As we approach the end of the year, we’re looking back at some of the biggest races of 2024 with a travel diary series from DSC’s Australian correspondent Michael Zalavari.
Missed out on Part 1? Catch up HERE
Appearing like a mirage through the cloud, I was entirely unprepared for the ‘Ring Boulevard’s imposing presence before it was just there. There was no build-up, no warning, just an all-of-a-sudden shocking realisation that I’m here. “Green Hell”, right in front of my eyes.
*****
My adventure to the Nurburgring 24 Hours had started the night before, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. A TGV from Paris into Lille for the night, where DSC deputy editor Stephen Kilbey would be picking me up from the carpark of a shopping complex the following afternoon.
I had been on the road for two weeks at this point, being a tourist in the Netherlands and Paris, but soon my trip would turn to business, with the first of three absolutely mega events to report on.
A restless night turned into an even more restless Wednesday morning, as I watched the tracker of SK’s live location as it crossed the channel and navigated down from Calais.
The purple Porsche Macan GTS finally arrived, signalling the official start of my motorsport reporting duties, and away we went with five more hours to get to the Nürburgring.
I hadn’t seen Stephen since the 2020 Bathurst 12 Hour – my second-ever event on-site for DSC – and there was plenty for us to catch up on over the five-hour drive!
The journey was over in a flash though, in large part due to the Macan GTS’s smooth ride, spacious interior, comfortable seats and punch through backroads. It really is a versatile piece of machinery and the run to the ‘Ring demonstrated its capabilities beautifully.
In the midst of catching up and settling in, the surroundings changed from the motorways of Northern France to the lush and almost fairytale-like setting of Western Germany.
I’m sure it’s nothing new to any European native, but to me, the dense, lush forests that surround Nürburg, and the incredible roads that cut their way through them, felt like something straight out of a video game, as Stephen continued along utterly indifferent to my bewilderment.
And before I was ready, we were there – cruising past the iconic red Nürburgring lettering on the massive silver building on the boulevard.
As we had arrived late in the afternoon, the credentials office was already closed for the day, so the task was easy – check in, grab a bite to eat, and plan for the weekend ahead. And, I got a very early taste of the ‘Ring itself.
With (huge) thanks to Porsche, we were booked into a room in The Dorint – the hotel that sits on the outside of the pit straight at the Nürburgring. From the window, we were looking down at pit entry, with Sabine Schmitz Kurve in the background and Nürburg Castle perched on the hill above.
A few teams were organising their group shot around the final corner, while looking in the other direction gave a view of the starting gantry and tomorrow’s base of operations – the media centre.
All of it was mad. All of it felt surreal. All of it had my heart racing and the feeling that I had to pinch myself, and there weren’t even cars on track yet!
*****
Walking into the pressroom on Thursday was equal parts thrilling and terrifying. The exposed rows upon rows upon rows of desks, already filled with team representatives, series personnel from both the ADAC and the SRO, photographers, and various media outlets made me feel like a deer in headlights.
I meekly followed Stephen to the front of the room to grab a seat in the first few rows, trying very hard to quieten the ‘I don’t belong here’ voice that was ringing around in my head.
Walking into the pressroom on Thursday was equal parts thrilling and terrifying
But it didn’t take long for that voice to go away, thanks in no small part to Stephen, and the ongoing queue of people greeting us and having a quick chat. It’s hard to describe how much the media centres can feel like social events.
It’s a reunion for the travelling circus of media and a chance to catch up with those who might have missed an event or two or touch base with a friend or contact in the paddock. Even I, on the wrong side of the world, was able to say a warm hello to some faces that have braved the trip down to Bathurst!
Despite being at the track three hours before the first session of the day, there was plenty of work to do. Stephen was already queueing up interviews for the weekend and working on press releases to either feature as articles or add to the daily Paddock Notes, and I had the task of looking through the entry lists and regulations for any important information that could be expanded on in the paddock notes for the day.
There are effectively two phases to the weekend from a reporting perspective. Phase 1 is news, notes and interviews – basically gathering content to work on in between sessions and for the periods between races. Phase 2 is track action – session reports and race coverage.
With not much happening on track, it was a prime opportunity to identify a few targets to talk to, and work on content ahead of the race.
Breaking my concentration, Stephen interrupts me. “I’ve organised an interview with Nico Varrone for you straight after the driver’s briefing, which is in about 10 minutes.”
“AHH!”
While the drivers were filtering into the room to get briefed on specific regulations for this event, first in German and then in English, I was frantically writing notes and building the skeleton for an interview with the reigning GTE-Am champion, who was casually driving the #1 Ferrari 296 for the weekend.
As the driver’s briefing ends, I feel a presence come up behind me. “Ah, Nico!” Stephen says from next to me, and I’m face to face with my first interview of the weekend.
