Master's Program

A gifted driver can learn any track with ease. But the nürburgring isn’t just any track. It demands something beyond innate skill: devotion.

- Jack Baruth

HE WAS THE LAST MAN on the Nordschleife and a faithful servant of the one true goddess who rules over the tarmac and steel within. It was more than 30 years ago, after the track had disappeared from the Formula 1 calendar but long before the Godzilla GT-R and the so-called production-car records. Before the PlayStation brought a digitized version of the Nürburgring’s old North Loop into millions of homes. Before the lawsuits, before the shopping center and its empty storefronts, before the 99-mph roller coaster that operated for a grand total of four days and then closed for good. Before the Nürburgring was a sticker, before it was a brand.

In those days, you found the Ring by accident or through word of mouth or perhaps not at all. There was an old entry down near the T13 corner, mostly invisible from the road. A single marshal stood between you and the track. You handed him your ticket, and he punched a hole in it before waving you on. There were no flaggers, no safety workers, no yellow Bongard truck to charge 200 euros for a 20-minute flatbed ride back to the pits. You were on your own in pretty much every sense of the phrase, among the drivers who still remembered and venerated the old track.

The man is Ron Simons. A successful Dutch touring-car racer with an effortless command of multiple languages and an entrepreneurial bent, Simons had fallen into the grip of an unusual but seductive idea: namely, that the recently introduced Alfa Romeo 75 (known as the Milano on our shores) was the perfect car with which to tackle the Nordschleife.