🇩🇪Nürburgring Nordschleife

The Nürburgring Nordschleife ("North Loop") is a 20.832 km motor racing circuit with 73 turns (or 154+ corners depending how you count) in the Eifel mountains of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany — universally known as "the Green Hell" (Die Grüne Hölle, a nickname coined by Jackie Stewart) and considered the most challenging permanent racing circuit ever built. Construction took place in 1925–1927 with the explicit aim of giving Germany a world-class motorsport venue, and the track was inaugurated on 18 June 1927 with motorcycle and sidecar races — the very first race was won by Toni Ulmen on a British 350cc Velocette. Cars followed a day later, with Rudolf Caracciola taking the first four-wheeled victory. The original "Gesamtstrecke" combined a 22.835 km Nordschleife with a 7.747 km Südschleife for a 28.265 km total. The Nordschleife hosted the German Grand Prix for decades until Niki Lauda's near-fatal accident at Bergwerk in the 1976 European Grand Prix forced Formula One off the circuit; the modern shorter GP-Strecke replaced it for top-level competition from 1984. The Nordschleife rises and falls more than 300 m from its lowest to highest points and its weather can differ between sectors. Among its 154+ corners are some of the most famous in motorsport: the Hatzenbach esses, the high-speed Schwedenkreuz (named after a Swedish-army monument from 1638), Aremberg, the long blind Fuchsröhre downhill, Adenauer Forst (a brutal right-left chicane infamous for catching out trackday riders), Bergwerk (where Lauda crashed and which becomes the most dangerous section in the wet), the 210-degree banked concrete Karussell (a berm-style hairpin where drivers drop their inside wheels into the banking), Hohe Acht (the highest point), Pflanzgarten with its consecutive jumps, Stefan-Bellof-S and the long Döttinger Höhe straight back to the start. Today the Nordschleife is used for the 24 Hours of Nürburgring (combined with the GP-Strecke), the VLN endurance championship, manufacturer development testing and the famous public "Touristenfahrten" open sessions where anyone with a road-legal car or motorcycle can buy a ticket and lap.