Our Honeymoon, Part 2

Read Part 1 here.

When you turn off the motorway to head up the mountains through Adenau, the road gets a little twisty – well really, a lot twisty! It seems to be an endless series of hairpin bends joined by long sloping curves. There’s no way to rush on this road – not unless you want to go tumbling down the mountainside! Joining a queue of cars that was obviously headed for the Nordschleife, we watched anxiously as the minutes ticked upwards to 13:30. Arriving at a corner that I suddenly recognised from the previous year, I yelled for George to turn right – there, ahead – wasn’t that the entrance to the Nordschleife?

It was, but our way was blocked! A German police officer stood in front of us with his palm held up, and two crashed cars on the other side of the road. We rolled up to him, and I dropped my window (advantage of driving a rightie on the continent, the passenger side is the one at all the tool booths and the one the officer headed for) and prayed for him to speak some English or French – my German has always been abysmal.

He did speak English! He asked us to wait as there was a queue of cars waiting to descend the road, but I turned my best puppy-dog eyes on him and explained that we were late for our BMW Ring Taxi. He was a lovely guy and let us through after a few cars came past. We flew on up to the roundabout and I spotted the BMW pavilion on the left hand side of the road. “Go left” I cried, and for a split second George nearly took that literally, before realising that driving the wrong way around the roundabout towards a Ferrari would be a bad idea! He quickly recovered and we were there – on the dot of 13:30!

I leaped out of the car and sprinted towards the pavilion clutching our booking sheet. I found one of the staff and began apologising profusely, stressing that we had driven from Ireland for this and had met lots of bad traffic on our way – but there was nothing to worry about. The staff were wonderful and quickly registered us while George parked the car.

We had a small wait and then the BMW M5 pulled up outside the pavilion and it was indicated to us that it was our turn, much to the dismay of several other people who had been waiting longer (and who had obviously turned up early, unlike us!). George jumped in the front and I in the back. Our driver started talking – we later worked out that he hit about 5 different languages in the first 30 seconds, before discovering that we spoke English. I started peppering him with questions, while George was just basking in the shinyness of the interior of the front.

It turned out that our driver was the chassis tuning engineer for all of the M-series BMW’s, and had been responsible for the car we were currently in as well. He had driven over 3000 laps of the Nordschleife circuit and was hoping to bring us around the 12.9 miles of twisty-turny circuit in around 9 minutes (he can manage much closer to 8 minutes when he is in the car alone). As the full main straight cannot be driven on open-track days due to the modern exit/entrance there, these laps are usually timed “bridge to gantry”, which is only 11.8 miles and thus about 30 seconds shorter than a full lap.

We pulled out onto the main straight and we were off! The track is fully open on these days to cars and motorbikes, each paying €11 per lap for the privilege. We immediately roared up to well over 100 mph as the driver politely asked us to inform him if we were feeling queasy at any point during the ride. We began to pass cars and bikes, quicker and quicker it seemed – up to three and four abreast at times, yet nothing passed us, we were the quickest on the track!

The two Ring-Taxis currently in service are completely stock BMW M5 sedans, each sporting a bright white paint job with huge logos emblazoned on the doors. Each M5 receives new tires every two days, or after about 40 laps. The brakes last slightly longer; new pads are required only every three to four days. The 18.5-gallon (70 litre) fuel tank is the biggest culprit. It needs filling up after as few as six or seven laps – which works out at roughly 5 mpg!

The experience is hard to describe – think of the most fun roller-coaster that you have been on, and then extend that experience out to nine minutes in length, all while sitting on executive leather seats in a comfortable car, held in with nothing more than a normal seat-belt. You twist and turn through the corners, with your driver flicking out the back end at high speed “just for fun”. No amount of driving the circuit on any games console can prepare you for the up and downs of this circuit that has been nick-named Grune Holle (Green Hell) which is widely considered the toughest and most demanding purpose-built race track in the world.

Laps in the BMW Ring Taxi don’t come cheap at €180, but three people can be fitted into the car and split the fare – but it’s certainly one of the most fun things that can be done with that money!

When we pulled back into the pits our hearts were racing and it took a moment to get our legs back to normal. After posing for some photos with the car (and driver), we decided it was a good idea to grab something to eat before continuing on. At this point we returned to the car, and George began looking around – these were some high-powered cars parked around our Type-R – oh God, were we in the pits for the track?

I watched George’s face carefully, he had previously expressed an interest in driving around the circuit himself, but I’d hoped that a lap in the Ring-Taxi would cure him of that; after all we still had three weeks to go! I quickly took a look around and realised that we could drive back out onto the main road, phew – we wouldn’t have to go around the track again!