“My First Time at the Nürburgring”

[BP]

Assetto Corsa with the Lotus 98T. I figured go big or go home.

I just took broke it down into roughly 3 sectors...didn't allow myself to move on to the next one until I memorized the previous one. Tried iRacing's version later on and remember feeling like the elevation changes seemed more pronounced. Drive it once a month just to keep it committed to memory or to test a new car...amazing track; should be a rite of passage for any sim racer.

 

[Durge Driven]

Going negative in GPL Eagle
My first rank was over 200+ seconds , I had half a dozens spins in Nords after 3/4 laps
Over next 11 weeks I left the Ring alone and only did the other 10
some I went negative others were close
I was still +30 seconds
Week 12 I did Nords and on the 2nd lap I took off 38 seconds to go negative -8.xx
.... from driving the 10 other tracks it just came together

 

[Jugulador]

Enthusia... the version was lame. Very poor road surface, but the cars behavior made ir a good experience... but nothing memorable.

Them Gran Turismo 4... that was very nice visually and that "pseudo-suspension" the game had passed some feeling, but the game was too superficial.

Finally an expansion for Race 07 (don't remember the name) bring a very good version of the track. But I was engaged on league racing by the time and used to practice only on tracks used by the folk... usually more accessible ones.

After that I saw some very nice versions with GT5 and 6 (that I found very good games... much better than GT4) and them I give the track the due time. But only with Assetto Corsa that I learned it.

I drove on the real thing last year with a Golf GTi (with serious brakes and suspension preparation). It's a very intimidating track... even knowing all the layout I was uneasy all the time... both the fear of making a mistake and by other drivers around... specially folks that seams to don't understand how dangerous that place is, or simply don't care about it. I don't pretend to go back there any soon.

 

[Greg Latty]

i still have my first clean lap around the ring. It was in Assetto corsa in a p1.. I remember being happy as hell the first time i got around without crashing. It was an extremely slow lap though. But i didnt care.

 

[Frizfrow]

First time was online during a quick GT6 sesh, got my ass handed by the pro drivers in the lobby. It was at that moment i decided to conquer the Nordschleife. Weapon of choice, a slightly tuned RX-8. It was never fast but it was a joy to hear the rotary engine rev at 10,000 rpm virtually every corner. To this day it remains as my most sacred track.

 

[unseen]

I got into the mighty Ring long before sim racing, back in the days of my childhood racing heroes like Jackie Stewart, etc. The Nordschleife had been given up for at least 6 or 7 years as a racing circuit, but highlights were still shown on TV of the races there, the circuit was still being referred to by current racers, and my parents had all the videos of the old races.

It was so very different from the rest of the tracks. From the tiny little GP section, out into the vast green wilderness. It was the only race you saw that had to have a helicopter filming the majority of the track, due to speed and the sheer size of it. Whereas you had accidents in other tracks, people crashed and died on this twisting green hell all the time. It was absolutely unique amongst circuits.

Forward a good few years and suddenly we have GPL as a thing. A chance for this budding simracer to finally attempt to stay on the long dark ribbon between the trees. As much fun as I had and as thrilling as it was, unfortunately GPL always felt clunky and floaty, and the track itself wasn't very accurate. Having watched, and rewatched so many videos at that point, you knew various corners just weren't anything like the ones in the game.

Time passes.... and then rF1, GTL, GTR2, all come out, and various altered GPL meshes pretending to be this or that version of the track started popping up. New sim, same bad old base. It wasn't until GTR Evo came out with the first really good version of the track that the magic all started to happen. Suddenly the corners made sense to the blurry, shaky onboards I'd seen years ago... The inclines, the dips and troughs, the general sense of scale and positioning of the trackside objects (awful in-game adboards aside). It was a thing of glory, I had my Ring at last, even if it wasn't quite the one I grew up knowing.

I already knew the circuit well enough by then to know how to navigate it, and every inch of it was a joy to drive. It's simply the ultimate driver's circuit. There isn't a single corner or bend that exists to put a dampener on the enjoyment. It's smooth, fluent, has a huge mix of every kind of corner, at all kinds of speed. It was at this point in simracing, most other sims and circuits became redundant and I became the consumate Ring junkie.

Now, I spend most of my simracing time in AC, in exactly the same place. It never gets old. I have many other favourite tracks, but they just don't hold the same appeal. No matter if the actual AC road mesh seems so very, very similar to the old GTR Evo version (including so many of the same little problematic areas, etc...), and the GP section is just a passable attempt, a Ring is a ring. It loops round and around and never ends, and neither does the enjoyment.

