Ok, the real story

***To anyone who has not watched the teaser video below, you simply must watch it first. Scroll down***
Awards go to David & Jon for figuring out the riddle.

Graeme: The real story. Ok by now, anyone worth half their weight would have looked at our GPS locations and figured out where we were.
We went to Nurburg, to drive the Nurburg Ring's north loop (Nordshleif). We like to keep this as interesting for you as it is for us, so suspense was all part of it. Plus there is always a chance 'public runs' (I can't remember the proper German name for it) will be canceled or not scheduled for the day, so we didn't want to risk more disappointment.
Sure, it's probably not the first Australian car on the Nurburg ring, but you can bet it's a one in a million deal. Needless to say we saw heaps of Australians, but none in their own car and equally few hiring one and going for a blap.

To those who don't know, Nurburg's North loop is some ~20KM of turns, sharp descents and ascents surrounding the town of Nurburg. Jackie Stewart, a famous race driver coined it 'Green Hell'. When we'd planned this trip from the beginning, we had to come and give it a go. We're much happier to have given it a blap at this end of the trip, not the beginning!

The video will be uploaded in its entirety tomorrow.

Taking the troopie round was awesome!!! This isn't playstation people! 3 tonne, ~96KW diesel, mud terrain tyres and 100KG on the roof. What a hoot! We were one of the first ones out of the gate, taking off disappointingly slow onto the main straight. Like merging onto a highway up a hill it was laborious. Down the next hill it started to come into it's own. It's all about momentum with this beast. After a few quick corners a 90' right-hander washed our speed away. You'll see from the video a car just driving in pit lane was no doubt going faster than us.
If you ever see us on the right hand side of the track, you can bet we were indicating for someone to go past us. Staggeringly, some cars and bikes stayed behind, and when they went past, they were not going much faster at all. How were we possibly leading the pack? Two things the training revealed and is difficult to appreciate, is that 80% of the corners are blind corners, and that there is 300M altitude difference across the track. Holy hell! Having never driven the track before, not even so much as knowing the direction of each turn keeps you on your toes. I had played it before on playstation, but the ~150 odd corners tests your virtual memory. One piece of research I did suggested the biggest failing of bringing road cars to 'the ring', is people fry brakes. I was very mindful for this not to occur to us, with no airbags, crumple-zones and all those niceties. One more thing to consider when watching, is that this track was designed in the 1920's and therefore has 1920's
safety. There is hardly any room for run off. Ouch. I hope that doesn't all sound like excuses?

One corner I'd forgotten about is in the video around 4:34 when you hear the kettle roll out of the cabinet. Thank goodness for that car in front of us because I suspect we wouldn't have seen that corner as you can see so many before have also missed. 3/4 on the temperature gauge is the new record, but then again, I doubt it's ever had quite the 'workload' that it just had. Cassie, the ultimate co-driver, was quick to turn the heater on for some additional cooling! When we'd finished, we quickly hid the camera away (filming is prohibited) and went to the hire car place to pickup the next part of our adventure. Interestingly enough when we pulled up, the tyres were really sticky, but the brakes were virtually stone cold!... should have gone much harder!

The night and day change was the substitution of a Renault Megane, with it's ~2L turbocharged kick in the pants. For the first lap of all rentals, the instructor must accompany you. Initially I was really disappointed and inwardly angry that this technicality meant Cassie would miss out on this, but in hindsight, so many people would crash straight away, so I see why they do it. If you had plans of doing a few laps, the instructor would have been good training. Even now, with all maturity and calmness over me, he was still a major kill joy. As a passenger, I would have been the same. I wouldn't let some stranger drive within 80% of their limit with me in the passenger seat. The troopie was relatively more fun as I wasn't getting poo pooed at every opportunity. All that aside, it was still worth it, and if we'd have booked more laps, the laps after him would have been an absolute blast.The car was STUNNING! It's a RenaultSport R26R. Front wheel drive, carbon fiber bonnet, no
rear seats, hardly any soundproofing, roll cage and 6 point harness... this is a factory configuration people! The absence of soundproofing meant you could hear the roar of the air intake, or exhaust, or a combination of both when it came on boost. Either way it was thoroughly a treat to the ears. This very model achieved a time of 8 minutes something on this very track by a Renault test driver during development. Unfortunately, I don't know what my time was in this thing, but I'd estimate 12 minutes. It handled like it was on rails. No exaggeration. It would out-handle me by a factor of three! There was sooooooooooooooooooo much braking power, so much horse power and so much handling in reserves it was beyond words. 227HP, 310NM, 6.5second 0-100 time.

