Nurburgring shenanigans

[MikkiJayne]

Hi all

Some pics and footage of taking my heavily modified & manual-swapped FL2 S8 round the Nordschleife. Enjoy

[MikkiJayne]

[MikkiJayne]

[Ronin]

How did you get those pics taken? must be some service from the track?

[MikkiJayne]

There are independent professional photographers all round the track. They snap everything which comes by and upload the pics to racetracker.de where you can go and buy the ones you like

[MikkiJayne]

Having spent most of the day on saturday doing fast laps we had a break for an hour from 5, and then came back at 6:30 for the last lap of the day. It was twilight at this point and the gopro went a bit mad in the low light, but we were almost the only ones on track which was glorious Taking the racing line on the world's maddest racetrack at Sunday cruise speeds with the sun setting was just the most surreal experience.

[MikkiJayne]

With the weather having been lovely on Saturday, it was a bit of a shock to wake up to frost on the cars on Sunday morning



But, we'd made a plan to do a lap at opening time before breakfast at Devil's Diner, so we defrosted the car and were on track just after 8am. The track was damp in places, but amazingly not frosty so we did a nice warmup lap to feel out what the track was doing, and then went for pancakes.
9:30 and suitably fed, we headed out for another lap, and everything just fell in to place for the fastest lap of the weekend - a 9:53 We had a very quick Citroen Saxo behind us right from the start, and while we had more power, they had so much more speed round the corners. They ended up chasing us for the whole lap which was great fun. The Porsche rental that held us up at Bergwerk managed to hang on to our coat-tails too.



Based on previous laps, we think this could have been a 9:40 without the yellow and the two rentals tripping over each other, which is pretty respectable for a 2-ton rocket couch

After a quick pilgrimage to Apex to see if Misha was in (he wasn't) we did one more lap just as the rain came in, so that one was a bit slower albeit with some sideways action at Brunnchen, and then had to leave to catch the ferry home.

[MikkiJayne]

[MikkiJayne]

A few more pics from the trackside snappers:



Yes, the left indicator is on, indicating (!) to the faster following traffic that I'm coming in to the banked section rather than going round the top. For some reason, even though this is the racing line, drivers of fast cars seem to automatically assume slower stuff will stick to the top for no valid reason and then get pissy when they dive in to the banking. Its not rocket surgery to just show your intentions before there's a crash

[MikkiJayne]

Final thoughts...

We did about 15 laps in total, and used about 150 litres of Super-plus 102. The S8 didn't miss a beat and the V8 just thrives on being soundly thrashed, responding so well at high rpm.

The Yellowstuff pads worked really well, and I'm leaving loads of lap time on the table in the braking zones. With the highly upgraded braking system, I could stop far shorter than I actually was, but with no runoff its not prudent to push the limits on braking distances! They did make quite a bit of dust though



Note - highly upgraded brakes. With the stock D2 Brembos you'd be in the wall before Hatzenbach. Don't try this at home.

Michelin Pilot PS4S are quite remarkable tyres. They were very very angry when we took them round Spa, got to 80+ degrees and blistered quite badly but they love the 'ring. They were consistently about 42psi hot (34 cold) and 45 degrees no matter how hard we pushed, and were sticky to touch even at 45. Wear is even and smooth, and after 25 laps of Spa and 15 of the Nurburgring they're about 1/2 worn. I'm running -2 camber all round and they seem quite happy with that too. For a road tyre dealing with such a heavy car I am quite impressed. I do want to try semislicks next time though