Driving in the Green Hell
By Dan Edmunds
It's graduation day at the AMG Driving Academy at the infamous Nürburgring Nordschleife, and the speedometer needle in my 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG has just swung past 200 kilometers per hour.
As the car hurtles toward yet another hellaciously fast corner with an incomprehensible German name, I'm a bit too busy right now to convert metric into real units, but my spider-sense tells me it's bleeding fast for a car with no roll cage and garden-variety three-point seatbelts.
Schwedenkreuz, I think the next corner is called, and if my memory of the last three days at the Nürburgring with AMG is correct, it leads into Aremberg, a 3rd-gear right-hander that will spit me out under the Yokohama bridge. Beyond that are a series of nameless flat-out kinks as the road plunges into another 200-km/h compression, followed by a climbing braking zone that feeds into the tight, high-curbed esses at Adenauer-Forst.
Hey, I might actually be getting the hang of this place.
Welcome to Germany; Now Haul Ass
Just over 48 hours earlier I'd been sitting in a classroom with some 54 other students from all over the world, AMG owners all. Swedes, French, Spaniards, Italians, some Austrians and, outnumbering them all, a contingent of German locals. A surprisingly large group hailed from China. And then there were the Russians — chain-smokers to a man, these hardened, surly comrades with close-cropped hair looked like cosmonauts.
We'd all come to attend the AMG Driving Academy's event at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, the famed 12.9-mile, 73-turn racetrack where both cars and drivers have been measured since 1927. Formula 1 champion Jackie Stewart called it the "Green Hell" back in the 1960s because of the way the road twisted through the forest, and the track still seems as daunting and dangerous as it did then.
AMG, the high-performance division of Mercedes-Benz, calls this three-day event, "Pro Training." Participants must have previously attended at least one entry-level course in the AMG Driving Academy and then they fork over $3,040 in fees for the school, meals and lodging.
If you like, you can drive your own Mercedes-Benz AMG, and the valets at the Dorint Hotel overlooking the last corner of the Nürburgring grand prix circuit were kept busy with C55 and C63 sedans, some CLK55 and CLK63 coupes, one or two E55 wagons, a handful of SLK55 roadsters and a couple of be-winged CLK DTM coupes. Arrive-and-drive students like us can rent an AMG for another $1,600 to $2,400. One set of fresh tires and brakes are included in the price; insurance in case you auger your mount into the ever-present Armco barriers is not.
I try hard not to think about the $156,745 price tag of my hired ride, a 518-horsepower 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG roadster.
First, Water Ballet
Before actually heading out onto the Nürburgring, we break into small groups and I meet my instructor, Roland Rehfeld, a likable English-speaking guy with an easy smile.
Rehfeld started out racing karts, moved on to sports cars and even raced big diesel trucks. He's also raced a couple of NASCAR Craftsman Truck and ARCA Re/Max races in the States. Now he's back home racing Porsche Cup and endurance GT events like the Nürburgring 24 Hours.
We begin with some exercises at the Safety Center, a miniature proving ground with a braking area, a compact autocross, a low-friction cornering course and a strange expanse of asphalt with what looks like a humungous overturned belt sander in the middle. Then they turn on the water and flood the pavement, and the Safety Center becomes the automotive equivalent of the foam practice pit that motocross stunt rider Travis Pastrana uses to practice double backflips without killing himself.
We practice some exercises on the wet pavement. Turns out we are meant to drive across the belt-sander thingy onto a patch of painted, wet pavement that's slick as snot. As you drive across the belt sander at 40 km/h, an instructor triggers the belt to twitch one way or the other. The car instantaneously lurches into a lazy wet spin, requiring quick hands on the steering wheel to contain it.
"Turn off your brains," says Rehfeld over the radio. "Look straight ahead. Don't think; just react. Fast hands." Apparently, this exercise represents what might happen if we encounter one of many lingering damp patches out on the Nürburgring's North Circuit (Nordschleife) where overhanging trees drip water onto the track long after the morning fog burns away.
What? This isn't in the brochure.
Finally on Track
On Day Two, we huddle on the track under a clear, chilly sky. The instructors have broken down the track into seven segments, with a single group assigned to each. We'll spend 45 minutes in each segment, running it over and over like a rally stage, then advance to the next segment. By mid-afternoon, we'll start running full laps.
We do the usual lead-follow exercise that every driving school incorporates, following Rehfeld's CLK (a former F1 safety car) on the racing line while he calmly relays instructions over his handheld radio while nailing each apex.
"You can go through here at 160 km/h, and the compression at the bottom of the hill can be taken at 210."
"You should straddle this curb, but don't touch the next one — especially if it's wet."
Putting It All Together
By mid-afternoon there is just enough time, fuel and stamina left for three or four full uninterrupted laps. Lead-follow is still the order of the day because this will be the first time we'll run through the transitions between segments at speed. And some of the transitions are legendary. Flugplatz, for example, is the high-speed double-apex corner (it's actually named for a take-off strip for sailplanes that used to be nearby) that comes right after we land a jump that, um, we'd never yet jumped.
