DRIVER'S SEAT
“WELCOME TO THE NORDSCHLEIFE for the first time drivers,” Ricardo Sanchez calls out over the radio as we make our way through the famous main gate and onto the most fearsome and famous racetrack in the known automotive universe. If you’re reading this magazine — and you are — the circuit in rural Germany needs no introduction. Passing through the main gate, palms sweaty on the wheel of a showroom-fresh BMW M4 Competition — the rear-wheel- drive model, which sadly isn’t available in Canada — I can’t help but notice a neon orange ambulance parked on the right and a flatbed recovery truck on the left. “Just follow me,” says Sanchez, who will be my guide to the 20-kilometre- long track for the duration of the BMW M Nordschleife Driving Experience. It’s a two-day course that costs €4,590 and includes two nights in a hotel at the track, meals, instruction, and the use of an M4 Competition. Drivers have come from all over the world for this. Our group of roughly 70 includes participants from Sweden, Japan, Canada, the U.S., Switzerland, Hungary and elsewhere. Some have done this event with BMW dozens of times. For others — like me — it’s their first time driving the track, a true bucket-list experience. “This is Tiergarten, we take it at 240 km/h,” Sanchez says as calmly as if he were narrating a how-to guide for knitting. Tiergarten is the first corner after the main straight, where our M4s will be hitting their 255 km/h limiters. There’s a big high- speed compression with deep scars in the pavement where cars have bottomed out, followed by a series of increasingly tight corners that serve as a braking zone where drivers must bring the car back down to a sane speed without losing control. Easier said than done. Luckily, for this first lap, Sanchez is taking it slowly, talking us through exactly how to position the car and keep all four wheels off the grass. If the name Ricardo Sanchez sounds familiar, it’s because he won the Gran
Turismo Academy competition the year after the inaugural winner, Jann Mardenborough. Jann got a Hollywood biopic, but Sanchez has had an equally impressive racing career. More important right now, as we begin to navigate the 73 turns of this impossibly complex circuit, is that Sanchez is patient, clear, and reassuringly calm — even as we start to pick up the pace. The morning is spent learning the track section by section, something that’s only possible because BMW has rented the entire Nordschleife. Sanchez takes us through a half-dozen corners, then we turn around, go back, and run them again. Each run gets a little quicker, as our fearless teacher narrates the turn-in and braking points and any landmarks or bumps to watch for. “After the crest, touch the brake, off the brake, back to the power to put some weight on the rear — and now we brake hard, brake hard, behind me, behind me, go in, go in, go in,” he calls out over a double crest into the treacherous blind left at Schwedenkreuz. Most of the eight drivers in our little group are still learning whether the corners go left or right at this point, but by our
"Drivers have come from all over the world for this. Our group of roughly 70 includes participants from Sweden, Japan, Canada, the U.S.,
Switzerland, Hungary and elsewhere."
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