A Different Strata of Sport

The track’s been widened, the runoffs have stretched out over the years, and we all agreed a long time ago that sending Formula 1 cars into the woods at full speed wasn’t a good part of a healthy diet. Still, only an idiot would call the Nürburgring neutered—it still obliterates egos in 2018, easy as ever. It is the ultimate circuit built for racing cars. Few others hold more provenance, and only the Isle of Man Mountain Course can call itself more dangerous. Loss of life is never to be celebrated, but who can deny the adrenal allure of dangerous motorsport?

I’ve driven the North Loop, the “real thing,” the Nordschleife, a handful of times over a handful of visits to the Eifel Mountains in western Germany, but those experiences can all be summed up by bearing hard to the right as a daisy chain of Porsche GT3s fart-shift their way past my best efforts at momentum driving whatever car I’ve managed to get my hands on.