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.