 

[Mark Ratzenbacher]

Learned it in the stupidest way possible with a couple of race-friends online and GT Legends. We called it the Cat & Mouse game.

-We made teams of 2, one in a Mini Cooper(Mouse) and the other in a fast car(Cat).
-The first team (recognizable by color-scheme) whose Mini crossed the finish-line first wins.
-The cat can help by pushing your own mouse faster, or simply turn the leading mouse around or push of track
-Only one rule: You can never attack the last mouse. That resulted in a lot(!) of lead changes and a "natural" rubberbanding.
-Another precondition: damage in-game was off

You may say this was just wreck-racing, but as a mouse you learned to use your mirrors a lot and learned maneuvers to avoid cat-attacks.
Same went for the cats as the had their own cat-fights, trying to avoid another cat attacking your teammate.
That way the attention of the drivers was always to all sides of the track and not only to the road before you. And going off track was a must and not a mistake if you would just learn the track with hotlapping

We did this for ~ 2 years on every saturday late night with 3-4 races with 1-3 laps.
After that time you knew green hell better than anybody else, you knew the runoff-areas , even the areas behind the armco, we could go backwards and forwards.
Tell me a funnier way to master this track

Take a coffe and have a laugh:

 

[Greg Latty]

Learned it in the stupidest way possible with a couple of race-friends online and GT Legends. We called it the Cat & Mouse game.

-We made teams of 2, one in a Mini Cooper(Mouse) and the other in a fast car(Cat).
-The first team whose Mini crossed the finish-line first wins.
-The cat can help by pushing your own mouse faster, or simply turn the leading mouse around or push of track
-Only one rule: You can never attack the last mouse. That resulted in a lot(!) of lead changes and a "natural" rubberbanding.
-Another precondition: damage in-game was off

You may say this was just wreck-racing, but as a mouse you learned to use your mirrors a lot and learned maneuvers to avoid cat-attacks.
Same went for the cats as the had their own cat-fights, trying to avoid another cat attacking your teammate.
That way the attention of the drivers was always to all sides of the track and not only to the road before you. And going off track was a must and not a mistake if you would just learn the track with hotlapping

We did this for ~ 2 years on every saturday late night with 3-4 races with 1-3 laps.
After that time you knew green hell better than anybody else, you knew the runoff-areas , even the areas behind the armco, we could go backwards and forwards.
Tell me a funnier way to master this track

Take a coffe and have a laugh:

Haha that was awesome. I sat here and watched the whole video.

 

[ouvert]

First time I drove on Nords was in oposite direction with Sabine Smith going the other way

In sim I think it was GTR Evo in Radical which was for a long time my favourite car-track combination

 

[Mikec87]

Grand Prix Legends.....and learnt using a joystick on Windows 98. Took months to memorize each corner...now can just hop in years later and get a fairly good time.

 

[Slytek]

Playing gtr2 driving the maserati mc2 with my momo ffb wheel with no assists was the best. I would challenge my friends to see if they could survive 1 lap without crashing. Still my favorite track in any game

 

[DaveDaBass]

It was, i think, Gran Tourismo 3 or 4 (the first GT with this track ) i was playing with a friend around 2003 or 2004 before we had to leave to go to work.
I remember we were sitting in front of my old CRT TV an after some time we managed to get clean laps.

 

[Koen Verlinde]

Contrary to popular vote I just don't like to drive or race on it. Nor do I think that every single game should have this track in laserscanned quality just to be part of the "big boys".

 

[Marco Massarutto]

I've discovered the Nordschleife thanks to Grand Prix Legends, in 1998. Challenging sim and challenging track. I learned most of the corners, even if I remember I never found a great pace on it, in GPL, but I never forgotten its layout. On July 2010, I went at the Nurburgring for the laserscan survey at the GP track during the development of Ferrari Virtual Academy, and I taken advantage of a pause during the recognition, to get my first lap at the real Nordschleife, driving the Mini rented at the airport (something that today is not allowed anymore). Despite the GPL version was the historical one, the general layout was pretty similar, and it was useful enough to let me know what to expect behind the blind corners. The driving experience, despite my lack of experience on it, and the lack of (any) performance of the Mini, was pure emotion. Nordschleife is simply iconic, and if you are a car enthusiast, once in your lifetime you should pay a visit to it, (if you don't do stupid things) you will not regret. I was driving, with my colleague at my right, and I told him "can you imagine a simulation performing netKar Pro physics, featuring a laserscanned Nordschleife?", and I remember my tone was not "hopeful", it was sounding more like "it's never going to happen". After then, I got back at the Nordschleife five times, and it's always exciting. That's why I consider the Assetto Corsa's laserscanned Nordschleife one of the best goals I achieved in my career at Kunos. And you can't know enough how I'm proud to let thousands of simracers to share the incomparable driving experience the Nordschleife circuit offers, even if only in virtual.
Just a personal piece of advice: the first time you will go there for a lap: forget onboard cameras, just live the driving experience in first person, don't think to drive fast to show your friends at home how good you were at driving. Stay focused, live the moment. Otherwise you could tend to go over the limits set by your lack of experience. Use any simulator you like to memorize the corners, but when you go there, don't drive using your memory: just drive. Look to the apex (look in the mirrors..), make deep breaths, stay focused, and stay relaxed, you are not racing, but driving, and you do not need to prove anything. Just drive, and enjoy what can easily be the best driving experience of your life.

