“My First Time at the Nürburgring”

[mantasisg]

Definitely would remember if it was first drive in real life. I had so many laps there in simulations.

I don't remember specific first go, because I shuffle content so much maybe.

I consider two:

1st rF1 brilliant Nordschleife mod I'd say track was verey accurate considering how huge it is.
1st Assetto Corsa (very likely Yellowbird or Cobra). I could consider it to be first drive too because of how precise the track is made.

 

[FeltHat]

ive yet to learn it, need nordschleife raceroom rd event for an excuse

 

[Keith Dixon]

Moving to the darkside in GPL, I didn't drive it again for years after that, I'd had enough of it

 

[Mr Chip]

I cannot remember the first time I drove it in sim's. All I know is that I never really liked it; I always preferred what I consider "proper" race tracks, and therefore love the GP circuit.

But wow did it change when I drove it for real last year. I went over (from England) with a couple of mates, to meet some sim-buddies in real life. The drive there was great, and surprisingly easy - really good roads through Northern France, Belgium and then into Germany.

As I knew I would be driving for real, and possibly my own car, I tried to get into it on Assetto Corsa before we went; I still found it difficult and not really enjoyable, eventually giving up and just saying to myself I will just take it (extremely) careful, and enjoy the scenery.

One of my colleague's that we were going out to meet, then talked about Ringfreaks and the idea of hiring race prepped cars. Naturally this intrigued me greatly and I decided to go that option. I hired a race prepped Clio (RHD) and also opted for an instructor lap - he was awesome and really helped confidence and best lines/gears etc. When I took my mate round for a lap; he was very surprised (and a little scared ) at how quick we went.

I absolutely agree with Marco (and thank you for bringing it to us in such great detail for AC), so many people seem to go there and think they can drive like they do in sim's/games - there were a couple of track closures while we were there.................

The scenery is great, the atmosphere is awesome, and the chances are very high of seeing some awesome cars (and bikes) when you are there, just enjoy it

 

[N'Gear]

My cousin owned Grand Tourismo 4, and I was arround 10 I used to come to his house and try out the game. I was enjoying myself driving in Monza when he told me to try the nordschleife as it was a big chalenge. I was dreadful at it as expected, not eve reaching the flugplatz, but I'd never grew hate on it, in fact I liked the fact it was nothing like the regular tracks. Fast forward a few years and my first propper lap took place in AC. I saw people on youtube reviewing the dlc. 13 year old me was hooked. At that time I just had bught a T300 and a wheel stand, and so I bought the Dreampack 1 and just drove it with the Z4 GT3. It took a few atempts and lots of hours watching track guides, but at last I finaly got a clean lap! I have made around 400 laps ever since.

 

[farjam]

My first serious try was in iracing with pontiac solstice , in older sim/arcade games i was always bad at it , and it was mostly "those 2 corners before the last corner by taking too much kerb i think". but now it's my playground or test bench to test any car in any sims to check if i'm able to use this car comfortably at race or not

 

[BrainsBush]

My first (and only) lap in real life was many many years ago in my Opel Kadett B type. I felt like a (race)king of the road. I couldn't care that almost all cars passed me and some I even did not notice they flew by. Stopwatch timing was not allowed so I never have proof of my laptime. In my fantasy it felt like 10 minutes but to be honest I think it was closer to 25 minutes

In racesims it all began just a couple of years ago with glorious AC and later on others racers like R3E, GT Sport, PCars2. Still like to take classic cars like Gr5 beasts out on (virtual) track. Meanwhile drove so many laps on the several track layouts. Good for brain training.

Two months ago paid another visit to Nürburg ring and 'castle'. Nordschleife was closed because of new pavement/tarmac. Bought my first Nordschleife souvenir. A sticker for an absurd price of €7,95. My wife saw the smile on my face and she knew it was well spent Now it serves as decoration on my simrig seat.

 

[NtsParadize]

It was literally the first day I was playing Assetto Corsa. I just had bought my new PC and bought Assetto Corsa about 3 days after the delivery. I absolutely wanted to test the online and directly drove an Audi R8 LMS Ultra. It was really difficult because the sensations were different than rFactor. I managed to stay on the track but I was really slow and sweating a lot.

 

[davide74]

 

[Deleted member 637371]

Pretty certain it was Forza 1 on the original xbox that was my the first gaming experience , I hated the track back then (Clearly I was ignorant to its charms).

The Nordschleife is the reason I got into sim racing and moved from being a casual joypad simcade racer, into buying my first wheel and pedal setup.

Were it not for hours spent watching videos on YouTube from Tourist days, watching past races and car testing vids and documentaries, I would probably still be pretty ignorant of its importance to motorsport, the car industry and the freedom and pleasure it gives to the people of Germany, Europe and the wider world.

