We want to hear your road trip horror stories! (Inspired by the Nurburgring trip that made me despise the Audi RS7)

We want to hear your road trip horror stories! Whether it’s break downs, traffic, illness… whatever caused you to wish you’d never set off on your journey, we want to hear it! Hit the comments and we’ll round up the best. To inspire you, here’s a story I never thought I’d tell. It happened last year, and was supposed to form part of a feature about road tripping to the Nurburgring, but I was so thoroughly fed up when I returned that I never wrote it up and tried to forget it happened. So, in the spirit of sharing, here goes!

I get to do some pretty cool things in this job, and when Audi offered me the chance to drive an RS7 to the Nurburgring to watch the six hour World Endurance Championship race I was obviously pretty excited. I’d driven an RS6 shortly before that and absolutely adored it, so as I dropped behind the wheel to set off on the 400-mile journey to motorsport Mecca, with four countries and an ocean between me and my destination, I was in good spirits.

The first problem occurred when I got to the ferry terminal late due to some crazy traffic, and had to wait an extra hour to get on board a later boat. No biggie, I thought. Once in France it was all plain sailing, but then I hit Belgium, and tried to make my way around Brussels. My carefully laid plan to avoid the city during rush hour was now screwed thanks to my little ferry mishap, so I found myself stationary on Brussels’ ring road getting more and more fed up. Then the sat nav popped up saying there was traffic on my route, and asked if I’d like a diversion around it. Hell yeah, I would! So with my new route in place I skipped off the highway… and into the town centre. Yep, the Audi took me out of the frying pan and into the fire, so I spent the next three hours in stop start traffic trying to get out of the gridlocked city.

Speaking of stop start, the RS7’s stop start tech pushed me to boiling point until I dived into the menus to figure out how to turn it off. You see, in most cars the engine stops when you have your foot on the brake and are stationary, then starts again as soon as you lift off the brake. Same’s true of the Audi, but for some reason it also applies the handbrake when the engine turns off, and is slow to release it, so you lift off the brake, push the accelerator and nothing happens, so you push a bit harder and then the handbrake suddenly releases, catapulting you forward. It means you’re sat in a near-£100k car with everyone watching you kangaroo about. Not a cool look.

With Brussels finally behind me, I started to make some progress. As my destination grew ever closer, the fuel gauge was dropping closer and closer to empty, but I’d managed to keep the range above the remaining mileage, so my plan was to get near to the Nurburgring before filling up to avoid expensive highway fuel prices. Unfortunately, the Nurburgring is in the middle of nowhere, and none of the rural petrol stations were open late (yeah, it was past bed time by the time I even got close to the circuit), which left me on the orange light in a 550bhp car cruising through the Eifel forest well below the speed limit. Not cool and super stressful!

Once I finally made it to the circuit, my spirits were briefly lifted by the famous red Nurburgring sign, but that was short lived. I was staying in the hotel that’s attached to the circuit, but the sat nav was saying I’d already arrived, so I asked a car park attendant how to get to the hotel. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak very good English (better than my German, though), but from what I could gather he was saying I couldn’t park at the hotel and that I had to speak to some other guys. Well, I was more than annoyed as I’d been told I had parking, so I approached a group of other attendants further down the road. Again, none spoke English, so I was left standing in a field at midnight, unwittingly 100 yards from my destination, waiting for someone to help me. Eventually a bloke turns up and tries to make me give him €20 to park in his field. I politely declined and as Friday turned to Saturday I went crawling along looking for the hotel. I finally found it just next to where I’d been gormlessly standing for 15 minutes before, and a very polite hotel employee ushered me into the car park beside a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and Koenigsegg One:1. I was too exhausted to take a picture, and the latter was gone by morning, sorry!

Despite being shattered from what was ultimately a 12 hour journey (should’ve taken eight hours, tops) I had an utterly fantastic weekend watching the racing and mucking about on the Nordschleife with Boosted Boris. But the road trip from hell wasn’t finished with me yet.

The journey home was fairly uneventful, though the sports seats were giving me chronic back ache. I even managed to avoid Brussels city centre, and was treated to an incredible electrical storm as I left Belgium.

As I arrived at Calais, the border guard clocked me in and sent me on my merry way with a smile and a quick “by the way, the French ferry drivers are striking, no ships have left all night.” My heart sank, and as I eventually found where I was supposed to be going I joined a long queue of fed up holidaymakers in a torrential downpour. I also discovered that night that the RS7 does not make a comfortable bed.

After about 10 hours in the claustrophobic Audi, we were finally let onto a ferry as daylight broke, and a few hours later I parked the RS7 up outside my flat, stumbled into my flat and collapsed into bed. The whole experience gave me an utter hatred of the RS7, and whenever I see one I can’t help but recoil in disgust. It looks great and goes like stink, but I have too many bad memories…