Petrolhead Paradise

Speed ... Do you like speed? Yes? You may think you do ... but do you REALLY? I'm happy to report there is a place on Earth, where you can find out. It's called the Nürburgring Nordschleife.

The 21 Killometers track in the North of Germany has quite a few turns as you can clearly see in the image above, but what you cannot see is that there is a 300 meters difference in the elevation of the track, and that is ... well ... a LOT. This means that you're never really going straight, not even where you have the straights in the pic. The track is continuously climbing and diving and this leads to a quite astonishing number of blind corners, meaning that you either don't see the corner coming, or that once in the corner you have no idea when it will end and how... it's quite scary ...

I have been there before and almost peed my pants while driving it, so, naturally, I have decided to go again. For this time, however, I have decided to leave the driving to professionals ... and what better professional service to drive you around the track other than the famous BMW M5 Taxi?

Three people get to go, and the extra available seat went pretty quickly to our friend J, who is as well a hopeless petrolhead and Nürburgring enthusiast. He also owns a fine fine track machine, a classic 993 Carrera prepped and ready for action:

First up, it was the M, and, lucky us, this fine gentleman mentioned in the copyright section of the photo below caught us as we were plunging into the Karussell:

I kept trying to find the words to describe the experience we had in the M5... I could say it was fast, very fast, crazy fast, incredibly crazy fast, but it wouldn't really cover it... So, instead, I'll just say it was OMFG OMFG OMFG OMFG OMFG OMFG ... OMFG. I could add a couple more OMFG's but it wouldn't quite cover it either. The way this car accelerates and then sticks to the corners is something very difficult to imagine. With the right guy at the wheel, it is a MONSTER, a car that makes no compromise, devouring tracks for breakfast and chilling in luxury when it is finished  ... you have to witness it to believe it.Which is just what I am encouraging you to do... Whatever plans you have for the near future ... just cancel it right now ... get a Taxi ticket and hold on to your internals ... they will be squashed together in ways you cannot imagine....

But back to our day, which was not even far from finished. After around twenty minutes of coming back to our senses, we decided to go at it again, this time in the Porsche. Some fine gentlemen owning the copyrights to their photos have caught us on camera and here are some of the photos:

Driving around with J was a bit more ... enjoyable. We did the track in around 9 minutes so it was still quite fast and tons of fun, but it didn't call for a group hug between all my organs followed by a very sudden argument where they each go their separate way. As for the 993, it is just a beautiful machine, fast, extremely well balanced, progressive, predictive. It didn't come at all as a surprise to me, but I was very impressed just how good a car that's not really brand spanking new can be when the owner knows how to maintain it and what he should be doing to it.

After a couple of laps, we were ready to go home. A. fell asleep around nine ... but she was really the hero of the day ... I am quite a lucky man.

I kept wondering this Sunday why they call the Nürburgring the Green Hell because for a hell-lot of people it's Paradise ... addictive Paradise ...