‘It’s one of the few recognised performance benchmarks’
SOME YEARS AGO, GM ORGANISED AN EVENT at the Nürburgring Nordschleife with the intent of showing that its cars handled well. It did so because this fact was not apparent from driving them on the road. This was back in the early ’90s, when French car makers were much admired for the agility and comfort of their cars, which is how I found myself heading downhill in a boggo Citroën ZX estate towards the wicked compression that is the Foxhole. We hit the bottom at about 145kmph, the ZX, myself and four water mannequins, and when the suspension compressed to the bump-stops, the car took attitude and we headed up the other side with a handful of opposite lock. Exciting stuff. The lap after, the Astra took the compression at the same speed without drama. But around the rest of the 21-kilometre lap it was uninspiring and flat-footed.
Finding handling foibles in volume models is one of the reasons car makers use the Ring. ‘For us, it’s a very good test facility,’ says Jos van As, BMW’s boss of road car dynamics. The company’s new models are developed and tuned all around the world and their final sign-off is at the Ring. ‘There’s nowhere else quite like it. It has extreme bumps and dips, 300 metres of elevation change and a high average speed,’ says Van As. ‘The combination of high cornering speed, body movement on bumpy sections and 257kmph-plus potential is very challenging.’
‘You can develop a car at the Nürburgring or for the Nürburgring,’ says Phil Talboys, who runs Jaguar Land Rover’s test facility at the track. Most JLR cars being developed at the Ring are cooking models. They’re there not for dynamic tuning but for durability (each mile of the Ring is reckoned to be the equivalent of 12 road miles), stability-control tuning, and thermal robustness and brake testing. What makes it a tough test? ‘The duration and the speed – an eight-minute lap is an average speed of 145kmph. There are lots of bumps and crests, some offset, and the elevation change tests the brakes on the way down and the thermal robustness on the way back up.’
Talboys estimates that JLR products rack up 200,000km (124,000 miles) a year on the Ring and about 1million kilometres (over 600,000 miles) in the area – the derestricted autobahns and local country roads add to the usefulness of the Ring as a test centre.
Ring lap times? Horst von Saurma, the veteran journalist and Ring specialist, offers another perspective: ‘It’s one of the few recognised performance benchmarks, after 0-100kmph and maximum speed.’ Thierry Landreau, director of engineering at Renault Sport, agrees. The company targeted the front-drive lap record and learned much from the experience. ‘There are few reference tracks and the Ring presents unique difficulties,’ he says. ‘It’s the best track for showing chassis performance – we managed lap times the equal of much more powerful cars. But the Nürburgring was the final test, the final validation – we didn’t design the Mégane RS for the Ring.’
Some car makers do chase lap times for marketing reasons, but for most the value of the Nordschleife is in proving the dynamic security, durability and robustness of everyday models. It’s partly why we can have cars that in extremis are Astra-safe but are otherwise entertainingly agile like the ZX.