Performance

Ok, I admit it, I’m a speedfreak. Everything with four wheels and an engine has my passion. Because of that I’m a regular visitor of all kinds of racing events and tuning shows. Yesterday was one of those days that I was really looking forward to. Together with a friend of mine we went for a 275 km drive through “der Heimat” (Germany) to the Nurburgring Nordschleife. The Nordschleife is also called the world’s most beautiful circuit, or the Green Hell :o) and is a former F1 circuit of 20.8(!) kilometers length. Its also a very dangerous track and that’s why they quit driving F1 there when Niki Lauda almost burned to death in his car. Nowadays the Nordschleife is opened up for the public and everybody with a street legal vehicle is allowed to drive on this legendary track. Officially its a one-way toll road without a speedlimit, but with (German) traffic regulations in place, so i.e. you are only allowed to overtake another car on the left. Although I’ve been there before its still special, just like the German highways you need to take in order to reach the track which also don’t feature a speed limit ;o)

We arrived early, so it was all very peaceful and quiet. But, not for long! As the track opened up there already were some beautiful Porsches ripping the silence with their powerful boxer engines. Nordschleife is also a great place to spot some exotic cars in the open, like a Ferrari 360 Modena, Lamborghini Gallardo, Honda NSX and a Dodge Viper. Each of them are not cars that you see every day. We spent the first few hours shooting some pictures in “T13”, the S-type curves right before the connection between the Nordschleife and the Nurburgring F1 circuit. You are literally at the wall there, so the distance between my camera and the actual cars is just a few meters. Nice!

Then my coworker Maikel arrived at the scene with his Volkswagen Golf II G60 and he asked us if we join him to go around the circuit as passengers. Cool! Although the car was packed with Maikel driving, his brother reading the pace notes and the two of us as passengers it still was an awesome experience. Maikel drove like the devil was on his heels. Even if this wasn’t fast enough he decided to shake the devil off with an evasive maneuver in “Eschbach” (read: ..because he took the tricky uphill corner “Eschbach” with a little too much enthusiasm, we did a 360 there.. :o) The other highlight of the drive was taking the “Karussel” (name says it all) pedal to metal in third gear. The feeling in your stomach is undescribeable. Awesome! After we finished our lap we drove to the spectator location around Eschbach to see if we could see the skidmarks or spot anybody that took a picture of the poor Golf’s tyres putting a screaming stamp on the asphalt. We did see the skidmarks (unfortunately because we came straight from the track I had no camera with me) but no other spectators were around at that time.

We spent the afternoon in “Adenauer Forst”, one of the track’s most trickiest corners. Although the 15 minute rather steep uphill climb is a killer, this corner guarantees some action! Because it started to rain it ended up as a real drifting fest. Fortunatelly nothing but egos were damaged.

In case you wonder why I titled this post “performance”…well, next to the fact that both Maikel and I write Java code and I always wanted to do a post on performance, it’s entirely based on coincidence :o)