CAR’s resident M3 expert Ben Barry enters a drift competition at the Nurburgring
The choice was easy: stay at home and take the weekend easy; or leave work on Friday for a 1000-mile round trip to the Nurburgring. Being something of a sucker for punishment, I chose the latter. As did, impressively, my wife Ondine, knowing full well she’d have to endure the buzzy charms of my track-prepped E36 BMW M3.
The plan was to enter the Internationale Drift Championship (IDC) on the Saturday at the GP circuit, before switching to the Nordschleife on Sunday for some hot laps. I’ve done a number of drift events over the past two years, and it’s helped hugely in my understanding of car control – and in bagging action shots for the magazine. I figured the competition would let me polish my skills, while the ’Ring would put them to the ultimate test. That was the plan, anyway.
After some last minute tweaks – I replaced the tired old clutch with an uprated AP Racing item and refreshed the Uniroyal RainSport rubber – the M3 was ready to add to its impressive 207,000-mile tally.
Leaving work on Friday, we just made the 7.30pm P&O crossing and arrived in Calais 90 minutes later. There followed a mind-numbing, highly scary ride to Lille in the streaming wet along some of the bumpiest, most poorly marked roads I’ve ever encountered. Barely rested, a 5.00am start and three more hours or so in the wet saw us to the Nurburgring.
This was the last round of the IDC, an event promoted in conjunction with German magazine Sport Auto. Run over the sequence of corners that loop around the Mercedes arena (we started from where Hamilton and Button slid off so spectacularly the weekend previously), the idea was to stay as sideways as possible for the duration while a panel of judges scored drivers out of 100. The top 16 of the 45 entrants would go on to battle it out side-by-side in pairs to decide the winner.
In the event I managed a respectable 72 points, but the high level of competition saw me out of the running in 25th place – just seven more points would have seen me qualify. At least the sun had come out and we spent the evening in Aachen, marvelling at the number of British-registered GT3 RS 911s that roamed the streets – good to see people with the cahoonies, and the money, to use these machines as Porsche intended.
Unfortunately, the downpours continued come Sunday morning and I tiptoed round a nearly deserted Nordschleife, the M3 constantly on the brink of understeer and oversteer, the kerbing looking perilously slippy and the Armco always threatening to intervene – not nice when you’ve got to drive home afterwards. Still, we saw 130mph on the finish straight, and 100mph clocked up a few times along the way – reasonably quick but way off the eight-minute times a well-driven M3 should record. But mastering the ’Ring is more about learning the track than anything, so my exploits weren’t entirely in vain and I hope to return sometime soon. If you’re planning a trip, a great place to start is nurburgring.org.uk.