Nürburgring

The Grand-Prix-Strecke is the short, modern half of the Nürburgring, laid out at Nürburg in the Eifel hills of Rhineland-Palatinate. When it opened in 1984 it shared only the start-finish straight with the old circuit, ran to about four and a half kilometres, and was built with the wide run-off the Nordschleife next door could never offer. The lap raced today is the 2002 version — 5.148 kilometres, 15 turns — after the Mercedes-Arena was built over the circuit’s former kart track and stretched the GP course from 4.556 kilometres to its present length. Beside it the Nordschleife still runs 20.830 kilometres through more than 300 metres of elevation. The GP circuit is the engineered one: it asks for precision where its neighbour asks for nerve.

The Mercedes-Arena is the newest part of the lap and the reason it measures what it does — a slow, Omega-shaped complex built in 2002 on ground where the circuit ran a kart track from 1984 to 2001. Round the far side, the S-curve between the Dunlop-Kehre and the Kumho-Kurve was renamed the Michael-Schumacher-S in 2007: announced in March, and christened by Schumacher in person on the European Grand Prix weekend that July. The chicane before the pit straight has changed names more often than shape — rebuilt in 1994 and again in 1997, it has been the Veedol chicane, then the NGK chicane, and the circuit has since put the Veedol name back.

The Grand-Prix-Strecke opened in 1984 at the foot of the Eifel mountains, the modern gateway to the legendary Nordschleife. Together they host the Nürburgring 24 Hours — the largest GT3 race in the world, two hundred thousand fans deep. It would be the championship’s ultimate European test: where the GT3 world proves itself, in the shadow of the Green Hell.

A weekend on the circuit that crowns the GT3 world: the Mercedes Arena, the Dunlop hairpin, the plunge through the Veedol chicane — with the Nordschleife waiting beyond the fence and the Eifel forests all around.

The Nürburgring opened in 1927 in the hills around the village and medieval castle of Nürburg, and it is the Nordschleife that earned Jackie Stewart’s nickname for the place, the Green Hell. The Grand-Prix-Strecke is the younger half, inaugurated in 1984 with an exhibition race for twenty identical Mercedes 190 E 2.3-16 saloons — a field holding nine former Formula 1 world champions, won by a then little-known Brazilian named Ayrton Senna. Formula 1 has since raced here as the European, Luxembourg, German and Eifel Grands Prix, and DTM and GT World Challenge Europe have been regular visitors. One thing worth stating plainly: the Nürburgring 24 Hours is not a Grand-Prix-Strecke race. It runs a combined 25.378-kilometre circuit — the Nordschleife joined to part of the GP track — with the Mercedes-Arena left out and often used for support pits.

Official circuit website →