This 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG has felt so utterly composed and secure through the high-speed dips and bends that it doesn't distract me from the task at hand. The brakes bite hard yet never fade, the seven-speed paddle-shift transmission executes flawlessly and the stonking 518-hp V8 pulls like a, well, a stonking 518-hp V8.
Then a sharp, sphincter-clenching sound echoes through the SL's cabin as the car barely leaves the ground going into Flugplatz. It takes a few moments for my brain to realize that the sharp report didn't mean the SL had blown a tire; instead the pop-up rollover protection had deployed just aft of my helmet when it registered the zero-G moment. At least it works, but damn....
We've only done three full laps, but the day's total comes to over 150 miles on the 'Ring. No one has been timing these lead-follow laps, but we've had too much fun to care.
Nah, that's a load of bull. Of course we cared. No one can make a lap around the Nürburgring without thinking about the lap time. Rehfeld's assistant felt the same way, so he ran the in-car timer in his SL63 while he drove sweep behind the group. Just like on public track days, he measured the lap from "bridge to gantry" and came up with 9 minutes flat — a time that roughly equates to a full lap of 9:30.
"You guys were driving in a very sportive way," smiles Rehfeld. Take that, Mr. Jeremy Clarkson.
A Change of Plans
On the third day, the track would be opened up for "free practice," and the instructors would be on the sidelines. Would we remember our way around?
Time would tell — literally. GPS data-loggers are added to our cars, so after a couple lead-follow refresher laps the objective will be to record three laps in times as close to each other as possible. Perhaps this exercise will keep us from killing ourselves.
The infamous Nürburgring weather apparently has other ideas, though, as a persistent mist has kept the track wet and a curtain of fog screens the next corner from view. Rehfeld leads us out on the circuit anyway, saying, "This is the Nürburgring." But he makes sure we have our stability control set to full-on instead of the Sport setting we'd used yesterday.
Any Way the Wind Blows
We tiptoe around, feeling our way on the greasy surface. "Stay off all of the curbs," Rehfeld emphasizes. Suddenly the belt-sander exercise and the water ballet seem like good planning.
Finally I make two complete laps alone for the first time, but then flags start waving and we are directed to the pits. Someone has gone off.
Soon word spreads that one of the German locals has misjudged Flugplatz and hit a barrier, writing off his personal CLK DTM coupe. Only 100 examples of this $300,000 car were made. No more than 99 survive now.
This, too, is the Nürburgring.
Present Intense
So now the track is open once again and I'm out on the first of three back-to-back timed laps. It's all flowing together nicely. I'm pushing hard and the SL63 AMG is right there with me. It hardly feels like the Newport-Beach top-down profiler most are destined to become. Rehfeld's voice is echoing in my head as I storm from apex to apex: "170 km/h here. Straddle this curb. Center of the track here."
The roll bar pops up again on my first pass through Flugplatz and stays there. What I don't expect is a brake temperature warning that comes on midway through my last timed lap. "Only 26 or so corners left to go," I tell myself as I press on. The brakes squeal. They shudder. But they continue to respond.
And then I cross the imaginary GPS start/finish line and it's all over. I've got 11 miles of cool-down before the pit entrance. It takes 10 of those miles for the brakes to cool sufficiently (or what's left of them, anyway), and the same goes for my heart rate.
At dinner they finally hand out time sheets, an event that goes unnoticed by no one in the room. The Russians try to play it cool but they look as closely at their time sheets as anyone else. For what it's worth, I managed a full lap time of 8:48.93 in my 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG. Official Nürburgring times are something AMG doesn't publish for its cars, but a few private words indicate I'm just over 30 seconds off what this piece of high-horsepower rolling jewelry can do.
Now I'm all the more impressed by the golden laps claimed by some car manufacturers. Surely they use fresh brakes and tires, and their drivers certainly have more than a handful of solo laps under their belts. Roll cages and six-point harnesses doubtless make it possible to nudge the limit with more confidence, too. Even so, any lap time in the range of 8 minutes or certainly 7 seems incredibly fast from where I just sat.
It's All Doable
Think this type of experience is beyond your means? Guess again, because you can do this.
Yes, you need to be an AMG owner, but used AMGs are cheaper than you think. eBay has several low-miles four- or five-year-old C55 or E55 AMGs for sale right now for between $26,000 and $35,000. Round-trip flights to Germany can be had for less than a grand, and besides, you've wanted to go there and drive the autobahn ever since you stopped playing with Hot Wheels, right? There's a good stretch of autobahn between the Frankfurt airport and the Nürburgring.
What's more, the $3,040 price of the AMG Driving Academy, Nürburgring edition, seems downright reasonable next to the cost of other multiday driving schools, and that's before you factor in the lodging and meals that AMG includes in the price. It is true that you'll pay about $1,750 to rent something like a C63 AMG sedan for the training (a capable machine that we love), but that's probably less money than the market price to replace the AMG brakes and high-performance low-profile tires you'd use if the car were your own.
It's all doable. As long as you don't stuff your rented AMG into the guardrail at Flugplatz, you'll be fine. It'll be the fastest 9-minute lap of your life.
