I just spent 3 days in the new M2 at the Ring with BMW. A fairly detailed journal awaits below. It's long. It will excite some of you, please some of you and surely piss some of you off. Oh well, enjoy.
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After a five-year hiatus, much of which was due to covid, I finally had the chance to get back to the Nürburgring with BMW for 3 days of Nordschleife trainings in the new M2. This is a trip that Donnie Isley (BMWPC) has been organizing for 15 years and I’ve been 3 times to the Ring with him and 3 times to Ice Driving in Sweden, with some domestic stuff mixed in there as well. The Ring training runs as two days of sectional training with laps at the end of the day and one day of lapping. In the past, there was a two day lapping option, but BMW has ceased to offer that option, so 3 days total is the best you can get.
Departure Day and Day 1
I left for Munich on Thursday June 22nd on LH 453 direct from LAX. Flight was a tad bumpy with one good drop. LH’s premium economy isn’t as good as others and I’m annoyed I stuck with my offer instead of just paying the fixed price. Oh well. Arrived afternoon of the 23rd, checked into Le Meridien next to the train station got a quick workout (amazing and empty 17M pool) in to clear the flight shit, and it was off to beverages and local fare.
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Day 2
Saturday morning, we left the hotel around 9 and headed for the Sixt Munich Sendling branch to pick up our rental cars. Hot tip, picking up here and returning to MUC was cheaper than renting directly from MUC. It was also super easy and only 5kms from the central Munich area. We could have rented from the train station location, but that is exorbitantly expensive. I got an X5 (or similar) because I was supposed to have 4 in the car. We were delighted to actually get the or similar in the form of an X6 with a 6 cylinder diesel. Got great mileage and topped out around 145 ish. Sixt warning here. Almost everyone rented from Sixt because they tend to have good cars. What we found is all the cars, including the M4 I saw at the airport gas station prior to return, were equipped with winter tires. I think this is their way of trying to prevent autobahn speed runs. I politely complained about it in the survey. While I may notice both the tires and the KPH sticker in the windshield, many renters wouldn’t have a clue and that could get dangerous.
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Lunch on the way to Nürburg is in Heidelberg. We didn’t have proper time for wandering, but I’ve been there before and it is a great little city to spend a night in, maybe two. In the car park, I saw this gem…a new GT4RS with an ED plate. So glad to see someone is still doing ED, and what a car to do it in.
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We arrive to Nürburg early Saturday evening and check into the Lindner Congress Motorsport hotel. It’s the best hotel in town and is fairly nice overall. We then walk to the Pistenklause for the inaugural dinner – sizzling raw steak on a stone. Delicious!
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Day 3
On Sunday (the day before the training begins), there is a tour of the F1 pits. I’ve done the tour before and opt out to go for a run about town and check in on a possible Tourist lap rental. The tour got mucked up and didn’t run, so this was a good choice anyway. First, lunch was in nearby Cochem, a typical German river town along the Moselle. Managed to get a rental car for Donnie and I to split so he could take his GF around, but he had to bail on it because track closures for accidents messed up the timing. So, I had to do my second lap completely blind save for one of my fellow students who had never been there before. I actually managed to do this lap about 45 seconds faster BTG than the prior one with Donnie riding shotgun and giving direction. I was amazed at how much of it came back to me once I was put into the situation. Still, I took it very easy and let everything pass…some of which I ended up repassing as I got comfortable. I was happy to pass a pokey C63, but a 10:35 ish BTG is nothing to write home about.
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Sunday night we have an hour of theory and meet our instructors for dinner. For the first two days we have a younger guy, Moritz, who teaches courses for BMW on the side but runs his own tech/engineering type business – I didn’t get the full details. He turned out to be a great instructor because he could sense we wanted to go fast and was aggressive out of the gate; challenging us at every turn. The true BMW employees, especially the more seasoned ones, take more time to get you up to speed. Presumably they are more fearful of management. On that note, it was amazing how many of them are the exact same crew I saw last time I was there in 2018. It’s also impressive and awesome that true engineers are also out there pushing M cars on the Ring.
Day 4 – Day 1 Driving
Day 1 of driving I’m up at 3 a.m. I’m excited but my internal clock is all screwed up as well. At 38, adjusting to the time change has just become impossible. So, I head out early for a little run to see if I can’t catch the sunrise and I got a great shot looking to the east from the Bilstein Bridge.
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The driving begins with two full scouting laps, one per driver (cars are split between two drivers) followed by slalom and braking exercises. We then proceed to our first sections. We started at the baby carousel to gantry section at the end of the circuit. At every section you get out and walk a bit at the most critical parts. We proceed to compression to uphill transition section at the beginning of the track right after the bridge. The following section starts at the Sabine Schmitz corner heading downhill toward Quiddelbacher Höhe. We then drive around the track to lunch at the Devil’s Diner. Lunch is buffet style and ever declining in it’s palatability. The espresso machine, however, is glorious.
The final section for the day is one of my favorites, the Schwedenkreuz. By now Moritz knows driver 1 (except for one of us) wants to push it and when I’m the first car behind him (I was in car 2 of 4), we’re really cooking through it. I remember the last look down seeing 258 kph and still accelerating. Interesting little note here, the cars are reading as high as ever on the speedometer, but the telemetry BMW uses for the onboard video recordings must be accurate numbers because here and several other locations the speed I noticed on the video was a good 8-10 kph lower than what the car was registering.
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After finishing this section we head to the Devil’s Diner area for laps. Laps work like this. Driver 1 is first and driver 2 gets out and waits. We do two laps at a time, with cars in order: 1, 2, 3, 4. After each lap the cars change position. Car 1 to the back and the rest move forward, and so on. Drivers change after two laps but the order remains so that everyone gets to be at the head of the train. Day 1 is section heavy and we don’t get to do much lapping. We had 2, maybe 4 laps each. For dinner, we ditch the German buffet at the M center to head back to the Pistenklause and get to meet Ron Simmons who owns and runs RSR Nürburg and Spa. I have a great wine conversation with him – may be doing something with them this fall.
