And yes, it was awesome.
First, apologies. Due to logistics and running in circles (and the video camera rental kiosk apparently never being open), I've got nada for pictures or video. Apart from one shot of me sitting in a Rent4Ring Swift... Hardly scintillating.
Moving right along... The drive from our hotel in Trier was stunning. The fields looked almost manicured, and the drive alternated between those and dense forest. This drive was also my first exposure to an autobahn...
In short, I just wish everybody where I live would drive in a similarly attentive and orderly fashion. Over the course of three days we did have two slightly nervy moments wherein a vehicle on the right started to pull into the middle lane (or sure looked like it was about to), causing me to simultaneously reach for the left signal and look in the mirror. By flukes of timing, in both cases there was somebody coming up on us way faster in the left lane. I was usually cruising around 130kph, and would guess the cars on the left in each case was carrying an easy 25-30mph on top of that (sorry for the mixed units; 130kph is ~80mph). Fortunately neither the Czech truck nor the other vehicle finished the move into our lane and everybody lived. I imagine it was not fun being in the far left and seeing one left blink out of our Renault Scenic at that speed and timing.
We arrived at Rent4Ring around 1:30 and talked to Ralph and Dale. Dale gave me a recap of the Nordschleife guidelines, and an pitch-perfect reminder about the key things to know; just enough information to get the important bits into the addled head of a holidaymaker who's about to drive the Nordschleife for the first time and who may not be at their personal peak for the retention of new information. Basic info about how to handle certain circumstances, and a reminder that while you're out there sighting it up, as long as you stay right and indicate your intention to remain there as needed, there's no need to worry about driving slowly while you get a feel for the place.
And that's exactly what I did. On my first lap, my girlfriend, Rebecca came along to see what it was all about. I don't know which of us was more in for a surprise. First off, neither YouTube nor GT5 can prepare you for the vertical component of the Nordschleife. It goes up and down in a rollercoasteresque fashion that just doesn't come through a screen. Also, the track looks markedly narrower and tighter in person. I was glad for the reminder that it was okay to cruise and stay out of the way as modified 911s and bikes strafed us, going by like we were sitting still while we were travelling 60-70mph...
We'd only driven a part of the first lap when we came across a reminder that people get it wrong. There was a 944 backwards off the right side of the track, an a Ford GT off the left, missing its entire rear bodywork. Two more cars I didn't parse were off the right, and fifty yards down the track there were two guys standing with an undamaged-looking Opel; I have no idea what they were doing...
We finished our sighting lap, and the track was closed when we came back around, to clean up all the stuff we'd just seen scattered around. I dropped Rebecca back at Rent4Ring to go do her own thing, and sat there and watched the webcam, waiting for the track to reopen. Rebecca also reminded me at this point that I ought to take one of R4R's loaner helmets. No objections from me; I'd meant to grab one in the first place.
After a while, the track reopened, and I headed back to the Nordschleife. This time I didn't get lost and wander to the modern circuit, as I had done initially while trying to grab lunch before the first lap. It's a short drive over the hill and past the castle to the roundabout outside the Nordschleife entrance, and before I knew it I was back out on track. The next three laps went pretty much without incident. I slowly started to get less reflexive about moving and signallying right the instant I saw somebody in the distance in my rearview, as it was finally starting to take them a little while to actually catch me. I did have two go-rounds with bikes which I caught, but who didn't get the memo about moving right and letting people by. With their superior straightline speed, I couldn't just pull around them, but I didn't want to just try to fling it around them in a corner, either. This wasn't a race or a track day, after all... I eventually got by in both cases, but it was annoying using so much of a lap up to do so.
On my fourth lap, I came around a corner to find the silver M Coupe which had just passed me finishing a trip from Armco to Armco, shedding bodywork across the track. The other car which had followed it was pulling off, but by the time I got slowed and pulled off the track he was already out and indicating that he was okay and to keep going. In retrospect, I should've pulled further up the track before pulling off, as I'd left some but probably not enough runoff for cars that were coming across the scene right after a blind left-hander.
The track, of course, was closed as I came back around. Apparently there were five wrecks on that lap. I spent a fair amount of time at the webcam back at Rent4Ring, and was significantly worried that I wouldn't get my last two laps in. At 6:30, the track reopened, and I got back out, and had the two best laps of the day. I was finally reasonably comfortable with my pace relative to other cars and would give myself a minute to judge closing rates and assess when I needed to move over. I caught and passed a couple of cars. I enjoyed the heck out of the track, but wished I'd found time to run a few hundred more laps in GT5 to memorize the last third of the track, which I find much harder to recognize from corner to corner.
Speaking of which, I hadn't realized that Dale from Rent4Ring is the same guy who runs BridgeToGantry.com, which along with Ben Lovejoy's site and some others, is a great Nordschleife resource. He'd mentioned that pesky sameness of the latter portion of the track. I ended up driving it pretty tentatively, as I was rarely sure how tight a given corner was until it would've been too late to do much about it.
So, that's roughly the story of my trip to the Nurburgring. I've been there, I've driven that same stretch of pavement that so many of the greats of racing history have driven. I wish that I hadn't gotten my logistics too sideways to wander around with a camera, and I wish I'd been able to rent a videocamera (apparently the Nordschleife-mandated official rental camera kiosk is hardly ever open), because all I've got is the goofy picture hotlinked above and a lap ticket card to remember it by, but I'm hoping very much to go back and give myself a chance to document more memories. I recommend the experience very much to anybody who's at all inclined.
