Europe 2013: Nürburgring, Here I Come

August 30, 2013

I'll have more to say about the other bits of the day later, but for the moment, I am sitting at the Devil's Diner on the Nürburgring. A track day ran late, so they'll only be open from 6:15 to 7:30 tonight. I already have a ticket, but it's only just 6, so I have a little bit of time to kill.

The restaurant is closed, but I'm always in favor of a convenient table, which makes typing so much easier.

From the look of things, I'm one of the approximately 1% of people who has not arrived in full racing leathers. Sorry, I left my racing suit at home, and I don't have time to run back and get it. Still, the big ugly yellow suit will work fine. But me with my tank bag and my GPS on the handlebars... well, I don't look like a Ricky Racer, that's for sure. It's not a problem, it's just a funny observation.

Apparently, the way this works is that you just roll up (once the gate is open), wave your ticket (which I hope I get to keep as a little memento) in front of the green window, and roll onto the track. Pass those who are going slower, allow your self to be passed by those who are going faster. As usual with race tracks and motorcycles and me, I will be spending a lot of time being passed. It's ok, it's not a competition, this time.

A lap costs EUR26, or four laps are 97. That compares fairly well with riding a track day at home, except that you can roll up and ride here most days, and the minimum outlay is 26 euros vs. $150 for a whole day at Pacific Raceways -- and Pacific Raceways, fine track though it may be, does not honestly hold a candle to the Nürburgring.

I'm pleased that I planned sufficiently well today that I could get my camp set up before hitting the track, and thus lose the tower of stuff that normally rides on the passenger seat. It's clear that there's no such thing as a gear locker here. There are barely any indoor facilities at all, except for the big restaurant behind me.

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Back at the campsite, got myself outside some dinner (the cheese and tomato sandwich is the official meal of Europe 2013, but such bread, and such cheese!), and i've got all my stuff laid out.

Riding the Nürburgring was... stressful. And fun. And sweaty. And intimidating. And humbling. All those things, and a lot more, really. Fortunately, with my previous racing experience, I was ready for the ins and outs of riding a fast track, although there was a lot more traffic with me than I've experienced previously. Interestingly, I wasn't going dead slow compared to everyone else -- I was holding my own, although I'm sure I caused a few gnashed teeth through a few corners as I hogged a decent line. Don't get me wrong, I got passed a lot. I would guess between 15 and 20 cars and bikes went past me in my lap of the track. On the other hand, there was a line well past the street, and I went on amidst a cloud of others, and only 15 or 20 went past me.

I passed a total of two vehicles: one an SUV right at the outset, and the other also an SUV, somewhere in the middle. I only made one oh-shit mistake, and ended up running across some grass (no real trouble caused, just made me look like a beginner, which is true) when a curve suddenly doubled down on its turning radius. I was simply going too fast, and was already leaned over near the edge of my comfort. It was far safer to straighten up, coast over the grass, and get back on the track at the other side of the turn.

The GPS tells me my highest speed was 165 km/h, which is just over 100 MPH. I could have sworn I was going faster, but I'm not surprised that's all the faster I was going. It also tells me the course was almost exactly 21 km long, and that my average speed (which includes a whole lot of waiting in long, dead-slow lines) was 64 km/h. I figure without the lines, I was averaging around 100 or 110 km/h, which is decent, and is about my racing speed at Pacific Raceways (where I tend to average 59 to 60 MPH).

The Nürburgring is a considerably faster track than PR, and I was on a much faster bike, so that balances out reasonably well against being an utterly foul newbie who's more or less never ridden the track before (I've ridden it in a video game, which is a shadow of the real thing).

I started out waving my card in front of an RFID reader, which raised a gate for me. I followed the SUV out, as well as a Porsche 911 which I never saw again. He passed the SUV, and shortly after, I did too. The bike responded very well, and I can reasonably say that this was the first time I've pinned the throttle. It's a light, powerful bike, and I can see why people like racing them. It sprang forward, and I was quickly into my first corner. I was also very quickly aware of someone behind me, and performed my first of many "please pass me" pull-overs. I didn't really get the blinker ettiquette (assuming I got all of it, which is unlikely) until I was nearly done, so I didn't use my blinkers much during the lap.

I'd say that of all the drivers on the course (where driver and vehicle will have to be taken together, necessarily) I was in the lowest third, speed-wise, but near the top of that lowest third. It was mostly cars passing me, although a few bikes went past as well. I was definitely in the lowest fraction of motorcycles, for speed. I actually think that my bike was comparatively underpowered vs. the other bikes on the track, so part of it was purely that I didn't have as much oomph once I'd gone carefully around a corner. I'd say that it would be a fun track on the 250, but I think that would only be the case if you were alone on the track, or there were only other similarly-powerful bikes with you.