After understanding its significance I realised I needed to drive it. Unfortunately I don't have a car worthy enough to drive from Ireland to Germany nor the money to afford such a trip. The only way I figured I could do it was if I bought the best representation I could find, that's where Assetto Corsa stepped in.

I took to trying to tame the track in a BMW E30 Evo. I spent weeks practicing it everyday. Frequently quitting it in a rage, trying different cars, then jumping back to E30. The track nearly broke my spirit on more than one occasion, as it took me weeks to get a clean lap in AC. When I finally did my first clean lap in the E30, it was an emotional moment! One of the few gaming memories I am likely to remember. Since then i have embraced Racerooms version and rF2's.

The Nordschleife is quite high on my bucket list of things to do before i die. I would give anything to drive an E30 Evo on it in real life... But I would probably be just as happy to just see the track in the flesh on a nice Summers day, spent drinking German beer and eating bratwurst while watching the magic unfold.

A few years on, and i still spend more time on the Nords than any other track. Its the first track i look for when i buy a new Sim and like others have already said; its the first track i use to test out a car. I cant wait for rF2 to bring us their laser scanned version.

Long live the Nordschleife!

 

[Ghoults]

Used to drive the track occasionally in gpl. It was very weird track to learn because on a typical lap you'd know the first third of the lap very well while the last third was almost uncharted territory because more often than not you'd have accident ending your run somewhere on most of your laps. Even with damage off you could still end up upside down or stuck in the bushes. In those gpl cars many corners were just plain deadly. Then some bloke made the ring trainer for gpl. It basically allowed you to start your lap at certain points on the track which allowed you to focus on different sections. I remember there was talk about it back then whether that is cheating or not to use. Real pros don't start their laps at karussell. While I agree that it might not be realistic all it really does is speed up the process. Doing that did allow me to learn the track well enough so I could focus more on pace than on just surviving laps one at a time. But back then gpl modding scene was already in full swing and I spent more of my time driving new tracks instead of lapping the ring. It is not very good track for racing anyways so all it had was hotlapping at that point.

I think the next time I drove the nords in a sim was in rfactor. While the original rf physics were a bit turn off for me the track had lots of fun to offer. I think the first nords was released on rf1 when rf1 had already reached some level of maturity with physics but I still remember doing some laps. Not even as close to as many as in gpl. This was also at the same time youtube started having sizeable catalogue of onboard videos at the ring. I'm 100% sure during 2007-2008 I watched every nordschleife onboard lap in youtube. It was such a dream to hope maybe one day we to do that in a sim. Laserscanned nords. The dream, the impossible dream. Everybody wanted it, everybody thought it was never going to happen. Every sim discussion forum back from 2006-2010 has long threads rationalizing how impossible that would be. How much it costs, how long it takes to make it and can a sim even run it. Can it even make back its own investment. After all only the sim racing anoraks truly cared about that track. And for quite some time we did not have nords. But in the meanwhile you had the rf1 version which was very fun on its own even. Glorious effort back when you could not download lidar data for every location on earth and had to use old school methods to get things right. Doing that with 20km+ track is even harder than it sounds. Back when most pics were 800*600 or 1024*768 if you were lucky and there weren't many of them.

Then gt5 came out. Wheel support and nordschleife. Wait this nords is pretty accurate. Oh cool, let me drive hundreds laps around it. In the wet in the dark. I played a lot of gt5 and I drove a lot of nords. I tried to find cars in gt5 that had done a lap in real life and then try to match and beat those times. Sadly I quickly learned all the cars were quicker in gt5 compared to real life so beating the lap times was too easy. So I started putting slower tires on the car, sometimes even taking away power. Then trying to find those last seconds. It was fun trying to find that last 5 seconds even on last lap you hit every apex, braker marker and acceleration zone. You learned you could drive flatout into the hedwigs höhe before wippermann, how late you can actually brake into aremberg and how much the road camber helps you in adenauer-forst. And so forth. There is just more to learn. The track in gt5 taught me a lot about it. I could finally push hard on every lap from the beginning to end. Mistakes were no longer near spins or wallrides but missed apexes and locked brakes. Every corner was on full attack.

Gt5 still did not have gt3 cars which were the dream. Imagine being able to do just that. But still I had great memories driving weird cars online and offline. I stilll remember winning a duel 2 lap race on wet nords in a v8 vantage out of all things against a subaru of same pp level. Or the countless gt500 online races where on the first lap 80% of people spun out and then the rest of the time you were battling to tooth and nail against the rest. There was so much variety and so many people playing that in its heyday you could literally race almost anything against big grids. 3 lap k-car races around the ring, tank car races etc.. I still remember I hated the night racing on the ring. So poor visibility. But in the wet and dry it was still great. Gt5 did not have the best physics by any imagination but it was the first accurate nordschleife and a lot of fun to drive.

