The game. And the reality.
By Koworld

GT4 makes it easy.

This isn’t GT4 - this is a track day on the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife in Germany. Worse, that overconfident racer is a real person, on a motorbike and her morning accident happens during our first tutor-led sighting lap and we reach her as strangers are cutting off her leathers to find undamaged veins into which to feed IV fluids.

Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous - almost 14 miles and built by 2500 workers in the 1920s as
Germany showed off to the world, later they would invade Poland on their holidays

We crawl back to the pits and the girl is airlifted away. It’s not said if she lived or died - just the jokes about her track repair bill get spoken. Gallows humour is an important part of the ritual here on these mad-Sundays - deaths are common and the stereotypical German efficiency evident as blood is cleaned, Armco replaced and the track swept. Witnessing our first accident, just minutes into our first racing session isn’t the start of the fear - that got churning two hours earlier over coffee and statistics in the breakfast room of the Tiergarten Hotel.

Veteran Dutch racer Ron Simons, expert-in-residence at the Nurburgring, is pointing through the windows to the fog-protected mountains and explaining, with much glee, that crashing today is ‘inevitable’. That one of our group of eight will be stripping barriers and graunching metalwork. He tells us ‘that grip doesn’t exist’ for the stripped-out, race-tuned, Alfa Romeo 75TS ‘Ring Edition’ cars we will be racing - that the track is filmed with oil and grease from the Classic GP hosted all that week 'Old cars yes, dey drop so much oil it is like ice to drive. Lot of fun gentlemen. You smile! You crash!'

Tutor Brandon, twice British kart Champ, wanders in, munching a pastry and slurping a coffee and chimes in with 'Yeah, bloody slippy this weekend.' Then, in a manner that sets the tone for the day, Brandon decides we should hear about this year’s fatalities (each year there are between three and twelve deaths).

Talk of insurance liabilities, maximum charges for Armco replacement and costs for helicopter extraction, are followed by a chilling corner-by-corner fright-fest talk-through by Ron 'Ahh - you will be surprised each time by this. Here the crowds watch for good accidents. Here is done flat, yes!' Er, fucking not likely Ron! My biggest fright comes when he explains how to get out of a bad over steer in the rear-wheel-drive Alfas 'Put your foot down and steer.' As a consistent spinner of rear-wheel drive cars, both real and simulated, this has me shitted-up good and proper.

Honestly, by the time we arrived at the track all of us, the two regular racers in our party included, were shitting ourselves.

The Nordschleife is a curious thing: it is the old Formula 1 circuit abandoned as ‘too dangerous’ and famous for its ridiculous length of more than 13 miles. That long distance and a stomach-churning 1000ft change in elevation across the lap creates a staggeringly dangerous series of micro-climates. A single lap can include torrential rain, standing water, fog, bright hot sunshine, drying lines and hail simultaneously. The weird weather coupled to the fact that almost all of the 114 corners are blind plus the 11 different road surfaces AND all the crazy camber-changes, oh and the incredible closeness of the Armco, walls and fences makes this one of the most challenging race tracks in the world.

We stopped and had a look to see if there were any bits of Nikki Lauda's face still
on-track but there weren't

Sony Liverpool went so far as to model the Nordschleife as a potential bonus track for one of their recent F1 iterations, they did a pretty good job by all accounts with the result that nobody in the team could actually complete a lap. The physics of the modern F1 cars just could not cope with the physics of the track.

So, the local State Government took this abandoned and hideously dangerous circuit, they turned it into a one-way toll road and for years now open it twice a week to the general public. Each lap literally starts with you putting a ticket into a toll barrier machine. The only vehicle restrictions are that you have road tax and more than a piddling 50hp. And from there on it is a brilliant mix of nutter, Sunday dawdler, novice, expert, fast, slow, beat-up, brand-new, car, bike, coach, van, station-wagon, saloon, standard-road-car and race-tuned monster. Little Peugeots, filled with giggling teenagers dice with M5s, 911s buzz like flies around crazily modded Opel Kadetts, Rollers sporting lowered and stiffened suspension scream past stately Mercs and exotic race-cars parry for position against forecourt-fresh family runabouts.

This is what all current simulations of the Nordschleife lack: the insane traffic. Motorstorm on the PS3 is closer to the reality of lapping here - one of everything on track at the same time all fighting for position. Can’t wait to play it.

Honestly not all that far from the reality

The effect is mental. The atmosphere mental and the driving, largely, mental.