When planning for an interview, I like to try to have a story in mind at the end of it. Nothing is worse than having nothing interesting to ask, or nothing really notable to say. And I’m sure drivers, team managers, and the whole paddock get sick of answering the same sort of standard questions to every outlet.
Luckily, the story I wanted to tell with Varrone was an easy one – how does a Corvette factory driver end up driving the Nurburgring 24 Hour in a Ferrari? And not only that, making their debut in the reigning winning car?
Nico was an absolute pleasure to speak to, and incredibly kind in giving long, in-depth answers to my questions. After wrapping up the interview, I sat down, took a deep breath, and cracked out a huge smile – the nerves were gone, and we were underway!
Another opportunity was coming up later in the day with a ‘Meet The Team’ event thanks to Scherer Sport PHX, who were running the two Audi R8s in SP9. While Stephen had a very clear goal to talk to Christian Scherer about the future of Scherer Sport, I was given free rein to ‘see what I could come up with,’ A.K.A. my least favourite brief.
There are almost too many things to ask, and too many people to talk to when you have access to a full team of drivers and management, that it can become paralysing.
There’s almost too many things to ask, and too many people to talk to when you have access to a full team of drivers and management
I decided to focus my efforts on two of the longest-serving drivers in the Audi stable, and let them tell the story of Audi Sport and Team Phoenix/Scherer Sport PHX at the Nürburgring.
Something I always find special is when you ask a question or reference an event, and you can see someone’s eyes light up in response. Asking Christopher Haase about his first win at the Nürburgring in 2012 with Phoenix Racing, or mentioning the original iteration of the Audi R8 LMS Evo to Markus Winkelhock, and seeing the excitement written all over their faces was something very special and something I felt lucky to be asking about.
*****
Covering a 24-hour event was a brand new experience for me, and the Nurburgring 24 definitely set the tone for the late nights I’d become very used to. At Bathurst, the latest session finishes at around 6 pm, so there’s plenty of time to finish up, get a meal, and a good night’s sleep before the next day.
Night Practice running all the way to midnight was something new for me to contend with, and after a suitably late night on Thursday, I realised just what I’d gotten myself into. You do get an awesome view of the headlights roaring back up the hill before exiting the GP loop at Sabine Schmitz Kurve and the illumination of the hill as they fire through the Hatzenbach.
Come Friday, I was lucky enough to be given a chance to watch the hour-long Qualifying 3 from trackside, getting dropped off at the Pflanzgarten and given free rein for the hour. And only then did I realise how wild the Nordschleife is.
You can play it on a video game or simulator a thousand hours, or you can watch races here a million times, but nothing compares to being trackside and seeing the cars appear over blind crests and drop down beneath you into Brunnchen, or the scraping of bodywork through the Caracciola Karussell.
The viewing areas, completely covered in mud after rain early in the week, were packed out with campers all the way from Pflanzgarten to the Karussell, with home-made grandstands towering over the catch fences, right on the border of the race track.
Sprawling out into the forest were the campsites themselves, and while I thought camping at Bathurst was impressive, the Nurburgring clientele take it to a whole different level. Full bars, dance floors, sleeping quarters, big screen TVs, absolutely everything you could think of was catered for.
Sound systems cranked to the absolute max playing either race commentary or that particular group’s brand of Eurobeat pounded through the forest, almost drowning out the cars just metres away. And the best part, if you didn’t like what was playing, you just had to move two camps down!
But that hour trackside could not prepare me at all for the incredible experience that was the race start. Once again given leave from DSC duties, I was one of the many people who poured onto the grid ahead of the race start, making my way all the way down to the head of the grid.
I’ve never been in such an organised, chaotic mess just moments away from the start of one of the biggest races in the world, and it was amazing to see how close all the regular punters could get to the cars being wheeled to the grid.
After getting cleared from the grid, I raced out of the circuit and up towards Nürburg castle, taking a short cut to join the crowd at Sabine Schmitz Kurve.
I arrived just as Group 2 were passing through on their formation lap; fans all the way up against the barriers, flares in hand, cheering for the Porsche Cup and GT4 cars as they slowly made their way towards the Hatzenbach. I hadn’t realised that the crowd was allowed right up against the barriers like that, with the marshals on the racing surface keeping a watchful eye on proceedings.
Once the last group had gone through, the crowd cleared out as quickly as they flooded in, and the next cars to come through would be the GT3’s on their first flying lap.
And the rain started to fall.
The first car through past me was the #130 GetSpeed Mercedes, which had started on slicks, but already at Sabine Schmitz it was struggling for traction as the field behind gingerly made their way through on the opening lap.
As the rain came down harder, the top of the field mixed very quickly with the backmarkers, and the chaos of cars going past made it impossible to keep track of the leaders.
A walk down from Sabine Schmitz to the Quiddlebacher Hohe and taking in every possible sightline in the opening sector of track, and all too soon I was back at my desk covering the race.
