2018 Nürburgring Trip

For this year’s Nurburgring trip we had a number of cars we wanted to test; our brand new 2018 Litchfield Track Edition GT-R and our long term LM1 RS track car, which featured our billet 4.6 litre engine ready for cooling and lubrication checks.  We also treated this car with a full colour change to Nissan Storm Grey with a unique matt/pearl PPS finish courtesy of our in-house bodyshop.  Along for the ride was our brand new Alpine A110, which we had just taken delivery of and were looking forward to get to know. Lastly Anthony’s extreme LM1 RS track car was just finished in time to test its considerable changes and upgrades since last years trip. 

So in late August 2018 we departed en masse from our UK base in Tewkesbury.  Whilst being a lot of fun, these trips serve as an excellent platform from which to better understand what we offer and which direction to head next.  

The damp early morning start didn’t reduce our excitement of what was about to come at the other end of the 520 mile journey. The convoy made for a great sight as it crossed the UK from Tewkesbury to Folkstone, arriving mid morning for a well deserved break before boarding the Eurotunnel.  The Alpine headed up the group and followed a stunning Ferrari Testarossa on to the train.  Now our team could relax for 30mins before the next leg through France

Doing our bit for the Nissan Renault Group!

Just some of our 2018 Nurburgring team

For anyone travelling to the ‘Ring we’d strongly recommend booking the high vehicle train, as it gives much greater space onboard.  We arrived on the continent for early afternoon, the drive within Europe from Calais to the ‘Ring is around 5 hours, but was made slightly more difficult by the fact that the Formula 1 circus had descended on Spa Francorchamps, just 60 miles off our proposed route.  This 5 hour journey turned into 7!  

 
After a total 14 hours and 3 fuels stops later, we arrive at our Destination, the famous Nurburgring.

Due to the unique nature of the track and its locality to our base for the week, its perfect for testing and R&D purposes as it allows us to make small changes, instantly test them in a track environment, and be back into the workshop within 5 minutes.   

After a long day in the saddle we finally arrived in Nurburg where we were joined by our 2018 Porsche Carrera T, which had been on a driving tour around France and Switzerland. This 991.2 had seen a large number of upgrades that we looked forward to signing off on Track.   Our home for the next 5 days would be Milltek Sports Development Centre which is ideally situated less than a mile from the Nordschleife entrance.

With everyone here and the trucks unloaded we headed off for a traditional team dinner at the Pistenklause Restaurant.  For those who don’t know The Pistenklause is the ‘must-visit’ restaurant for any ‘Ring trip It comes highly recommended, serves great steak on a stone, and is littered with all manner of motorsport items from signed photographs of drivers and cars, to posters, trophies, front wings and stickers from race teams – it’s the perfect base for debriefing and cocktails!

From there it was off for a well deserved sleep, whilst Anthony, Iain and our photographer Chris Wallbank took snaps of the Ant’s LM1 RS.

We’ll put separate blog posts together for each of the cars as we learnt a huge amount, but as convoys and day trips go, this one was pretty special.