Nürburgring - Hermann Lang

Germany looking northwards towards the distant Seacoast and where the Moselle flows east from France to join the Rhine in the wooded Eiffel Mountains lies the most picturesque and difficult motor racing circuit in the world the Nurburgring this is the traditional setting for the German Grand Prix and here at the scene of its pre-war triumphs is one of the great racing cars of the past the 1937 w12 five Mercedes with its 8 cylinder 645 horsepower engine powerful too is the famous Mercedes team manager Alfred Nobel who has with him the European champion of 1939 Hermann line they have come to the ring specially for our cameras to record its 25 years since this Mercedes raised here and Grand Prix cars of today are limited to barely a quarter of the capacity producing only a fraction of the horsepower of this the most powerful Grand Prix racing car ever built the Nurburgring is made up of 40 miles of road specially built for racing and high speed testing for much of the first five miles the road descends in a series of fast curves the town of Aetna is nearly halfway around at the foot of the circuit the road now climbs toward one of the trickiest corners of all the carousel Laing is coming round for another lap and this time you will sit behind the wheel and hear the 1962 world motor racing champion Graham Hill giving his impression of the finest of all motor racing circuits from the start we leave the wide apron in front of the pits and get funneled into the narrow section just down here which constitutes the normal width of the circuit of course just after the start of a Grand Prix we're all about 30 odd cars are trying to get into this funnel and we're all docking for position and it's very very tricky then into the South curve which is almost a 360 degree corner and it's very difficult to hold the car in at this point on the power because I think factory all cars would understeer on this circuit and we find that we then have to squirt out of here onto the uphill section which comes behind the back of the pits we very often get our pit signals from this section illegally so they put the big high wire fence up there to stop the mechanics giving us signals but we can very often get a very good quick lap time in from this section now we come to a left-hand Bend which starts the Nurburgring proper up over a bridge to a very nasty little left hander which is a second gear corner taken very carefully and again they slip in the wet very fast downhill section where we're reaching speeds in the order of about 130 miles an hour this is followed by a series of left and right turns about five or six in all very close together and a very very tricky to take at any speed at all it's most important to get the exit right from every corner so I think a smooth flow through these series of corners would give one a better lap time as you can see the cars are eroding away the edges of the circuit here we're trying to pinch every available inch of road here to straighten out the corners there's a good example there he just touches the dirt and little puffs of dust Rises and we're trying to do this all the time of course it pays to be extremely acted on this circuit and have the following corner in mind this is the last corner for these series of left and right-hand corners and it's a right-hander followed by a left-hander which is slightly downhill and slightly banked when we burst out of the woods to quite a good view if we had time to look at it and we go rushing down over a couple of bridges until we come to a section called the flip parts just here in front of us actually all the cars leave the ground at this point it's extremely tricky core because it's followed up by a very fast right-hander and it's you have to make sure that you haven't gone too fast and get out of control when you're in the air so that you don't get time to get stopped for the next corner we're now entering a very fast downhill section this point here is about the fastest path on the circuit it's downhill and we get up to about 150 miles an hour it's even quicker than down straight and it gets very tricky stopping because we have to brake on a rather fast left-hand corner of the surface here is very bad as you can see the Macan mistake this is the Fox Roo fast downhill section left and right hand corners all concealed from you it was on this section in the practice for the 1962 Grand Prix that I am met with a side accident when I ran over television camera that had dropped off another car I hit the camera just about here it hold my old tank and I spun off into the ditch on the left hand side on my own oil and went borrowing down this ditch behind those hedges like a giant mole ended up about here still forcing out the right way we now come to a another section in the woods the corners gradually getting slower and slower until we reach this this part here which is about the modern stairs corners on the circuit with a sort of skyline view that we drop in the second gear here and it's very easy to overdo it as it says slow now we come to the downhill section going down to add no gate there's a very fast section but you need to be extremely brave to go down here very quickly the corners follow on another in quick succession game around the side of the hill and if you can you try and set the car up into a giant drift to drive the car through all these corners in one smooth line this is a little bridge that must not be confused with the Admiral gate one for the approach is very similar no favor or two people do make mistakes and you can probably see one or two little holes in the hedges which shows where they actually left the circuit this you have to hug right into the hedge it pays the touch the axial please of the hedge with the left hand wheel and now we approaching the adenoid gate which is a fairly similar approach to the little bridge we've just seen very fast I always ease off just about here drop into here touch the dirt on the outside and brake very hard for this bridge here and then set the carp into the left-hand corner and hug the inside of the track very closely here and over the bridge and away up to the uphill climb to reach them again we the full height of the Nurburgring circuit now straight into the carousel the one gets very heavy you do to the extra G load on one's own body weight and the car gets thrown around it's very easy for the car to sit out of this banked section and then of course you go straight through the heads like a stone on the end of a piece of string this is the Swallowtail which is a smaller version of the carousel being less banked it's even easier to fly out now this is the straight between two very tall hedges it's fairly narrow but I would imagine that when we'll get to speeds of about 170 miles now in this very long state an actual fact it's climbing all the time uphill and that it also dips it's in fact called the switchback the cars go up and down through little sort of rises and hollows and it is on occasions that the cars that one is following it actually disappear from view so one must be very alert of this section in looking in one's Meredith could easily be lulled into a false sense of security and believing that there was no one following you or no one close enough an extra fact he might just be an Apollo we approach a very very tricky corner at the end of the straight which goes up under a bridge and the cars actually leave the ground and just as they leave the ground here we've got to turn left the cars very very light and the road drops away making the position even worse this is followed by a series of very fast left and right-hand corners we could almost be taken flat out in 1962 Formula one cars very tricky the cars slipping and sliding and fairly steep too one wants to be properly geared and this completes another lap of the German Grand Prix circuit the Nurburgring you

Channel: Lars Halvard Rødberg

Views: 612,845

Keywords: nürburgring, 1937, w125, mercedes, 1962, hermann, lang, graham, hill, alfred, neubauer, grand, prix, nurburgring, nordschleife

Id: fkZwGa50eqM

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2007