New intensive track courses make the Nürburgring easier to learn, but even seasoned professionals can still be caught out
If ever there was a reminder that you never really 'know' the Nürburgring, it came this afternoon when one of the instructors, with decades of experience and thousands of laps behind him of the Green Hell, managed to write-off his car when giving instruction.
And it wasn't even wet; it was warm, sunny and the track was as grippy as it had been all day. His four-wheel drive system couldn't even save the car (although the rollcage fortunately saved him).
This incident occurred when I'd 'learned' three of the six sections the Nürburgring had been broken up into, as part of the Scuderia 7 intensive training course I'm on, which makes up part of a challenge to see if the Nürburgring can be tackled after two days' intensive training.
After the morning session of day one, you could skip lunch in order to do some free laps of the 'Ring; I felt comfortable as I was in the sections I had already learned. But within two corners of drifting into parts of the unknown of the track, I'd nearly experienced just how close the barriers are to the edge of the track.
As a rookie I'd felt smug as I'd just managed to stay away from them, thinking that with training of the other three sections, I'd be able to string a hot lap together without too much drama. But hearing that a pro had just ploughed into the armco was enough to take you down a peg or two and give the track the respect it really deserves.
It's very easy to become overwhelmed by the circuit if you take it in its entirety. Breaking it down into sections is really the only way of beginning to understand it in such a short space of time. The theory of Scuderia 7 means you repeatedly tackle the same section of track for 75 minutes, before moving onto the next.
After the day's training of the six sections, if you asked me to describe a whole lap I would not be able to do so. But I'd come close at being able to tell you how the individual sections start to become familiar, as your own personal reference points string together to make the 21km lap - the technical start, the fast middle and the hold-on-for-dear-life end.
Tomorrow comes the real test: can a whole lap be strung together? And not just any lap, one that's both quick and smooth? I got a sneak preview into how I might get on with an hour's worth of free running at the end of the day.
But the Nürburgring's micro-climate soon intervened: it had been warm, sunny and grippy all day, but come the chance to put what you'd learned into action, the heavens opened on the start and end sections of the lap. At which point, I might as well have learned to drive around Spa in Belgium than the Nürburgring, as the feel of the track alters so dramatically - from corner to corner even, let alone a whole lap - then the training may well have started again.
Still, there was time for a morale boosting pass or two: I managed to pick off first a Porsche 911 Turbo and then a 911 GT3 RS in the wet in my Corsa VXR, before the red flags came out 10 minutes before the end of the session as it was just too wet.
Today I've discovered it's possible to 'learn' the 'Ring in a day, but as the instructor proved you can never master it. So whatever the piece of paper says I'm given at the end of tomorrow, after we've been assessed for how we can string a whole lap together, even then I know it may well count for nothing on another day.