SPIED: Sometimes Even The BEST Drivers Crash On The Nurburgring

In the wonderous world that is automotive testing and engineering, there is one Mecca. The holy land where enthusiasts travel to. That, my friends, is the Nurburgring.

Its become such an impactful element of vehicle development that automakers from across the globe have set up shop nearby so it can conduct testing at The 'Ring as much as possible. And, you may have noticed that cars like Cadillac's ATS use it as a marketing tactic to help push that the driving dynamics are not like your preconceived notion of Cadillacs of yore.

And while these engineers and testers are the cream of the crop and seasoned professionals, even they sometimes bite it. They crash, just like you and I.

More or less it's the cost of doing business, provided no one gets injured. Unfortunately, once and a while tragedy does strike. Sometimes in the form of product. Sometimes in form of a human life.

To illustrate that reality is a gallery compiled by Auto Motor und Sport that shows the various crashes.

**To see the FULL gallery, click "Read Article"

Read Article

MorePower - 4/27/2013 7:42:33 PM

+1 Boost

That's one powerful passenger airbag in the A45 to destroy the windshield or the co-pilot to a nasty hit.

Satriani1 - 4/29/2013 1:10:22 AM

+1 Boost

This would be bad publicity for Mercedes and BMW if advertised to the public – so many of their key car models had disastrous failures during testing on the Nurburgring (Nordscheleife). In comparison, only one experimental Audi e-tron had an incident, without any serious consequences.

This Nurburgring blogger estimates 3 to 12 fatalities on the Nurburgring each year. “I made 51 trips to the Nurburgring… Getting definitive figures for fatalities and serious injuries is pretty much impossible. On the one hand, 'Ring rumours' abound (to hear some speak, you'd think there were deaths on a daily basis). On the other hand, there is definitely some under-counting: in one case of which I have personal knowledge, one casualty was declared dead at the trackside and the other was declared dead in the helicopter ambulance shortly after taking off: that was recorded as one fatality and one injury. In an attempt to obtain accurate figures (on deaths from driving at Nurburgring), I visited Adenau police station in September 2002 to ask, and they reported Nordschleife 10 fatalities between January and September that year. A check with Nurburgring GmbH for the same period in 2005 provided a figure of two. That suggests somewhere in the three to twelve range in a full year. I couldn't even begin to count the number of accidents I've seen there. You'll spot a damage-only crash every few laps, and closures due to more serious accidents happen several times a day. A friend was killed there when he crashed on an oil-spill. He was an enormously skilled rider, and extremely careful - he had decided a few months previously to add 20 seconds or so to his laptimes so that he had greater reserve, but still the worst happened. We chatted in the car-park at 5pm, a couple of hours later he was in ITU and a few hours after that he was dead.”
http://www.nurburgring.org.uk/warning.php

10 Nurburgring Facts Revealed
http://www.caranddriver.com/news/10-nurburgring-facts-revealed-car-news