PolePosition_Ausgabe07

A sometimes-heard comment is that if a car is
developed on the Nurburgring the suspension is
to stiff for normal street use. This is could be true
if you engineer a car FOR the Nurburgring or go
chasing lap times with products at the top end of
a performance brand, but you can also engineer a
car ON the Nurburgring. This means as long as you
treat the track like a proving ground with features
for developing a road car and are not looking at the
stop watch you can have a really capable and comfortable
end product. This is why you see SUV’s as
well as sports cars on the track. The SUV isn’t being
tuned on the track because the manufacturer necessarily
expects a customer to go on the Nurburgring
with it, but they are using the many features and
challenges it offers to make a capable and robust
road car.
Not just any engineer or test driver can turn
up and drive in the Industry Pool, they have to
already be very experienced in high speed and
limit handling, then they go through a pass/fail
training course learning the correct line on the
track and rules of Industry Pool training. With such
a variety of cars out there from low power family
cars to 700PS super cars the range of vehicles and
speeds isn’t dissimilar to the NLS or Nurburgring
24hr race!
There really is no other proving ground/race track
in the world like Nurburgring for proving vehicle
capability and robustness. You often see the road
cars that spend considerable time on the Nordschleife
during development then appearing as
the best race cars in the NLS and the 24hr race.
On occasions the 24hrs of Nurburgring even sees
prototypes run as a final test for the whole vehicle
or future technology components before the
road cars are launched, creating a great PR story
proving you vehicle in the hardest 24hr race in
the world. //
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