A King at the Ring

Professional race car drivers leave little doubt about how challenging the Nurburgring Nordschleife truly is.

Three-time German Grand Prix winner Jackie Stewart famously called it the “Green Hell”.

“A real driver’s circuit,” according to 1961 grand prix winner Stirling Moss.

Maro Engel, the winner of this year’s Nurburgring 24 Hours for Mercedes, described the event as “the toughest car race in the world”.

And that’s only what the drivers who have won there say about the famous — or perhaps infamous — circuit shoehorned into Germany’s Eifel Mountains by some sadistic builders during the interbellum 1920s.

An Overwhelming Challenge

It’s a track with abounding history, but history that was largely unknown to me as I was growing up. Formula One abandoned the Nordschleife in the early 1980s in favor of the safer, cozier Nurburgring grand prix circuit, and American TV provided little to no coverage of the sports car races that still ran at the original course.

On early racing simulations, I also had little exposure to the track and its unique character. The Grand Prix Legends game that simulated the 1967 Formula One season included the circuit, but seeing that length — 14 miles! — and crashing in a few of the narrow, blind corners was enough to scare me away.

Even in more recent years and the era of YouTube and live streams, I made little progress in learning the track. I knew a few corners — the banked, concrete-plated Karussell, for instance — and when watching onboard clips, I’d just wait to see the cars speed through corner and stare confusedly at the serpentine sequence of 150 or so corners that came before and after it.

When iRacing, a direct descendant of Grand Prix Legends, announced that they’d be building a laser-scanned, millimeter-accurate version of the full Nurburgring circuit, I finally decided it was time to learn my way around.

Last June, I took to a separate sim, Assetto Corsa, that already included the track. I didn’t necessarily memorize the full track — some of the twisty bits after the Karussell remained a blur — but I at least knew most of the turns and began to understand the challenge that the circuit presented. I struggled to complete even one full lap. Surely there was no way, I thought, to run a 24-hour race here without incident.

Humbled and outmatched, I didn’t touch the track for a while. Even when the iRacing version was released, I ran just a handful of laps, resigned to finish learning my way around and getting up to speed another day.

That day came early last month. My teammate Karl Modig and I decided to run the iRacing version of the Nurburgring 24 Hours, so we both hit the track for some test laps in our car of choice, the Ruf C-Spec — a copycat version of the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car.

My first complete lap clocked in at 9 minutes 8 seconds. I soon got that down to 8:56, then 8:53, and eventually into the 8:48s as our setup improved and I completed more practice laps.

To my surprise, I realized that those twisty bits that even recently were unfamiliar to me had become one of my best parts of the track, while the Karussell — the corner I’d known for the longest time, and as a banked left-hander, the closest to an oval corner on the whole track — was one of my slowest spots.

After more practice, more coaching from Karl, and some telemetry analysis that would make those 1960s-era drivers jealous, we both found more speed, eventually hitting hot lap times in the 8:44s. However, even at a slower race pace, I found myself crashing or spinning in about half of my practice runs. For an endurance race, that inability to survive would spell trouble.

Even in my final practice the night before the race, I found kerbs that would damage the car. While I knew all the corners, I was still discovering things like that about them as I entered my final night of rest before 24 hours — so long as we survived, anyway — of sleepless racing.

Race Day Arrives

We started in seventh place, exactly halfway through the field of 13 C-Specs in our race, which was the second-highest of five splits based on average driver ratings. There were three other classes in our race, too. The faster Audi R8s and slower Kia Optimas and Mazda MX-5s rounded out the starting field of 56 cars.

Karl started the car and managed to make some forward progress, moving into fifth place by the first pit stop when I got in the car. In my first laps of actual competition on the Nordschleife, I got a trial by fire.

While catching a Mazda in the twisty bits, I moved to his inside to make the pass, but instead spun sideways because of my shallow line entering the corner. I stopped a foot or so from the inside wall, then caught my breath and started driving again.

If I was making that sort of mistake on a full night’s rest, there was no telling what sort of things I might do later in the race.

I finished that stint without further problems, and despite my bobble, we’d moved into second place after other top-running teams had made far more egregious mistakes that knocked them out. During Karl’s next stint, a spin by the race-leading C-Spec team, against whom we had raced with (and lost to) plenty of times in the past, moved us into first.

Three hours into the race, we had a lead that we would never relinquish the rest of the way. So it was an easy 21-hour cruise to the finish, right?

Absolutely not.

For most of that time, the second-place team kept up a steady pace that forced us to keep pushing. As the morning turned to afternoon, I managed two double stints with no issues and a better pace. But that was still the easy part of the race, when eyes, arms, and legs were fresh and fatigue wasn’t yet a factor.

The Race Turns Tough

As afternoon turned to night and the race crossed the halfway point, a familiar tone emanated from the driver’s seat. In those nighttime, just-past-my-bedtime hours, I tend to get a bit grumpy.

