‘The lap record thing has always been nonsense’
DER NÜRBURGRING. WHAT MEMORIES I HAVE of this famous place. Wheel Torque (remember them?) trackdays at which you circulated until your tyres, car or luck ran out. The gentleman with the satchel at the old pits who took your money for another lap. Losing an XK8 at the Mini Karussell and missing the Armco by a millimetre. Racing a Caterham in the 24-hour race. Rose-tinted visor? Possibly, but the place isn’t what it used to be. Public days are now expensive and, worse, are mainly spent in the car park or cafe waiting for the cleaning crew to sweep the remains of a superbike or car from the track; the delay can be particularly long if more gruesome cleaning is required.
But what has really sullied the Nürburgring experience for me is the car makers’ successful campaign to turn it from a racing circuit into a marketing tool. It’s my personal rule to avoid mentioning that a car has been ‘developed at the Nürburgring’ or set a new lap record there. The lap record thing has always been nonsense. How on earth can we know if a car is really sticking to the rules?
Ah, but it all helps to develop our cars, the marketeers counter. Rubbish. To validate a hunch of mine, I called the legendary chassis development engineer Matt Becker, son of even more legendary engineer the late Roger Becker; both mainstays at Lotus and the former now at Aston Martin. I can’t recall any Nürburgring namedropping at a Lotus launch or any banging on about the tremendous contribution of the place.
The Esprit Sport 300, one of the best-handling cars I’ve ever driven, never went near the Eifel mountains. ‘In more recent times we used to take cars to the Ring,’ says Becker, ‘but usually for one specific task such as brake testing or high-speed stability. It’s the same in my current role. Trouble is, if you set a car up to be excellent around the Ring you later find yourself adjusting all the changes out of the car to make it work on public roads.’
I called Porsche to ask how much Ring-time was involved in the development of its cars. ‘Not that much,’ was the reply. ‘We use the roads around the factory, our Weissach facility and then a multitude of locations around the world for hot- and cold-weather testing and different road conditions.’
‘It’s 28 degrees here in Barcelona,’ says McLaren’s Chris Goodwin, ‘and I’ve just looked up the weather at the Ring and it’s raining. That’s one of the reasons that we have a centre in Spain for testing. We’re a relatively small team with short programme times so we can’t afford to hang around waiting for good weather. Our best cars, the 675LT and 570S, didn’t turn a wheel at the Nürburgring.’
Spot the common denominator? These companies have built reputations via their products. They don’t need to name-drop the Nürburgring in every other sentence of the promotional material. Companies such as SEAT, Honda and, sadly, even Renault, are the ones banging on most about their cars’ Nürburgring development. Porsche has used the Ring in past marketing material, but it tended to be produced by a promotional department.
Marketing is insidiously taking over from engineering in the car industry and I hate it. If the engineers at BMW’s M division were to say they were going to give the next M5 just 325bhp and with it smaller and lighter cooling systems, lighter brakes, etc, because it would make it more fun to drive, the marketing department would have them fired for not creating a car with more power than its main rival, the 603bhp Mercedes-AMG E63 S.
The Nürburgring hyperbole is just another symptom of the same disease. Funny that the place was built in the 1920s to relieve unemployment in the region and to provide the German motor industry with a test facility – rather similar to why Brooklands was built 20 years earlier – and yet in the years when pounding around a racing circuit really did aid road car development, the Nürburgring was rarely mentioned.