OK, it's that time again. Ina and I are back in the USA and we have good internet access and a little more time to write.
Day 11 started in Haren, Ina's hometown in the far Northwest of the country. We had about 3 hours of driving ahead of us before we would reach Koblenz, home of the Nurburgring. The A-31 cuts through the Northwest of Germany, stretching from the North Sea down to to the West Central area of Essen. It's also a great place to do some high speed runs. Long, straight, flat, low traffic.
Once the car was well warmed up, I started pushing it. Getting up to 230 km/h (~145 mph) is pretty easy. The car rushes up to that speed and the visibility and traffic in the area can easily handle it. Beyond that gets a little interesting.
Gentle bends in the road limit forward visibility and groups of cars make higher speed runs a little stressful. Trucks are limited to traveling at 100 km/h on the autobahn and the A-31 is a two lane road. Even if they push it to 110, they are still doing only about 68 mph versus my already 143. When you catch up to them, they go by so fast it's almost as if they are oncoming traffic. Cars typically travel at about 160-180 km/h, so they're also catching up to those trucks and frequently moving into the left lane to get around them. At speeds above 230 km/h, I'm coming up on them real quick.
Eventually, the road opened up and straightened out. I could see long and far and there were no cars for as far as I could see. I dropped the right pedal and off we went. 230, 235, 240, 245, 250 then things start slowing down. You can feel that the car is pushing real hard against the wind and it's accelerating pretty slowly, but still definitely accelerating. 255, 258, 261, 264, 265 and then we come up on a group of cars and I decide to let off. The car was absolutely flying and still accelerating. Then I had Ina do the math. She grabbed my phone, accessed the calculator, divided 265 km/h by 1.6 and revealed that we had just been doing 165+ mph. WOW.....! That's freaking fast man. A new record for me (previously 162 mph in my 944 Turbo).
I let the car cool down and dropped it back down to a cool 220 km/h (138 mph). Still fast enough to lose your license anywhere in America, but it now felt slow. Nice..... After an hour of that, I turned the wheel over to Ina who kept it rolling at about 180 km/h (113 mph). The car really likes that speed. That's the speed that I mentioned was boring in an earlier post. That's because the car just really likes that speed. It's like a walk in the park. I took a little nap and Ina woke me up when she saw this:
The roads leading to the ring are very nice. Winding country roads through hills and valleys, with lots of high performance cars obviously coming from the track. Lot's of boy racers, a few really nice cars. I had to take a picture of this one:
Once we got there, we realized we were at the wrong Nurburgring. We were looking for the Nordschleife (the North Loop). A nice guy pointed us in the right direction. We were only off by about 2-3 km. When we got there, I instantly recognized a rotary that's right in front. Anyone else here seen that You-Tube
video of the guy beating the snot out of his guards red Cayman? Well, I did and when I entered that rotary I felt an amazing déjà vu. It's literally right outside the entrance of the Nordschleife.
The entrance and parking area are pretty small. There were dozens of motorcycles there, and lots of cool cars.
