Crashing At The Fastest Part Of The Nordschleife Doesn't Look Like A Whole Lot Of Fun

An incident with a backmarker during the Nurburgring 24 Hours led to Audi driver Dries Vanthoor suffering this scary, high-speed accident at the fastest part of the circuit

Dan Thorn

13 May 2018

Vanthoor was threading his No.8 Audi R8 LMS through some very slow-moving traffic at the end of the 1.3-mile Dottinger Hohe straight when he lightly tagged another car and ran onto the grass. That’s enough of a brown trouser moment right there, but as a result he developed a puncture, causing him to spin and slam into the wall backwards. A less than ideal situation, to put it mildly.

The driver was OK but the car certainly wasn’t as the whole rear end was torn apart, unsurprisingly putting the crew out of the race.

Now, there’s no such thing as a nice place to crash in motorsport, but if there was, it certainly wouldn’t be at the fastest part of one of the most fearsome race tracks in the whole world.

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Thank you for that…

tbh, crashing doesnt seem fun at all

Depends on the crash. Some are more fun than others. High speed car crashes with an immovable object aren’t fun. Gently spinning because you tried a little too hard to set a faster lap, that’s not too scary…

Source: years of racing.

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his rear right tire got damaged after the impact,going over the grass was maybe the thing that finished it off,I wonder if the result would have been different if he didn’t go over the grass.

I’m sure he knows that, but sometimes you have to take a risk to get an advantage, causing stuff like this to happen.

By my experience on racing in the Ring in several racing games, it’s very scary to hit the kerbs, easy way to spin even with AWD

He got a puncture. Next time you could just read the article maybe?

No, gently brushing the curb is the only option. If you’re not going to hit that curb, I know 100,000 other drivers who will happily hit that curb for their chance to be a racing driver at 24 hr. Nürburgring.

What are you even talking about, this has absolutely nothing to do with driving over curbs. You can clearly see the right tire on the rear having a puncture after having contact with the Cayman and after driving off track, just before he starts to spin. The Contact with the Cayman wasn’t avoidable, because he otherwise would have crashed straight into the car standing. please don’t comment something with driver mistake, when you clearly have no idea…

That’s one less Audi R8 LMS in the world….

No it isn’t. It’ll be repaired for the next race. It isn’t a complete and utter write-off.

He definitely messed something up by going off track with almost the whole car before the crash…

I think his back tire got punctured when he hit the Cayman and then he understandingly lost control

All I can think of.. “You Spin me Right ‘Round”

this slow moving GT3 on the left side caught him to make such action. He didnt see him going down hill. He tried to avoid him in the last moment, heused very tight space beetween slow moving GT3 and this Cayman. Unfortently he touched with his rear right wheel the Cayman and he damaged suspension or cut tire.

This or this, it was crash anyway from such hard breaking, specialy with rear wheel/tire not properly straight.

No Yellow flag?

That was most likely so soon after that the flag couldn’t have been given yet

There was a white flag indicating a slower car ahead, but this is a 270kmh blind curve and the driver most likely didn’t notice the flags.

There absolutely is a nice place to crash in motorsports… It’s called the grassy no man’s land on the outside of Lime Rock. No big impact, nothing to shunt too badly, and lots of warning.