As we took off down the straight, it was cutting out like crazy at around 4000 RPM, like hitting the rev limiter, but at nearly half of it's 7000 RPM red line. Turned out it does this when it's not yet warm. Fair enough. Either way, it was still properly quick when we took off down the straight.
Note to self - must return and bring hoards of people with me. Spend a week here.

Cassie:
Graeme and I were originally thinking we would be spending two nights and one whole day around the town of Nurburg and surrounds to incorporate a blast around the track with ol' Troops and another the next evening in the Renault Megane. The reason for this thought was that public sessions usually run from 5pm - 7pm each day unless the track has been booked for something else. So we were under the impression the line up would be huge to get onto the track so we would only get one chance to go around one evening and would have to reserve the other run for the next evening. But, being mid-week our timing was perfect and there actually weren't many people around so, after both of us feeling a bit let down that the town of Nurburg is tiny and what on earth are we going to do there for the next 24hrs, it hit me like a tonne of bricks, why don't we do both runs in the one evening then we're free to do something else the next day!? I felt like the little girl on the Old el Paso ad wh
o suggests why don't we have both soft and hard taco shells!? We were both so excited that after a spot of lunch in a beautifully quaint town near Nurburg, we spun round to the place that hires cars out for the Nurburg Ring, parted with the cash and spent the next hour looking for a vantage spot for me to drive to so I could film Graeme zooming round a corner.

At our chosen vantage point, we met a German guy, Christian, who is a freelance photographer. He not only recognised that we are from Australia, he knew where New South Wales is because he lived in Byron Bay for a while! The world is so small in ways. His first inkling that we must be Australian was when Graeme walked past him with a cuppa in hand, wearing our distinct, hardy boots and also the kind smile and wave hello Graeme gave him. Then, when he turned around he was amazed to see from our car that sure enough, these guys are Aussie! I saw him walking around our car in awe so I said Hi and the first words out of his mouth were, "Did you bring this car from Australia!?". The Germans have been so friendly and warm to us. Not once have we been made to feel unwelcome anywhere we've been. I've lost count how many times someone has waved, given us a thumbs up and taken our picture on the autobahns. Seriously, we'll be driving along at 100kph or so and all of a sudden there'll b
e a car travelling beside us and when we look over there's big smiles, waves, thumbs up. It's fun that they're sharing our excitment at being here.

Anyway, back to the real story, the Nurburg Ring was such a thrill! We took Troopie around first and OMG, I've never been so scared in my life! Through the 154 corners on the ~20km track, I was literally gripping on to the "Jebus" bar in the car for probably 149 of the corners and my mouth was totally dry by the end of it. I think it's a scarier experience as a passenger. But, having said that, do I want to drive it? Nyet with a capital 'N'. Would I go out on it again? Yeah, absolutely. Maybe next time in a car that doesn't have such a high centre of gravity so hopefully the cornering isn't so sickening.

Seeing Graeme fly around the corner on the track was breathtaking, for a couple of reasons. It was amazing to see him accomplishing something that he really wanted to do, but my adrenalin was pumping. A race track is a full on place, especially when full of people who aren't used to a race track. I was a mixture of pride and worry when I saw him and in fact, if you look closely at that part of the footage on our video, you can see it shaking ever so slightly - that's me shaking from adrenalin and a bit of fear! Graeme wasn't concerned at all, he even managed a wave from the car as he drove around the corner!

We stuffed up our timing through Germany a little bit so missed out on seeing things like the Dachau concentration camp museum, the Porsche factory tour and the Porsche museum and I was feeling a little bit sad that it felt like we were missing out a little bit on such a wonderful country. But, hey, the Nurburg Ring! It's totally made up for it.