There will be close to 200 cars starting the opening round of the VLN series at the Nürburgring Nordschleife tomorrow.
The VLN series is a mixture of almost every possible car that can race. The fastest cars are GT3 cars, that can do a lap of the track in just below 8 minutes, whereas the slowest cars will be lapping almost 4 minutes slower. That is in dry conditions, which isn’t always the weather you’ll find in the Eifel mountains. It’s quite common that the time table on race day has to be adjusted because of thick fog is hanging around the trees at some areas of the track – and if there is a place where you want full visibility, it’s in The Green Hell.
There are 34 cars entered in the SP9 class which is for GT3 cars. It’s where we will find BMW, Porsche, Audi, Ferrari, Nissan, Bentley, Lamborghini, and Mercedes showing up with more or less works teams. Works drivers are spread across the board, where names like Rene Rast, Jörg Bergmeister, Jörg Müller, Tom Coronel, Markus Winkelhock, Timo Scheider, Antonio Felix Da Costa, and Bernd Schneider are only a few of the names that light up that list.
But BMW also have 22 cars in the BMW M235i Racing Cup, like the TCR class contains eight cars in a mix of Audi, Peugeot, Volkswagen, and Seat.
Toyota is there with their TMG GT 86 Cup with nine cars entered. Opel Astra OPC Cup has five cars, with the former motorsport boss for Opel, Volker Strycek in a car with his son and daughter.
But that isn’t the only car that Volker Strycek is driving – he is of course also behind the legendary Opel Manta with the fox tail on the antenna. The car has almost done as many kilometres at the Nordschleife as some road cars are doing in the real world.
There is a total of 25 classes in the race, so it would be way too complicated to go through them here.
The race will be started in three groups, split up by qualification times.
Everything is run in one day, with qualifying in the morning and then four hours of racing in the afternoon.
We can highly recommend to find the live stream at www.vln.de tomorrow, where there will be a German as well as an English commentary from the track.
The green flag will be given at 12.00 CET – but the formation lap will start 20 minutes earlier, because the cars needs to cover the 20+ kilometres before they are back at the start line!