*****
When I arrived back in the media centre, the #98 ROWE BMW was leading the race. 15 minutes later it was crashed out into the barriers at Fuchsrohre, in a scary three-car incident that saw a lower-class BMW complete a full barrel roll in the air before landing on the barriers.
That moment of chaos, as different people around the room see the incident and react, prompting others to look up from their screens, and react in turn, filters through the room like a wave. It’s almost awkward in the moments after a crash like that – no one really knows what to do in the immediate aftermath.
At first everyone scrambles to see if the drivers are okay, before trying to figure out what on earth happened. And then, once those two questions are answered, the room falls still and silent…
But at the Nürburgring at least, the race continues on around the rest of the track, and with weather setting in, tyre choice was going to be important.
One of the luxuries of covering the N24 is that because of the length of the pit stops, it makes it much easier for the information on what tyre everyone is on to be spotted and communicated. There’s nothing worse than tracking a car that’s out of sequence and having the broadcast miss the tyre choice.
However, the complication for a 22km track is that for much of the mid-afternoon, it was raining on the far end of the track and completely dry at the start-finish. That made tracking sector times imperative, to see how the tyres were performing against each other.
It was a fascinating battle between the #16 Scherer Sport PHX Audi and the #72 BMW Team RMG on the approach to darkness, with Chris Mies and Dan Harper trading the lead through the rain with the sun setting.
Then the fog started to set in. Then it became thick. Then, the race was red flagged, at 23 minutes to midnight on Saturday.
It looked like I was going to get a proper night’s sleep after all.
*****
Waking up to a thick blanket of fog on Sunday morning made the 7 am update very clear and easy to write from the confines of the hotel room. We waited an hour for another update but it was the same story. The fog wouldn’t budge and with visibility between a number of marshal posts either limited or non-existent, there was no chance of a restart any time soon.
There was a whole lot of nothing to do as we collectively pottered around the media centre, cracking jokes and working on what we could while we waited for nature to do… something.
While searching for something to make sense of, the question of the running order came up; under the red flag, the #911 Manthey Porsche had been moved ahead of the #72 RMG BMW into second place, for seemingly no reason.
A team deep-dive into the event’s supplementary regulations and an accompanying release from the event titled ‘Clearly Regulated’ finally gave us an answer. A peculiarity in the rulebook states that at the suspension of a race, each car has the minimum pit stop time associated with its current stint length added to its total race time at the point of suspension.
This meant that despite being ahead on the road, because the #72 BMW was on a longer stint when the red flag was called, it had a longer pit stop time added to its race time, which pushed it behind the #911 Porsche which was on a shorter stint at the time. “Clearly Regulated!”
Four hours later, there was an effort, more in hope than anything else, at getting the race back underway. Cars were back out on track for five laps behind an intervention car, and if there was no improvement after that, there would be no more racing.
After what amounted to an hour of circulating, there was no improvement to conditions, and the shortest, strangest, foggiest 24 Hours of Nürburgring was completed with the chequered flag, after only 7 hours and 23 minutes of competitive running.
And then, things got complicated. A colleague in the media centre shared that they’d heard of a possible protest by one of the teams with regard to how the race was concluded.
After combing the regulations earlier, we came to the conclusion that it was likely regarding the ‘finishing’ procedure, which saw the cars take the chequered flag before time expired, as opposed to the ‘re-suspension’ of the race under a red flag.
A few inquisitive messages were sent, with a soft confirmation given by the team in question, and then we were busy pulling apart the regulations and putting together a story.
It would be a few hours before we were invited to the ROWE Racing hospitality suite, to speak with team principal Hans-Peter Naundorf on the specifics of the team’s protest and subsequent appeal, and the grounds by which they thought they could protest the results.
Even being an observer, as Stephen and Davey Euwema quizzed the team principal, was fascinating, with the experienced journalists peeling back the layers of logic from Hans-Peter one question at a time.
However, most interesting to me was when the voice recorders were finally put away – Hans-Peter was much more open and willing to discuss specifics, but only upon insurance that the conversation was now ‘off the record.’ I’ve never had an ‘off the record’ chat with a team principal, and it was truly surprising how much more we were told, to fill in the blanks that Hans-Peter had been so bullishly defending just minutes ago.
What that showed to me was the trust that exists between the teams and certain parts of the media; those details were for our ears only, to help us frame a very delicate story in a way that made sense, and was fair to both the event, and the teams involved.
*****
Five hours after the race was finished, we were finally packing up after a very complicated end of proceedings. One final Pfeiffer-schnitzel at the one remaining open restaurant at 9 pm at night was ours before heading to bed. The alarms were set for 3:45 am so we didn’t have long before dashing to the Eurotunnel port.
While the Nürburgring 24 was already just a memory, there was plenty more in store for me in the weeks ahead…
