Tom Mooney recently took a spin on the legendary Nurburgring to discover what all the fuss is about.
Read any amount of books, but there is no preparation for the adrenalin blast that is driving the Nurburgring.
As soon as you begin to recalculate the good bends from the bad on the circuit which almost barbecued Niki Lauda, you spot a blur in your wing mirror which enlarges by the second.
Not only is the distinctive Porsche must faster than your own mount, but its driver, being German, is indifferent to the consequences of a rendezvous with the wall which edges onto the circuit.
The 911, with its front lights like two manic poached eggs, bridges my past and its future in seconds, disappearing around Aremberg quicker than the US space station into the Eastern sky.
Why does Aremberg have a gravel trap? Because most Ring drivers learn to fly there.
What will do for you on the Ring is unlikely to be the often tortuous challenge of the circuit, but other drivers, manically driven a personal best lap time.
What that means, as I drifted nonchalantly from the busy embouchure of the entrance, is that before you have completed the 16 mile lap, you will be overtaken on average 30 times by cars tailor-tinkered especially for the Ring, driven by death-wishers and would-be tree huggers.
The Ring begins with what I’d call a lazy loop: nobody is momentarily behind you when you start and a canyon of snooker table smooth tarmac unfolds toward scenery as green as a John Hinde dream.
Just as myself and the MX5 settle and start to enjoy the bucolic soundtrack of engine and an evening sun mottled forest, I spot the first Messerschmidt in my left wing mirror.
A guy with a Bruce Forsyth chin in a yellow Porsche Carrera, grinning girlfriend in a straitjacket of seat belts, whizzes by at easily 140 mph, with a salutary wave. I never see him again. Brakes are just a suggestion
A single lap of the Ring is expensive, another reason why local drivers don’t beat about the bush.
Germans appreciate it when you give way, for on the Ring you can only overtake on the left. The old saying that any eejit can drive a fast car but few can drive a car fast doesn’t apply here. Life may begin at 30, but it only gets interesting at 150 mph, just about sums up a German .
Earlier in the day I had driven for hours on an Autobahn from Bremgarten in Switzerland, which felt like the Jornada del Muerto in Mexico, or Dead Man’s One Day Journey, because of the absence of a speed limit, and the occasional driver content to dabble in the boundary of potential disaster.
Nobody drives with controlled aggression quite like the Germans, and nowhere is there a village as dedicated to the spirit of driving like Nurburg, the cradle of the Ring, moated by mountains and Hansel and Gretel forest.
The Nurburgring circuit and racing complex in North Germany is a Lourdes for speed junkies.
And on what is known as the Touristenfahrten, they come from all over Germany, Belgium and, surprise, England, to test their mettle on the Ring, which doesn’t disappoint.
It hasn’t changed significantly since Lauda was nearly fried in the rain in 1976 at Bergwerk, just yards from where Carel Godin de Beaufort was fatally flung from his Porsche 718 a few years earlier.
At the time, Lauda was the only driver to do the full Nordschleife in under seven minutes.
The Ring has three sections: a start and finish-straight, the five mile Sudschleife and the 14 mile Nordschleife, so disliked by Jackie Stewart, but not by Stirling Moss, that he christened it the Green Hell.
The name has stuck: after Lauda’s near fatal crash near Bergwerk in 1976, in which it took seven minutes for the rescue services to get to his inferno, fifty years of Grand Prix racing at the Nordschleife ended overnight
Today, the entrance and exit to the Ring are side by side, fed by a continuous figure of eight movement of cars, many seriously coiffured and others, such as my own, not in the least, except for a population of German insects on the grille.
Having done my homework, I figured there were three likely candidates for a shunt: Hocheichen, Adenauer Forst to Bergwerk, a long and sinuous stretch where the locals nestle in picnic chairs with a beer to watch the collisions, and the Caracciola-Carousel, a189 degree curved embankment which tilts the car like a green tsunami.
The only way to avoid a date with a ditch is to keep a postal code between yourself and a flaming Porsche on the approach to any of one hundred plus corners.
In two words, give way, because the fastest drivers, and you could have three or four on top of each other, develop blind spots approaching a sharp downhill set of bends such as Wehrseifen.
Translated into English, the Nurburgring’s bends wouldn’t be out of place in a Wordsworth poem: water mill (Ex Muhle), Metzges Field (Metzgesfeld) or one of my favourites, convent valley (Klostertal), which doesn’t prepare you for the extremely low visibility bend at Hohe Acht, a potential one-way ticket to you know where.
But don’t be fooled. If you misjudge an angle, their bite is as lethal as a Black Mamba with a tooth ache, even at the harmless looking straights like Pflanzgarten, or plant garden.
When you make it to Pflanzgarten you are gripped with the feeling that you are almost home, but Peter Collins perished here in a Ferrari 801 because if you turn it into an ultra high speed run, the dip is dangerous.
Collins, a potential heir to Fangio, was thrown head first into a tree. The was in the late 1950s, when a driver’s survival rate in Formula 1 was less than a pilot in the Battle of Britain.
In an MX5, the Ring isn’t hugely dangerous, although at the end you will feel like a spark that’s escaped the kiln. If you want danger on the Nurburging, you will find it, and if you don’t, you won’t, unless some spanner misjudges a bend, skids into the Armco and bounces into your path.
The other side of the coin is that on the Ring you are surrounded by very good drivers, and you’ll never think that on the M50.
But high speed or low, Newton’s first law about moving objects will unstuff a car in the wrong place at the wrong time. Drivers continue to be killed on the Ring, but treat the circuit with the respect it demands and supping an Earl Grey with the grim reaper will be as remote as death by meteorite.