When Karl and I ran the 24 Hours of Spa together last summer, it was at this point in the race that I spun out after a frustrating moment with a lapped car, nosing our car into the wall and giving us damage that cost us valuable time in the pursuit of the leader. In that race, it took several pit stops and a brilliant triple stint from Karl to overcome my mistake and gain back the lost time.

In the Nurburgring race, the frustration was because of my race pace. Karl had been steadily running 8:47s and 48s while I barely managed to eke out 8:50s. So I complained. Surely we were lacking top speed! The track grip must have decreased! I couldn’t consider myself a worthy champion if I wasn’t able to match my teammate’s pace!

Fortunately, I kept the car away from all walls during this stint and even managed to find some speed by driving a bit deeper into the rubbered-in corners. With our lead hovering at around three minutes, the next challenge emerged.

The hands on the clock seemed to crawl along as we entered the wee hours of the morning. “In some ways,” I told Karl, “I wish we could fast-forward about 8 hours and just get to the finish.”

However, part of me was glad that we couldn’t. One reason we decided to field a two-man effort for this 24-hour race was to prove that we could do it. In the Spa race, after Karl’s valiant late-night recovery drive, I got behind the wheel and managed to take the class lead when the previous leader was involved in a crash.

Sleep-deprived at 4:30 am and facing no immediate pressure from behind, my mind began to wander. In one split-second loss of concentration, our many hours of work was lost as the car careened into the wall. Our race was over in an instant, with the lead and any remaining hopes vanishing in a sidelong skid into the barrier.

The Run to the Finish

When we entered the same phase of the Nurburgring race, I was determined not to let that happen again. This time, we prepared a bit better by taking regular rest breaks — but not naps, as our minds raced at the same speed as our virtual car — and fueling up on energy drinks for a needed boost.

As the clock ticked past 4:30 am, instead of crashing in the physical or automotive sense, I caught a second wind, running a double stint at a consistent pace before the sun had risen outside my window.

When I handed the car back to Karl, I had blisters on my hands and one of my fingertips was numb from gripping the wheel so hard. However, they were battle scars I wore with pride, having passed the point at which I’d thrown away our chances in the Spa race.

Around this time, the second-place team that had nearly mirrored our lap times for most of the night fell out of the race, an innocent victim of contact with a faster Audi. That gave us more than four laps in hand — the better part of an hour around this long circuit — over the new second-place team, and we just needed to cruise home to the finish.

We both backed off on our pace, but the final hours still weren’t easy. Unlike the 24 Hours of Daytona earlier this year, in which an intense battle for the win kept me alert on just as little sleep, we had no such excitement to liven up the final hours of this race.

During one of my final stints, I felt my eyelids getting heavy, maybe even closing completely. But I kept going, intent on not crashing and just completing laps.

Even when Karl got back in the car in the final hour and our victory was certain — the second-place team couldn’t possibly complete as many laps as we’d already run — there was little celebration or radio chatter at all between us. We just kept logging laps with a certain efficiency that seemed appropriate for a German team in a German car at a German circuit.

Passing Our Test

When the checkered flag waved, we had a five-lap margin amounting to more than 46 minutes back to second place. I don’t say that to brag, but to point out just how difficult this race was. Only five C-Spec teams finished, and all of them spent extended time in the pits for repairs.

All of them, that is, but us. During the full race, we never hit anything and never had more than 45 seconds of repair time during a pit stop.

It’s this achievement — not winning by multiple laps — that may be my proudest. Karl and I have been racing with each other for almost two years now and we’ve always had a strong partnership, but one glaring problem seemed to be our inability to run races cleanly.

My two major incidents in the 24 Hours of Spa may stand out most prominently as examples of spins or crashes getting in the way of an otherwise successful race, and even in shorter races, we’ve both had our share of costly incidents.

Entering 2016, our main goal was to clean up our acts in these big races, which we figured would increase our chances of surviving and finishing well.

In our first big test in March’s 12 Hours of Sebring, we came away with the GT class victory by a lap and a half with almost no repair time during the race. By comparison, in the previous year’s Sebring race, we both had multiple spins and took damage during our stints.

Running cleanly for 24 hours at the Nurburgring, I imagine, is the ultimate proof of our improvement. If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere.

While that certainly doesn’t mean we’re indestructible, we’ve both shown that we can rise to meet the challenge in races where we’ve previously fallen short or that we never imagined could be run cleanly.

I do feel a bit unworthy of winning at the Nurburgring since the track still seems so new, and in some ways, so unfamiliar to me. The likes of Stewart and Moss were masters of the circuit who risked their lives in competition. I’m just a guy who got a numb finger driving it on a video game.

And as a newly crowned winner of the virtual Nurburgring 24 Hours, I can only hope that quote doesn’t join the more famous ones about the circuit.