 

[Richard Dastardly]

GPL originally, took a little while but one day it clicked & I suddenly started enjpying it ( got down to 8:04 or something iirc ) - then I had to relearn it completely for whatever Granturismo verson it came in! didn't actually drive it much in that. Then the laserscanned AC version turned up & that was all I did for 70% of the time,. It's not a great place if you want to pass someone, but it is actually pretty fast and Ilike the technical sections too, amd it's one of the few circuits I like just driving on if the car is interesting - it has that feel of somewhere you think might really be a tarmac rally stage in disguise, like a few other old tracks.

Unfortunately too ill for too long to have driven it IRL, or I might have tried to move to the area ( Spa is just over the hill too, relatively ).

 

[Dragon60]

I did my first laps on the Nordschleife on a Yamaha FZS600 Fazer motorbike back in 2004 which was probably the most intense experience in my life.

 

[Helldriver]

The first time for me on the Nordschleife was also Grand Prix Legends. I was young and haven´t even heared about this Track before. After some driving and lots of crashing i was frustrated and never tried it again on GPL. Many years later, the Nordschleife was introduced to Gran Tursimo 4. Because i wanted all the gold medals in the driving tests, i finally had to learn the track. What a surprise, after that it was one of my favourites.

In sim I think it was GTR Evo in Radical which was for a long time my favourite car-track combination

That was one of my favourtie combinations also. I liked it so much, that the only video i ever uploaded to youtube was a hotlap with the Radical:

That´s nearly 10 years ago......time goes by.

 

[MarkR]

I genuinely can't remember the first game I drove the 'ring in. Definitely one of the console games, GT, PGR or Forza and for definite on a game pad not a wheel. I've chased down top 10 leaderboard times in various versions of Forza far longer than is in anyway sensible!

I too love the 'ring, for hot lapping, some racing and more recently the track day style sessions in AC and Forza 7 - I find both AC and Forza 7 versions of the 'ring superb. Our little group of friends enjoyed an afternoon just testing out different cars just a couple of weeks ago. It's a great way to enjoy these games with like-minded friends away from the competitive stuff. Just the joy of driving some amazing cars (many of which I'll never see let alone drive for real) on this incredible circuit.

I love the 'ring because it's such a challenge and repeated practice really does pay off.

I remember the first car I ever drove the real 'ring in - a 1998 Mazda MX5 1.8iS Sport, I often see MX5s on track and they seem like mobile chicanes today but it didn't feel like that back then. It was great fun and I have returned many times since both for instruction and track days.

Because I've been to the 'ring with Renalutsport many times this remains my favourite activity: matching the real world RS 275 Trophy lap as closely as possible. Whatever the faults of Forza 7, they absolutely captured the dynamics and wheel feel of the Megane at the 'ring.

Linking back to the previous article by @leon_90 when we can't be at the track it's great to have these simulators to take us there at any moment!

 

[gluon]

My first time around the Nordschleife was in Race 07, which already felt quite realistic and definitely helped me learning the track. When I tried it in AC there was obviously much more detail, but the scare feeling was more or less the same.

 

[testdriver77]

Well, my first time on Nordschleife started many years ago when Grand Prix Legends appeared.
This was the joystick era
Through the years i had probably all the racing games on several systems but the most satisfied is the Assetto version. I dont know how many hours ive spent on this track.... probably too many

This iconic track is part of my life. Ive live in Germany but unfortunately still too far to visit the track.
The daily money chase didnt allowed it so far to visit this track but this is on my to-do-list.
I was already on some "big" motorsport events lie WRX on Estering and it was great!
I hope i will find some time to go to Nordschleife and see this awesome track and to "feel this real atmosphere".