Then there was this pause. No new sims with nordschleife. Then assetto came and then it had that snoopy's version which I drove a lot. But it was not perfect anymore. After gt5 some things were not quite right and even though it was valiant effort it did not quite satisfy the need. Gt5 had accurate track so maybe for normal sims it is doable? Then suddenly every sim developer was going to have laser scanned nords. Assetto first and then iracing followed by raceroom I think. And assetto had that car I had watched so many youtube vides. The z4 gt3. The car itself was not that special to me but the combo of z4 gt3 on nords. So many youtube videos had just that. Or the merc or the audi. Or the countless other cars. Just some years earlier it was deemed totally impossible to have that combo and now you could drive it. It was pretty amazing. I had to pinch myself couple of times when doing my first laps. For such long time this was impossible, it just could not happen. Just no way. I think at that point sim racing transformed from things we could never have to everything being within the realm of possibility. If we can have laser scanned nords in many sims then there are very few things we could not have. Laser scanned nords is very much a huge milestone in simracing and definitely one of the biggest milestone of them all. Bigger than the first real official f1 cars, bigger than lemans or bigger the re-introduction of gpl era cars to modern sims. Right up there with laser scanned tracks, modding and online racing.

 

[E304LIFE]

It's hard to describe how I truly feel about the Nordschleife, but I can say that I haven't driven more laps on any other track while it's the longest track I know by heart and it's the first track I'd pick to test a car on. I love it!

+1

@Marco Massarutto Thank you sir.

 

[MarkR]

It was very weird track to learn because on a typical lap you'd know the first third of the lap very well while the last third was almost uncharted territory

This is so true, I see many people who are fast for 1/3 of the 'ring and then start to struggle. It's much more difficult to learn the final section by lapping, the game with sections help a lot.

 

[GTR233]

Never been there IRL, my first try was GPL version but I did not like it because my driving skills were not good enough to master this track with stock GPL cars. I retried later with Raceking rf version which looks better then came the team rf-Nordschleife with their amazing NoS2007 (many years of hard work) and I started to love this track
Finally GTR EVO came out in 2008 with the best version so far : to be honest I did not really enjoy GTR EVO due to lack of big real racing series licenses (no more Porsche/Ferrari, and no more FIA approved...except the WTCC but not really keen on this serie), nevertheless racing with corvette on NoS track was really good

 

[Jusek]

The first time I tried Nordschleife was in PC1 with formula A car, I survived surprisingly long before crashing the car. My biggest achievement in simracing is probably winning a Formula Renault 2.0 race at Nords in iRacing with 0 incidents.

 

[dabr1965]

GTR2 with Group C/IMSA/GTP mod. I remember thinking how will I remember this track. several hours of practice and a few choice words I got the hang off. It quickly became my favourite track as it can be rewarding as well as head backing.

 

[Nick Hill]

Doesn't sound as though I'm the only one with this experience, but I definitely remember farting (or, auf Deutsch, "fahrting" ) around the 'Ring in numerous different games (GT, Forza, Shift) but the timelines are all muddy...but I definitively remember the release of the track being released on AC and my efforts to really learn it beginning at that point.

I still can't say I really "know" the track, because I am still to this day finding sizeable chunks of time here & there, but I am at the point where I recognize every turn on sight and have a decent idea on how to approach it, what comes next, etc.

 

[NDG]

I hated this track in NFS:Shift, and in Shift 2 also. It was much harder comparing to the other tracks. Then after several years I bought Project Cars but I still hated the track (I love PC). I bought Assetto Corsa after that and I started to time trial it. It took my 4 hours of practise to get a clean lap in a BMW Z4 GT3! Then it took me 1,5 hour practise for the KTM X-bow, I've done the Nordschleife challenge (drive around a clean lap as fast as I can) around 30 times in AC and several times in Project Cars 2, although I like the driving physics in AC more.

I remember the days man... Shift and Shift 2 are bummers. It's easy to hate especially because of the input lag, when you're turning left to catch a spin, the car and steering are still turning right!

Decent experience is the top three titles IMO. RF2, iRacing and AC! 'Decent' is a poor choice of words BTW. You get stellar performance, I mean speed wise, or your own performance in these titles. Input lag is minimal to zero IMO.

 

[Vitor Ferreira]

I play racers games for more than 25 years, on consoles and PC, difficult to remember the first time I walked in the Nordschleife. But I can say that my most iconic ride was to make the Xbox achievement in Forza Motorsport 5,"I Could do that in a Van", he should take a walk in Nords with a Ford Transit in less than 10 minutes, which it was not difficult. But a friend did in 8 minutes high, and beat his record was so much fun. That was really cool!!!!!!!

 

[Peregrine]

I love this track but it doesn't love me.