Railing the bike around the corners, I always forget, is a surprising amount of work. I was quickly quite hot and sweaty inside the suit, and spending a lot of time not breathing as evenly as I should: holding my breath, then blowing it out again. For each curve, I was trying to ride as good a line as I could, but that's really the kind of thing that only comes with practice on a given track or stretch of road. Without the practice, it was really only best-guesses, and I was wrong more than half the time.

There's a lot of up and down in the track, more than I had realized from the game (and even more than I'd realized while riding the track today, when I found a couple of viewing spots to stop and take pictures afterwards). The track is so big that it encompasses a town or two. There is, indeed, a great deal of graffiti on the track. I wondered when people can possibly get on the track to paint it. Some of it was official-looking brand names and such, so there must be some sort of official way to get on the track and paint. I only paid it enough attention to say it was really there.

When I came to the end of my lap (signified by a straightaway with a long line of stopped cars off to the right), I thought to myself that I could go another round, but I didn't need to. The desire to improve my skills was definitely there, but I also felt like in all the time I had, all I could really do was take two silly beginner laps instead of one. Better to leave it. I had the experience, I'll probably play the game with a slightly different eye now. I got two stickers, one of which will go on my helmet, the other, who knows where (and of course, I can always order more on the website... sigh).

I'm glad I had the experience. Maybe I should be doing more track days at home. It feels a little hollow, though. A checkmark against a list, more than anything else. Perhaps that will change with time.

As for the rest of the day, I can say that drying out the socks in the attic of my tent was moderately successful, and a bit of sun in the morning was able to finish the job (with a certain amount of wasting time while things dried out). I got on the road around 11, I think, and the mist in the valleys persisted through the day. I was wrong, yesterday, when I said I wasn't yet into the real hills and valleys. Today's route was absolutely delightful from a fun curves standpoint.

In order to get to my campsite, which is more or less 20 km northeast of the Nürburgring, I wanted to avoid Dusseldorf, and Cologne, and Bonn, and that giant mess of cities there. But I was just about positive that if I simply told the GPS to take me to the campsite, it would route me straight through the worst of the traffic. So, I picked a few likely and out-of-the-way towns, and told it to route me through them to the final destination. Coincidentally, there were no direct routes between these towns shown on the map.

The result was that I ended up riding some really delightful roads, including some that went down to one lane, and occasionally passed through miniscule hamlets. I got excellent curves, I got picturesque views, I got adorable towns with lovely buildings. It was really a good stretch to travel, and because I knew I wasn't in a huge hurry (the route I finally settled on only spanned 210 km, which is a very easy day for me, riding-wise), I was able to stop and take the occasional picture. The hardest part, really, was finding safe places to pull over and take pictures from.

The landscape around here is composed of steep, rolling hills and deep valleys, with towns perched both in the valleys and atop the hills. There are roads that run along ridges, and roads that follow along beside rivers, occasionally glimpsed through roadside plant life. The ridge roads offer view after view of hills receding into the misty distance, and occasionally a small town with a church spire rising prominently above the old, blocky houses nestled into a valley, or guarding the top of a hill.

There are tended fields which run straight up the sides of some of the hills, at improbable slope angles. On the ride from campsite to Nürburgring, the first thing I saw as I left the town was a steep hillside full of what looked to be wine grapes. I'm not sure how they tend some of them without fairly specialized tractors that won't roll over at such angles. No terraced hillsides here, just plant 'em as they come.

For lunch, I had stopped at a supermarket and picked up, you guessed it, chocolate and cheese and bread and tomatoes. I also got some grapes, which were huge. The bread was some mini-baguettes and a kaesebroetchen, which is basically a white-bread roll with a crispy shell of cheese baked over it. If you're sensing a theme here, you'd be right.

The place I finally pulled off for lunch was a mere track into the woods. I rolled a couple hundred meters down the track to a likely intersection with a few other tracks, and parked. It was a really pretty spot, strongly reminiscent of forests in the Seattle area, but with no undergrowth among the tall trees. I could definitely picture a variety of Brothers Grimm fairy tales happening in a wood like this.

The rest of the trip was more of the same: mostly nice curvy roads and little villages, although there were also a few stretches of freeway-like roads. I also passed by the Rhein, which is a big, blue-green river, with a variety of very low, long ships sailing along hauling whatever cargo. They were clearly designed to go under particularly low bridges.

My campsite is pretty much on the edge of the city limits of Ahrweiler, on the banks of the river Ahr. It's small, but it's pleasant enough. Though the ground is rock-hard, which makes it pretty difficult to get tent stakes into the ground. I did eventually succeed, after a bit of moving things around and doing the grunting he-man thing (more grunting than he-man), and my tent stands proud as a testament to my perseverance.

Apparently showers here are 1 euro for ten minutes, so I think I'm going to avail myself of a lovely shower, then come back and figure out my plan for tomorrow.

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Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.