Honda Fugel at the 2007 24 Hours of the Nurburgring
Review from last year’s event: Team Honda Fugel at the 2007 24 Hours of the Nurburgring!
S2000 at the 2008 24 Hours of the Nurburgring
One of 7 S2000s entered in this year’s race! 7 of 27 Hondas entered in this event, the third highest represented brand.
#96 Honda S2000: Heinz Schmersal, Mike Stursberg
2008-05-23 (N
24 hour endurance race at The Nurburgring this weekend
The 36th annual “ADAC Zurich 24h-Rennen” 24-hour endurance race at the Nurburgring runs this weekend.
230 “showroom stock” (mostly) type entrants, 800 drivers, and an astounding number of fans in attendance. If you’re not there in person (and this is one of the premier events in the world that you must attend at least once in your lifetime), you can at least watch on the live webcam on via several enthusiast sites and blogs.
Here’s the official site, in English: http://adac.24h-rennen.de/en.html
Keep an eye on this site for live video streaming: http://adac.24h-rennen.de/en/live/streaming.html
Live webcam (hit refresh to get the latest picture) http://www.nuerburgring.de/fileadmin/webcam/webcam.jpg :
Bridge to Gantry dot com – Nurburgring news!
Another site that is new to me – and a great on it is. Covers the Nurburgring from the perspective of a track rat. The author obviously has nothing better to do than to hang out on the Nurburgring… drive it… and take spy shots of manufacturer prototypes circling it. Now that’s a great life!
Camaro at Nurburgring with 4-wheel 4-piston Brembos
Brenda Priddy has captured the upcoming Camaro at the Nurburgring. Lots of details shown. Note the important differences here between the Camaro and Mustang:
- GM routinely tests at the Nurburgring. Ford of North America never does. Jaguar tests there (oops, that’s not Ford anymore). Ford of Europe’s most recent test there was the upcoming 350-horsepower Focus RS. Does Ford test anywhere significant? Will an off-the-lot non-R Mustang run hard on a hot race track without blowing it’s coolant all over the place? Unlikely. Will a Camaro? Yes – it’s being done at the Nurburgring right now.
- Does the Mustang use 4-wheel Brembo brakes? No. The Camaro and Challenger both have them as options – 4-piston type at all 4 corners. The cancelled Mustang Cobra had 4-wheel Brembos, all with 4-pistons, and an IRS as well – but all that was cancelled. Here’s the picture of the rear Brembos that were teamed with the IRS: http://www.drivingenthusiast.net/sec-my-automobilia/sec-imho/2005-03-20_irs-2007-svt-bs/index.htm
- Note the low-profile 20″ wheels on the Camaro. Sure, a Saleen and a Shelby offer those, but not with this kind of suspension travel. The Mustang wasn’t designed for these from the start. This is where I differ from my script: the Camaro is a *large* car, and this kind of unsprung weight isn’t good.
Will the Camaro ever make a good track car? It’s a large car, built on a shared and very large platform, and it inherently has a lot of weight (and momentum). The Brembo brakes are a great thing to see, but apparently 2-piece rotors are not offered and those would be the first part you’d want to replace. No doubt there wil be a lot of pad choicers for the Brembos – that’s good. From what we’ve seen of the seats, they’re even worse than those of the Corvette – if that’s even possible. So it’s debatable. But at least it won’t overheat and embarrass itself if its driver decides to drive it hard, to the maximum.
Continue in the link in the title above to the Camaro5 site and lots more pictures and discussion.
And stay tuned to the enthusiast web sites for the next few weeks… hopefully we will get a lap time from the Nurburgring.
MazdaSpeed3 at the Nurburgring
Motor Authority reports that a Mazda test of it’s European version of the MazdaSpeed3 did the Nurburgring in January in 8 minutes 39.66 seconds.
2007 Nurburgring 24h endurance race: live streaming
The 24 hours of the Nurburgring is being held in rain and fog. You can watch the race with live streaming video here: http://adac.24h-rennen.de/en/live/streaming.html
Aston Martin is leading with the DBRS9 – shown here passing one of several S2000s that are entered.
My SHO never did the Nurburgring :-(
But this one did, and thanks to very creative use of a custom editor for Gran Turismo 4 (courtesy of HunterVF via YouTube) we get to find out what it would be like.
This is a really nice peice of work. If you want to quibble on the details… the V-8 SHO wouldn’t actually sound like this unless you spun it up to 9000 RPM (and hopefully the cams are welded!), and of course the tranny that is envisioned here is about 10,000% better than the terrible production 4-speed auto. So I like it!
Production SHOs are rarely seen on tracks. My ’97 SHO did do Texas World Speedway – just once. My new ’99 Cobra hadn’t been delivered by Ford to my dealer yet (it was the first one in Central Texas, and we believe the entire state – and Ford delayed production for several months while some – but not all – of the bugs were worked out). So our daily driver SHO was all there was to drive (it’s lease would run out a month later) when I had the opportunity (I was an instructor in the LSRPCA Porsche club before they got too snotty to put up with) I took it.
Clearly the SHO wasn’t the worlds greatest track car, but it did stay unruffled.
What’s the ultimate SHO track car? About ten years ago, I was lucky to have several laps as a passenger at Bondurant in their early V-6 SHO instructor car. With a opened-up engine, unrestricted exhaust, a Quaife limited slip diff, a fuel cell, and of course a great driver - the difference was astounding and the tremendous flexibility inherent in the SHO V-6 really came out. I wonder whatever happened to those cars… and I wonder what it would be like having one now for fun. It’d be easy to duplicate it. Anybody out there have a limited slip diff in their Gen 1/2 SHO?
More Information
More information on DrivingEnthusiast.net:
- SHO section: http://www.drivingenthusiast.net/sec-ford/special-report-sho/index.html
- SHO blog: http://www.drivingenthusiast.net/sec-blog/?cat=519
- SHO blog RSS feed: http://www.drivingenthusiast.net/sec-blog/?feed=rss2&cat=519
AutoExpress: Nissan GT-R @ Nurburgring in 7:15
AutoExpress reports that engineering test cars are doing 7 minutes 15 second laps on average at the Nurburgring. This is an extremely good number and shows that great lap times are not about shear raw numbers HP – the car only makes (according to reports) 450 HP. Instead, it’s all about traction, torque management, and driving dynamics. This is going to be one great car!
Also note the spy shot of the dashboard!
Continue at link: www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/autoexpressnews/208327/nissan_gtr.html
BMW’s own Nurburgring video
I’ve said it many times before: a car is not worth if it hasn’t been developed and tested at the Nurburgring. The best cars have all posted development time here – the most difficult track in the world.