German Car Zone

Driving in the Green Hell

It's graduation day at the AMG Driving Academy at the infamous Nürburgring Nordschleife, and the speedometer needle in my 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG has just swung past 200 kilometers per hour.
As the car hurtles toward yet another hellaciously fast corner with an incomprehensible German name, I'm a bit too busy right now to convert metric into real units, but my spider-sense tells me it's bleeding fast for a car with no roll cage and garden-variety three-point seatbelts.
Schwedenkreuz, I think the next corner is called, and if my memory of the last three days at the Nürburgring with AMG is correct, it leads into Aremberg, a 3rd-gear right-hander that will spit me out under the Yokohama bridge. Beyond that are a series of nameless flat-out kinks as the road plunges into another 200-km/h compression, followed by a climbing braking zone that feeds into the tight, high-curbed esses at Adenauer-Forst.
Hey, I might actually be getting the hang of this place.
Welcome to Germany; Now Haul Ass
Just over 48 hours earlier I'd been sitting in a classroom with some 54 other students from all over the world, AMG owners all. Swedes, French, Spaniards, Italians, some Austrians and, outnumbering them all, a contingent of German locals. A surprisingly large group hailed from China. And then there were the Russians — chain-smokers to a man, these hardened, surly comrades with close-cropped hair looked like cosmonauts.
Full article: edmunds

Driving in the Green Hell


It's graduation day at the AMG Driving Academy at the infamous Nürburgring Nordschleife, and the speedometer needle in my 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG has just swung past 200 kilometers per hour.

As the car hurtles toward yet another hellaciously fast corner with an incomprehensible German name, I'm a bit too busy right now to convert metric into real units, but my spider-sense tells me it's bleeding fast for a car with no roll cage and garden-variety three-point seatbelts.

Schwedenkreuz, I think the next corner is called, and if my memory of the last three days at the Nürburgring with AMG is correct, it leads into Aremberg, a 3rd-gear right-hander that will spit me out under the Yokohama bridge. Beyond that are a series of nameless flat-out kinks as the road plunges into another 200-km/h compression, followed by a climbing braking zone that feeds into the tight, high-curbed esses at Adenauer-Forst.

Hey, I might actually be getting the hang of this place.

Welcome to Germany; Now Haul Ass

Just over 48 hours earlier I'd been sitting in a classroom with some 54 other students from all over the world, AMG owners all. Swedes, French, Spaniards, Italians, some Austrians and, outnumbering them all, a contingent of German locals. A surprisingly large group hailed from China. And then there were the Russians — chain-smokers to a man, these hardened, surly comrades with close-cropped hair looked like cosmonauts.

We'd all come to attend the AMG Driving Academy's event at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, the famed 12.9-mile, 73-turn racetrack where both cars and drivers have been measured since 1927. Formula 1 champion Jackie Stewart called it the "Green Hell" back in the 1960s because of the way the road twisted through the forest, and the track still seems as daunting and dangerous as it did then.

AMG, the high-performance division of Mercedes-Benz, calls this three-day event, "Pro Training." Participants must have previously attended at least one entry-level course in the AMG Driving Academy and then they fork over $3,040 in fees for the school, meals and lodging.

If you like, you can drive your own Mercedes-Benz AMG, and the valets at the Dorint Hotel overlooking the last corner of the Nürburgring grand prix circuit were kept busy with C55 and C63 sedans, some CLK55 and CLK63 coupes, one or two E55 wagons, a handful of SLK55 roadsters and a couple of be-winged CLK DTM coupes. Arrive-and-drive students like us can rent an AMG for another $1,600 to $2,400. One set of fresh tires and brakes are included in the price; insurance in case you auger your mount into the ever-present Armco barriers is not.

I try hard not to think about the $156,745 price tag of my hired ride, a 518-horsepower 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG roadster.


Full Article: AMG Driving Academy: Learning the Nurburgring in a 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG


M

Bartek was first - merged your threads!

Did anyone mention the Sl63's time around the ring??