When you’re on the track and you don’t have perfect visibility, you better hope that what you do have is lady luck on your side.
That, and some cold blooded reflexes, since the last thing you’d want to do is panic. But this is the Nurburgring, or as some call it, the “Green Hell”, which is where both drivers in this video almost went to, mainly because one of them made a mistake and spun, while the other didn’t have proper visibility until it was almost too late.
If you get the feeling that the crash wasn’t as immediate as we think, it may be because you’re not considering the speed cars usually carry into that specific corner of the Nordschleife. It’s about 170km/h (106mph) before you lift off if you’re a hot hatch, and slightly more in this case, since we’re talking about a BMW M3.
There’s no way of telling what caused the red MX-5 to spin, but if you’re driving that M3, you’re definitely buying your front tires a drink tonight, or at least some tire cleaning foam.
Any way you look at it, this was a pretty close call. And since the visibility over that crest is almost zero, more so if you’re sitting as low as you are in an M3 (driving an X5 M, you would have had more time to brake), we can’t say that near-misses like this one aren’t bound to happen again, and again.
Especially since on a track like this, there is no “good time” to lose control and spin – because of the high probability that there’s traffic behind you.