Germany's old Nurburgring has become a run worthy of Mad Max and the Cresta run, a Fight Club for cars, finds Nick Hall
Driving nuts have their very own Cresta run, their personal "wall of death". It's called the Nordschleife, the old Nurburgring in Germany. And I experienced that, at the wheel of a Porsche 911 Turbo.
Safety-conscious Scot Jackie Stewart dubbed the Nurburgring "The Green Hell" before its long tenure as an F1 circuit came to an abrupt end in 1976, when Niki Lauda's career ended in flames. The Grand Prix boys requested a new circuit, the Southern Loop, but it's a pale-pink imitation of the neighbouring track.
Club racing still comes, even at night during the annual 24-hour spectacular. But after the world's best drivers declared the circuit simply too dangerous to drive on, it also seemed rational to reclassify this 14-mile sliver of winding tarmac as a public toll road to nowhere and open all 157 corners on set days of the month. Welcome to the Cresta Run, with wheels.
Bikes, cars, vans, trucks, ambulances and tour buses all take to the circuit at the same time, a recipe for disaster in anyone's books, and it costs €14 a lap or €700 for an entire year's pass.
An electronic car park gate leads on to this, the world's craziest road. There are no safety briefings, no squadron of marshals on every bend and precious few rules.
This is a public road and some laws apply, there is even a speed limit at Breidscheid. Legally, the Nordschleife is a minefield. The police will leave you alone if your car is legal and you don't crash. If you do, you'll have problems, including a bill for the Armco, recovery truck, ambulance, whatever it takes.
Just one slow tour tightened pretty much every sphincter. Rollercoaster altitude changes, vicious cambers and sharp, blind turns all combine with a track that is only 7-ft wide.
Less than a metre of grass separates the track from the battle-scarred Armco that whistles past on either side for much of the track. Behind the barrier is a wall of trees that creates the tunnel effect and never reveals where the track is truly going. The Cresta Run comparisons don't end at the death toll.
There are even two banked bobsleigh-style switchback bends, of which the first Karussell is the most famous. Ride it right and the car pops out of the corner perfectly aligned for the following bend, but carry too much speed in or take the wrong line and the car can fire off the bank and into the air - or the double-decker bus full of Nordschleife tourists.
With roughly 11 corners in every mile, there is no chance to relax or to learn the circuit and the 'Ring has a habit of feinting left before carving right, or vice-versa, usually with an adverse camber thrown.
German trailer trash gathers in the public areas to drink beer, play heavy-metal music and wait for the bloodshed. They cheered the ambulance on its way to another casualty in the five-track closures we endured on a dry day. Realising you have willingly entered a bloodsport is a chilling moment indeed.
And it happens. Experienced hands reckon on a fatality every four weeks, and the flowers in various states of decay pegged to the fence provide the most reliable guide. Most, predictably, are bikers.
So with all this weighing heavily on my mind, plus the keys to €130,000 of Porsche's property in my possession, my first laps were about as wild as an anaesthetised house cat. I even suffered the indignity of watching a Renault Laguna fly round the outside of my bright yellow battlewagon that was the last word in subtlety. Only later did I learn Sabine Schmidt, all round 'Ring legend, was at the wheel. But the pace slowly came up as I learned isolated sequences of bends after 12 tours, more than 160 miles of mayhem, in two-lap stints to avoid cooking the car and my brain.
These included the four-corner combination at Hatzenbach that pushed the limits of even the Porsche's four-wheel drive system, seemingly turning into a cliff face at Bergwerk, the fiercely quick Pflanzgarten, the dip at Flugplatz that translate literally as "Flying Place", and the Karussell adrenaline rush.
The two banked corners and the fast back section through the Adenau Forest are perhaps the Ring's greatest challenges, but there are few standout corners. They're all difficult and this place is all about finding a rhythm and a path through the mayhem.
There's absolutely no reason to do it other than the challenge: this is a testosterone-dripping Fight Club for cars, the automotive summit of K2, and a spiritual experience in its own right.
When the contours are engraved in my mind like the letters in a headstone, that's when the 'Ring will really open up. She may even yield one of those sub-eight-minute lap times bandied about by the tight-knit track-day crew. Like the thousands that have scrawled their laptime on the track in paint, making for a disconcerting driving surface.
I'll be back, and the hit is unlikely to ever wear off. And if it does, then there's always the Cresta Run.