I am on the road to the Nurburgring!
Yes, the time has finally come! After some delays earlier in the year and lots of prep work, I have now hit the road on a 900 mile journey from Northern Ireland to Germany!
Starting off in Belfast, I get the ferry over to Liverpool England which is cool but takes a very long time (8 hours - yikes!) before then cutting right across England to Kent where I meet up with a car enthusiast called Tom Clarke who is coming along to the ring also.
We convoy down from Kent to Folkestone (near Dover) to get the channel tunnel (aka LeShuttle) which we drive onto and it is basically a train that goes underneath the sea in between England and France - a real engineering marvel!
Once in France we drive to Belgium, which really didn't take to long to get to (after we sorted out the sat nav and got going in the actually correct direction lol) Belgium on the other hand felt like it took forever to get through. So many long, motorways with nothing exciting to look at. Also road works and other such slow downs didn't help, much like the ever increasing temperatures didn't make for a comfortable Belgian journey!
Once we made it to Germany, the sat nav took us an interesting, somewhat scenic route, possibly to bypass traffic and how glad we were that it did. We travelled along some excellent roads with some of the most beautiful surroundings I have ever seen - a real joy of a drive!
Then, as if by magic, the famous Nurburgring sign came into to view and I got very excited, despite being somewhat sleep deprived!
After the obligatory photo op and already seeing many epic cool vehicles driving around the area, we made our way to get into our accommodation for the trip before making our way to the entrance of the Nordschleife because we had timed our arrival to coincide with touristenfahrten - German for tourist drives of the ring! So of course we just couldn't resist both doing our first ever real life (not video game!) laps of the famous track!
We decided to do passenger drives each to get the experience from both sides, with me going first in my Focus RS and then Tom in his Fiesta ST.
Just my luck though, as soon as I drove through the barrier, it started raining - not ideal conditions for my first ever drive of the Nurburgring!
I pushed on anyway, not going full send but that wasn't really what I had planned to do anyway for my first lap as of course I am new to the track in real life and I wouldn't call myself an expert anyway, even in video games, so it was wise to take it a bit easy to get a feel for it and learn the corners a bit.
I was of course tempted into pushing in a couple of places where I felt comfortable, getting bit of tyre squeal here and there so I know the tires were reaching their limit!
I did unfortunately start to experience some clutch slip about half way round the Nordschleife when I was red lining on the throttle and using the no lift shift feature. I could smell some nice overheating clutch also so I had to back off from taking it all the way to red line which was a shame but I was still able to go decently fast - something to look into sorting out once back in Belfast!
Tom's lap was super fun - his heavily modified Ford Fiesta ST (more to come on that next time!) is a real track beast and it is certainly a different feeling not being in control while in the passenger seat!
All in all, this first part of the ultimate Nurburgring road trip has been epic - a very long but successful and satisfying trip that took me through five countries, countless motorway services, many motorways, the most beautiful of scenery and culminating in laps of the most famous car enthusiast race track in the world!
At this point, however, I was definitely in need of rest so it was an early night for me and a good place to end part one of this video series!
Make sure you are along for the ride in part two where I show more of what there is going on at the Nurburgring and how awesome of a pilgrimage it is to make as a motor vehicle enthusiast - coming soon!
Nurburgring prep part one:
• NURBURGRING ROAD TRIP ...
Nurburgring prep part two:
• NURBURGRING ROAD TRIP ...
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Негізгі бет Автокөліктер мен көлік құралдары THE NURBURGRING ROAD TRIP PART 1! | FOCUS RS | VLOG 51
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