The WTCC's Nordschleife gamble paid off

Last weekend world championship motor racing returned to the Nordschleife for the first time since Jacky Ickx and Jochen Mass won the Nurburgring 1000kms in 1983. The circuit hadn't hosted a major international touring car series since the DTM's last visit in 1993.

Decently fast cars. A legendary track. It ought to be an easy win - and yet many people doubted that the World Touring Car Championship's visit to the Eifel mountains would be a success.

Chief among the objections were that the modern generation of WTCC cars are too aero dependent, and that with the grid temporarily down to 17 cars (Rickard Rydell is absent owing to illness, Dusan Borkovic has stepped back down to the European championship, and Lada only has two cars after one chassis was destroyed in a testing shunt) the field might string out into processional tedium under race conditions.

In fact the weekend proved to be a tremendous success, with close and exciting racing throughout the field in both races, even if the ultimate results went Citroen's way again.

Part of that was down to the drivers really buying in to the Nordschleife ethos, part of it came about through technical changes in advance of the race, and then a carefully planned broadcast package added a final layer of polish.

Michelisz found the real thing better than any video game

"As a racing driver, that's exactly the kind of challenge I want to do," said Honda privateer Norbert Michelisz, who like recent high-profile recruits to Nissan's sportscar programme came into racing via computer games. "It's completely different to what I'm used to.

"Driving even at 250km/h on a normal circuit where you have lots of run-off area, you know you can miss your braking point, maybe go off into the gravel, no big deal. But if you do it here, for sure you will damage yourself or the car.

"It's no game. It's exciting - pure adrenaline."

Even the sport's older hands caught the bug.

"It's something amazing, an incredible circuit," an unusually animated Yvan Muller told AUTOSPORT.

"You can't understand until you're in the car and you drive flat-out. When you drive around here in the road car you think, 'Ah, that's something special,' but there's a big step between this and being in a race car playing for the best lap. It's something incredible. No traction control, no ABS. Very demanding. Ah!"

A sole dissenting voice had come from James Thompson, who said after the test session in late April that he didn't think the cars suited the track, and that he felt "uncomfortable" about driving there. His subsequent departure from the team, to be replaced for the following two rounds (at least) by 'Ring specialist Jaap van Lagen, rendered those feelings somewhat academic.

Still, there was the question of whether the WTCC cars ought to be on the track; fuel tank capacity, for instance, would limit each race to three laps. But in terms of set-up there was plenty of room for manoeuvre.

Lopez's late charge was a highlight

"We have quite a lot of simulation tools that we've evolved," RML-Chevrolet chief race engineer Duncan Laycock told AUTOSPORT before the event. "The key bit is to have a circuit map; a lot of teams use laser scanning to create a 3D map of the circuit and as you can imagine that's quite labour-intensive, especially for a circuit this long.

"We would normally take a lap of data and extrapolate the driven line but we struggled to get data for here for this configuration. Given the size and complexity, we didn't include the elevation, which is considerable - apart from the power-loss effect of the altitude.

"It's more like a fast road than a racetrack. The surface isn't particularly smooth, and generally if you come with something that's an established set-up, which you've tested at other tracks, it's not that transferrable.

"You may have to pitch yourself somewhere else to deal with the bumps, crests and compressions, the banking - all the things that put a strain on the car. We've found there's a similarity between GT3 cars and WTCC cars.

"Aerodynamically the flat floor area and wing size are comparable. You go up a little bit on ride height. It does make you nervous when you send your car out with something that's a complete unknown, but I think we're in the ballpark."

Valente flew his Chevrolet to the front row

The result of that graft was P2 on the race-one grid for Campos Racing's Hugo Valente, though he proceeded to conspicuously make a mess of the race.

Most teams ended up trimming out as much rear wing as possible so as to maximise top speed on the long back straight, although AUTOSPORT understands that Lada also raised its rev limiter ahead of qualifying, which is why both cars required new engines come Saturday morning.

Trimming out downforce made the cars lively on the twistier sections of the Nordschleife, even though Yokohama had been granted FIA dispensation to supply a new soft-compound tyre. With race one out of the way, most of the drivers set caution aside during race two and pushed closer to the edge - sometimes over it.

Ma Qing Hua's accident on the final lap of race two freed up Jose Maria Lopez to push on and leapfrog both Hondas to snatch second place with the chequered flag in sight, but the truth is he had been teetering on the brink for some time.

"I could see he was at the limit and sometimes over," said Lopez, who had a grandstand view when Ma's C-Elysee finally let go.

TV viewers could see it too, thanks to a comprehensive suite of onboard, trackside and aerial cameras. Throughout the event the Eurosport crew excelled themselves, only missing Ma's pass on Mehdi Bennani in race one.

"Splitter-cam" was particularly effective and dramatic; if you thought WTCC cars would look slow and unexciting on the 'Ring, join the 160,000 people who have viewed an onboard lap with Sebastien Loeb on YouTube (see below).

When AUTOSPORT encountered series promoter Francois Ribeiro - the architect of the WTCC's move to the Nurburgring - on Friday night, he was a relieved and happy man. The helicams had just captured an exciting qualifying session, with a coherent narrative, all bathed in a beautiful late-afternoon light.

"It looked good, no?" he said. "Better than that - it was fantastic."

VIDEO: LOEB ON THE NORDSCHLEIFE