing cars, winding country roads everywhere, beer, and best of all German food. But this isn't a story about what I did in the Fatherland; it's about motorsports and how the German people, in their precise anal pursuit of speed, stack up.
I was personally picked up at the terminal by Klaus Wohlfarth, founder, CEO, and the KW in KW Suspensions. He had a lot to show me in Germany, and as his guest I expected to see a lot of cars with KW products. What I witnessed was something on a completely different level. It was a two-hour shot to the Nrburgring on the Autobahn (at speeds up to 240 kph or 150 mph) from Frankfurt, a casual conversation driving pace for my host and just about every other German hoopty on the road.
Nrburg (not to be confused with the city of Nuremberg 255 miles away where we tried a lot of Nazis) is nestled in the rolling countryside hills surrounding an ancient town and medieval castle. This is the home of the Nrburgring, or more precisely the Nordschleife (north loop) where all the OEMs perform their bragging right time attacks. Nrburgring itself is a modern F1-caliber racetrack that's attached to the 73-turn, 12.93-mile Nordschleife. To the local racers, a track weekend here is no more a big deal than a two-hour trip to our ex-nuclear disposal desert racetracks.
On this weekend, the historic Nordschleife track was closed to tourism and would be the home of the VLN (short for some longwinded name the Germans don't even bother pronouncing) race, a weekend event like our normal track weekend but with a lot more cars, money, and a more-deadly track. Most of the field were preparing for the 24 hours of Nrburgring race, an odd mix of Le Mans racing, the Burning Man, and the 24 Hours of LeMons. We arrived in the rain, on practice day for some fun ride-alongs.
The first thing you'll notice is the lack of non-German cars, which is to be expected. Peek though the Lexan windows and you'll also realize that these are all real race cars, each built at least as well as our top time attack cars, including the vintage '70s racers. On the rare occasion while walking through the pits you'll see Euro Civic Type Rs, part of a one-make race, widebody S2000s, caged modern exotic supercars, the occasional Corvette, Zakspeed-built tubeframe Jaguars and 300Ms powered by pushrod V-8s (the German equivalent of NASCAR), ex-DTM cars, and even a super-rare BMW M1. For the most part the field consisted of 2.0L, BMW-spec racers (their equivalent to our Honda Civic) and Porsches upon Porsches. Half the field, easily, ran on KW products-no BS.
KW brought me here to open my eyes to the world of "amateur" German motorsports while they tested prototypes for the suspension kit they would be building for our Project NSX. Along with the two NSXs, KW arranged to be present for our suspension testing on the Nordschleife, plus they had a JDM Nissan GT-R shipped in for development and an Audi race car ready for rides.
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