5 Reasons Why I Hate The Nürburgring

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The Nürburgring - specifically the Nordschleife - is probably the most famous thirteen miles of tarmac on the planet. As a Top Gear nut, you'll already know the place just from racing games or watching Sabine Schmitz do that time in a van...

It's regarded as a spiritual home for all things motorsport with petrolheads making pilgrimages just so they can tick it off their bucket list, but to me it's just another anachronistic strip of road from an era best remembered rather than relived. Here are five reasons why I hate the Green Hell.

1. Length

One of the overriding features of the 'Ring is its length - the classic North Loop is 12.9 miles, while the full Nürburgring 24hr course including the GP circuit is 16.1 miles. Participants of the "touristfahren" open access days will find that they only drive 11.9 miles - the Bridge-to-Gantry lap - for safety reasons.

The length of the Nordscheife is supposed to lend part of the challenge and charm, but it just turns it into a memory test. Thanks, but I've sat through enough exams in my life as it is - you may as well say the London cabbie "Knowledge" is a great motorsport challenge. Besides which, it's not even that long a track by comparison to these...

Pescara Circuit - at 16 miles total - was as long as the entire Nürburgring facility and holds the record for being the longest track ever to hold an F1 championship event. Enzo Ferrari didn't send his cars because he was afraid of the place - all that separated the drivers from the Adriatic Sea along the main straight was a five hundred foot cliff.

And before it's pointed out that Pescara is now retired and you can't drive it, there's an even longer active race track that you can go drive on. The Snaefell Mountain Course is 37.3 miles long - three Nordschleifes - and is in the British Isles. It's been used to host the Isle of Man TT since 1907 and, like the Nordschleife, is largely comprised of public roads on which there is no speed limit.

2. Width

The Nordschleife was designed to have an average width of 8 metres, but this narrows to 6 metres in places.

You can't race with 8 metres' width of tarmac. If you watched the 24hr Nürburgring race recently you'll have noticed precisely this - all the passes took place either on the nice, wide GP track at between 10 and 15 metres wide or on the straight(er) bits of track at Dottinger Hohe or Schwedenkreuz. Unless you're Maxime Martin, you can forget about a racing pass anywhere else.

This sort of processional driving is utterly derided when it happens in F1 and the organisers come up with flappy wing and explodey tyre gimmicks to generate overtaking. GT cars are the most exciting form of motorsport when it comes to positional dicing, yet suddenly it's acceptable to have them drive around like a conga line because it's at the Nürburgring?

Not to mention safety. My car's 4.8 metres long and 1.8 metres wide. If you come round a corner and discover that I've run out of talent and am parked sideways in the middle of the road, you will not have enough space to get round me and we'll both die in a fiery explosion.

3. Cost

It's €26 a lap. Let's just put that in perspective... it's just about £2 a mile. The Dartford Crossing is £2 a mile and that goes on keeping the bridge up, the tunnels empty of Thames and eight lanes of motorway in full working order.

You can do an entire track day at Rockingham or Silverstone (proper tracks with full marshalling) for £130 for as many laps as you can fit in the time - and you get better each lap because it's easier to remember - at less than 50p a mile. Oh and they don't need two Channel crossings and an 8 hour round trip through France, Belgium and Germany to get to either.

Even at that ridiculous cost, the track management got into financial difficulties and put the whole place up for sale earlier this year.

4. The Lap Record

Manufacturers fall over themselves to get their sportiest, most powerful and most aggressive cars around the Nordschleife in the fastest time they possibly can, with Nissan, Porsche, Ferrari, Gumpert, Ford and Radical all pitching claims at the production car lap record.

This lends itself to all kinds of exciting (tedious) internet arguments about the legality and "production" nature of the cars involved - discounting the Radicals as not street legal, despite being driven around the track after being driven from the factory itself and so on and so forth.

Problem is, there isn't a lap record. Laps at the 'Ring occur in a number of layouts and conditions. They can be during tourist days (11.9 miles, bridge to gantry), test sessions (12.8 miles, ignoring T13) or full private days (12.9 miles) and timed by the manufacturer themselves or magazines. There is no specific set of conditions and there is no independent timing outside of actual race events.

This means that there isn't an official lap record for anything except race cars at full sanctioned events, however much anyone wants to argue otherwise. The relentless pursuit of irrelevant Nürburgring lap times and its effect on road cars has already been covered by a much better paid and well-known motoring waffler than I.

5. It's Not A Track

No, really, it's not. It was originally built as one, it has to be said - as a safer way of holding the Eifelrennen road rally - and it's often used as one during the VLN championship (and the Nürburgring 24 hours itself), but the reality is that the Nordschleife is just a one way public toll road.

There's exits on and off the road at multiple points coinciding with the villages around it - particularly Adenau - and during the days Joe Public is allowed to drive it there are actual speed limits for safety. You can drive it without a helmet - try doing that on a track day - and timing yourself is flat out banned.

For that matter you're allowed on with anything road legal but not anything not road legal - compared to any other actual track in the world where you're allowed to drive anything that passes a scrutineering check regardless of legality. So you can't take your track-day special for a run, but the SAGA lot can take a coach of crinklies round at 12mph.

That's not to say you can't enjoy the 'Ring for what it was - with Ron Howard's "Rush" coming up we should all take some time to remember what it is about the Green Hell that's made it infamous and immortalised it in motorsport legend.

But for what it is, as a challenge or experience, I'll take Silverstone, Snetterton, Donington Park or Rockingham any day of the week over this museum piece and stick to driving it in a game.