Nurburgring record shattered
28 Oct 2005You have to watch this video. It’s Michael Vergers shattering the lap record for the Nurburgring Nordschleife – a notoriously difficult auto circuit – in the Radical SR8:
Vergers lapped one of the world’s most difficult circuits, the Nurburgring Nordschleife, in 6 minutes 55 seconds, 20 seconds faster than the previous production car record set by a Porsche 996 GT2.The 13 mile-long Nordschleife has 73 corners (many of them blind) and numerous abrupt elevation changes. No less a driver than Sir Jackie Stewart described the circuit as “the ultimate driver challenge.”
A few things:
It’s tough to feel much watching video of a car. Without the actual forces pushing you around, you just don’t get a feel for what it’s really like. Racing games often have race cars going faster than the car and racetrack model really would in real life to give you more of that visceral feel.
But in this video I felt it. I felt that engine, and I felt the fear of what would happen if a tire blew, or you came around a corner to find a tree branch down across the track. And once I had digested that, I started noticing other things.
What is that engine? I ride a motorcycle, so I know what an engine revving to 10K sounds like… but that doesn’t sound like a twin, or an inline 4. Man. A V8. Then I noticed that as fast as it looked like we were going, the camera was a good foot above the driver’s helmet. The sensation of speed for the driver was even more than we could see.
And did you see? Did you see where he got the left two wheels into the gravel? Did you see where he got air and came down so hard it caused a camera glitch?
After all that, it was only icing on the cake that he exceeded his buffer of space in front of him on the track, and caught up to the sad fellow in the slow, heavy, weak Porsche 911 Turbo, giving him a polite wave for getting the #&%@ out of the way.