And there are the accidents. Accidents-a-plenty mostly involving dented pride and massive body-shop bills but also, as described, the nasty and the critical. In part, it’s the accidents that draw the crowds - the size of which was a big surprise: hundreds of spectators turn-up filling a handful of grandstands and standing, hopeful, at various danger points. The effect of the crowd is quite odd - it’s exactly like being watched when you play a fine cab in an arcade. You want to show-boat: to spin the rollerball just a bit harder, to mash the buttons a bit quicker - or in my case you step out the back wheels a lot, make the tyres squeal and spend lots of time almost fucking it up completely.

At the Tiergarten Ron smiles and says 'Okay - to the minibus please [our nine-seater Daihatsu chariot]. I have a surprise for you!' We do as we are told and file out and down into the minibus and Ron tells us we’re off to the Nordschleife. The closer we get to the track complex the more it feels like a proper race-day - fast beemers, race-liveried Mercs, Ferarris, classic racers and more bikes and Porsche 911s than you can count litter the roads, car-parks and tented fields.

We arrive in the heart of the track paddock - where drivers and public mix. Look out for the low building on the left on the straight in GT4 and that’s the paddock. Unlike a modern circuit, the paddock area at the Nordschleife is tiny - really, really small and, fabulously, the old control-tower is right at the centre and it’s been converted into a bar. Also very different from a modern circuit - this paddock is completely open to the public and, even though it’s still early, it is jam-packed with wandering petrolheads, racers fettling cars and with trophy girlfriends poured tight into denim and brightly done over in rouge and hairspray. The chaos and noise here is extraordinary and feels fabulously un-German - it makes for a fabulous atmosphere.

Our intrepid mini-bus driver, Claus, cuts through the blind pedestrians and forces his front wing out into the crawling line of cars navigating the way to the car-park. We get up to the barrier, it lifts and we do that instinctive ‘look for a space’ thing all men do whether driving or not.

Except there’s no spaces just a sudden whoosh of open track and an immediate sweep down into a complex of fast-flowing corners. A Dodge Viper screams past us, Christ, we’re on track! In a Daihatsu mini-bus! And we are fucking shifting! Claus barrels us, screeching and screaming into a series of corners as Brandon reels off vital information about lines and speeds all of which we instantly forget on account of having to work so hard to keep down this mornings’ continental breakfasts.

Then, quickly as we got on, we’re off track and my white-knuckles fade back to pink as we tootle off to collect our Alfa 75s. To give you a sense of how these drive, the closest car in GT4 is the hideously un-glamorous Nissan Silvia Q’s Aero (S14) (’96) with upgraded brakes, racing clutch, lightweight flywheel, LSD, basic weight reduction, racing exhaust and fully customised suspension settings.

You're looking at this thinking 'that's a stupid jaunty angle' aren't you
well, it's not - it's a hill

Our first laps are the 150bhp equivalent of a chain of American pre-schoolers walking hand-in-hand down the pavement - a tutor leads with four of us in two cars following his every move. The first laps are rolled silent and then the teaching begins as tutors Brandon and Bernt, via walkie-talkies, calmly talk us through our pathetic efforts.

Then the rain starts.

And we enjoy three thrilling laps that feel like racing on glass (a good half an hour of abject fear). All six of our cars make it through okay until, right in front of me one of our cars steps out the rear end at Bergwerk (among the most gentle corners on the track) and spins fast backwards before gracefully slipping forward to just an inch off the Armco. Put off by his rear end turning into a side-door I start to lose it before collecting the straight line just in time and swooshing on through the rain.

This is one of the areas in which GT4 doesn’t get it right - it’s just too hard to correct a big mistake using the Dual Shock 2. To really get the feel right the game needs to, somehow, simulate better the movement of weight across the wheels and from end to end of the car. As a first-time tarmac-racer, being able to feel weight-shifting is something I hadn’t quite understood from hours of videogame racing and perhaps it shows the limitation of the interface rather than of the code - perhaps it is a person’s internal gyroscopes that allow them to understand, and correct in time, changes in a car’s weight and grip distribution?

Manage that low centre of gravity, inertia and weight distribution to make it to the
ice cream hut yah big fat bear

The next few laps are then spent under the near-mythical ‘bad Nurburgring’ conditions of wet/dry/drying/stormy/sunny areas at different spots around the track. These changes of condition are often split-second sudden and it’s enough to make many of the day’s other racers give in and go for lunch. Being the morbid fuckers we are we’d already had our nosh during the early circuit closure resulting from the biker chick’s serious accident. One weird looking meat ball and easily the biggest plate of French fries ever (honest - the plate was at least five inches deep, the nice frauline just kept on piling and piling it higher and higher) now meant my vulnerable stomach was just washing with grease and low-grade cooking oil - perfect for more scary laps but this time it would be with neither passenger nor tutor. I was on my own!

