Parenting. Most car enthusiasts are keen for their kids to get into cars from a young age, but there are limits… like letting a 16-year old loose on the Nürburgring.
REPORTS THIS MORNING are that a Swiss-registered Chrysler Crossfire was caught by a speed camera in Germany. Now Germany is noted for many things – beer, engineering… and also a different-to-Australia attitude towards speeding on sections of its major motorways, or Autobahns. The limit on this particular road was 130km/h (and our ed was booked travelling at 60km/h in a 50km/h zone once, so Germany is very strict when it comes to speeding)… and the car was doing 215. On its way to the Nürburgring, naturally. Here’s a photo of a Crossfire (not the one in question):
It seems the driver was a 16-year-old boy. And that alone would constitute an offence, even if you put aside the speeding, as there’s no way a boy that young could have had a driving licence. But the story doesn’t end there.
Boy and mother then turned up to the famed Nürburgring racetrack on a tourist day, which is when anyone and everyone can drive anything and everything around the track. Literally. You get cars from a tuned Porsche 911 to a bus, and skill levels from Stig to stupid.
So off the boy went, and apparently completed a few laps before crashing at a corner named Kallenhard. Below is a video of another driver crashing at either the same corner or close to it:
That particular corner is tricky, even by the standards of a track where the simplest corner would be the most difficult one on any normal track. Kallenhard is downhill and as usual with the ‘Ring there is very little runoff. Videos never do justice to the gradients, danger and all round thrill of the Nürburgring.
So the ‘Ring is a tricky place at the best of times, and we all want our kids to share the car passion but letting your son loose on the most difficult racetrack in the world, unsupervised, on a public day…now that’s on the stupid side of irresponsibly dumb. There’s plenty of chances for kids to drive -karts, programmes like Mercedes-Benz in the UK at Brooklands, Land Rover have courses, or just find a paddock. At least nobody was hurt in the crash.
Oh, and how about learning how to say ‘no’ ?
Story source: http://www.bridgetogantry.com/ your one-stop website for all things Nürburgring. Don’t miss our beginner’s guide to the ‘Ring, and why ‘Ring times don’t matter.