The next two laps constitute the most exhilarating twenty odd minutes of my life thus far. I love a nice bit of enthusiastic sex, that’s exhilarating; I loved seeing my two daughters emerge from the womb, that was exhilarating. Job offers, competition wins, sports, success - all exhilarating and all of those things not quite as exhilarating as these two laps of the Nurburgring Nordschleife.

It was in these two laps that I really started to string together some good combinations of corners and for the first time that day the fear, turned into elation whenever I stepped the back out and controlled the power slides (Brandon’s words ringing in my ears ‘Scrub your speed with the engine, line it up, squeeze the power, let it slide, unwind the wheel.’). I finished the session absolutely drenched in sweat but with the broadest grin my face has ever seen - physically and emotionally I was spent but high too. I roared the car round the paddock - twisted it into a tight parking spot (in the best view of the trophy girlfriends), checked my mirror, removed my contrast-enhancing shades through the front of my crash-helmet and stepped out of the car with all the cool of a proper racing driver. I could feel the gaze of the TGs on my manly self and I stood there, crash helmet upon my head like a beacon of raw sexual availability. I turned back to the car, saw my wallet had slipped out of my pocket and into the race-seat so I leaned in, swiftly, to grasp it and smashed my head so fucking hard on the door surround that I dented the Alfa and chipped a massive splinter off the front of my helmet. I almost cried it hurt my neck so much. I think the TGs saw my pain and that’s why they started looking at somebody else – as a common courtesy I think. And I’m pretty sure the laughing was about something else too.

So, head crunching aside, at this point I didn’t think the day could get any better. I wandered around for half an hour or so - just too high to drive, the afternoon was wearing on and there were just a couple of hours track time left. My high wore off and I got in three more laps and, though they were great fun they were like Oasis’ second album - fantastic but not new. Just as I was about to call it a day, Ron rolled by and asked if I fancied a passenger lap with him.

Cool.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.

This is a man who has circuited the ring in 7 mins and change. This is a man who carries a higher speed into corners than anyone I have ever seen. This is also the man whom Circuit Driver (like Edge for racers) described as ‘More thrilling to sit alongside on a race track with than Senna, Moss or Graham Hill’. We damn-near literally flew around the circuit as Ron opposite locked, fought, screeched, slammed and tore up the wheel, lines and other racers. At times all I could do was laugh like a girl as we shot into corners at well over the hundred, as we stormed up behind back-markers and took the ‘wrong’ line just to get passed without pausing, and as Ron forced the car do things that made it seem like a toy.

That was special. But it was what happened next that will have me spending every waking hour of the next year learning the track on GT4...

GT4 after you've actually been there is utterly uncanny

We finished the lap, I could hardly speak. Ron grinned 'Now you follow me.' And with that I jumped back into my own car, my brother hopped into Ron’s passenger seat and there then followed my fastest, best, most satisfying lap of the day. It was like having the perfect ghost-car to follow but one that kept modifying its own speed to get the best out of you and your individual capabilities. I want that feature on GT5. I could feel my limits spiraling away and new zones of grip and turn coming to me - stuff opened up by Ron’s perfect flowing line.

So why will I be investing all my time in pretend-driving the Nordschleife in a Nissan Silvia? It’s down to six little words gently spoken by Nurburgring expert Ron Simons in the paddock after I emerged zoned and pumped full of adrenaline from my lap: 'You know - you are naturally quick.'

And next year - I’m going to prove it...

Post Script
Had all my pre-event GT4 training paid off? No, not really. It’s all a bit arse about face this Gran Turismo and real racing thing - driving the game and then the track didn’t help but having driven the real Ring has had a massive effect on driving it in-game. My times have improved hugely and the fantastically accurate modeling of the circuit combined with real on-track knowledge has made selecting the right lines immeasurably easier. Even though the game doesn’t convey change in elevation or the physics of gravity-centre-change well it nails the geometry of the circuit perfectly. GT4’s representation of the Nurburgring Nordschleife is brilliant. A triumph in fact.

Fancy it?
Ron Simons' 75experience.
Ben Lovejoy's peerless Nurburgring site - the man's a legend.

September 2006

Comments