Day 5 – Day 2 Driving
Day 2 of driving begins by heading straight to where we left off sectionally. This means we start with another of my faves, Fuchsröhre (the Foxhole) up through Adenauer Forest. From there, it’s Metzgesfeld and Kallenhard (I just remember this as the miss-hit-miss section prior to Wehrseifen) and Wehrseifen. We have time for two more sections, so we do the Ex Mühle-Lauda-Bergwerk and the long uphill into and through the Carousel.
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The long uphill is probably my favorite part of the track. Balls out, no lifting, kiss certain curbs and stay the fuck off others. We’re done before and earlier lunch and there’s time for lapping all afternoon! We actually hit our fastest BTG times this afternoon and right out the gate. Moritz changed up the groups and we jettisoned our slow car in exchanged for some fast Austrians. I told Moritz that Germany had an interesting history with an aggressive Austrian. I did get a chuckle from him. Anyway, BTG 1 with me in car 2 was 8:17 with some minimal slowing for car catch up. BTG 2 with me in car 2 was 8:19 with considerable slowing. One bit right before the Carousel for catch up and the second bit at the end of the mini carousel when Moritz slowed us down to cool the cars. The delta here between the prior lap from lift to gantry was 10 seconds alone, so between the two slowings I figure we had somewhere just below 8:10 on an effective flying BTG time. Day 2 Laps 1-2 and 3-4 are posted below. We had a lovely windshield crack and then at some point murdered a bug, so the view isn’t great.
Laps 3 and 4 are in roughly the same neighborhood with Lap 4 being about 8:22 with what looks like 12 seconds of slowing to cool the cars between when we started slowing out of the mini carousel to the gantry – again just around 8:10 ish. Lap 3 to 4 actually got us a near flying lap, though we did slow a bit on the straight, and it was 8:48 for the flying lap and 8:16 for the BTG. So, I like to think we could have put together a BTG of just under 8:10 and a flyer in the high 8:30s. Not actually that impressive, but for a bunch of clowns playing follow the leader, not half bad. On Lap 4, Moritz had his car literally in the air at Pflanzgarten (brake before hump and after) when he was right in front of me for this lap. This is at about 16:56 in the Lap 3 – 4 video. I said your car was in the air. He very calmly and Germanically replied, “yes, of course, naturally.”
Moritz in the air.
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Me nearly binning it at Wehrseifen.
Toward the end of the day we’re gassed and the cars are completely gassed. My car is low on fuel, so I’m taking it a bit easier to try to prevent the power cut mode. This had me a bit behind heading into Wehrseifen but Mortiz doesn’t seem concerned because of how I’ve been all day. So, I make like a fool and almost wreck the car trying to catch up. Too much speed, cooked brakes downhill on the wrong line doesn’t make for success. But hey, I’ve now seriously learned Wehrseifen – more on this tomorrow. After driving all day, My co-driver Tim has signed up for Touristenfahrten and I decide to come along as a scout guide. It was his first time at the Ring and he’d benefited immensely sharing the car with me for the two sectional days because I was able to give him pointers on all the braking and turn in points I could remember.
Dinner tonight is a ditching of the German banquet again and off to Ventisette 27 – a little Italian place down in the town of Adenau and definitely the best place within 50 miles of the Ring.
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Day 6 – Day 3 Driving
Day 3 of driving…lapping day is finally here! Because Day 3 is technically a separate course, the morning starts with the scouting laps and then the slalom and braking exercises. Moritz has been handed off to a group of German students and we now have Dirk Hacker, the VP/head of M Engineering in some capacity or other. He’s a latish middle-aged more seriously demeaned German engineer type. However, he can still seriously drive. They’ve switched the group a little and it’s still not quite right, so we convince him to do it in our arrangement and he gives the typical “we’ll see how this goes,” scoff. I told him we were running well under 8:20 BTG times and he looks at me and says in prototypical German fashion with a rising end, “oh, really?!” He immediately decides to fuck with us and see what we can do and is actually genuinely very happy at the end. We got 3-4 laps in the new setup and Dirk had a genuine ear-to-ear smile – these aren’t easily coaxed out of Germans. Similar times around 8:20 ish with trailing car catch ups included.
I was most satisfied not for myself but for my co-driver, Tim, because he’d been saddled with the slower group prior to the switch and he was well out of their league. It was great for him to get the opportunity to feel the track much closer to his ability level on the latter half of Day 3. An interesting note on the approaches here. Dirk stayed far more right far longer heading into the braking at Adenauer Forest (before the hard left) and moved over far more to the right into the final left for Wehrseifen. Moritz seemed to have a far more aggressive line. I had always been taught Dirk’s lines and they seemed to work better for me and my joker skill level.
I didn’t record much of anything on Day 3, except a GoPro video or two. We also missed a couple laps due the “German language” group. One of them seriously cracked up an M4 at my corner, Wehrseifen – damage all around and to the rear of the car in front. Complete airbag deployment. Everyone was okay, but the track shut down for about 45 minutes or so. The German instructors were absolutely livid – and it wasn’t necessarily at the accident, but that the Americans didn’t crash, the Germans did! Their frustration was palpable. I was told not to share the video I have and I respect that request.
We end Day 3 with the banquet and a debrief. Dirk discusses the new car a bit. More on that in a moment. Dinner is at another Italian place in Adenau where we’re told it’s not family style and it turns out being beyond that with massive portions. My broken Italian and German serve as the sole ordering intermediary for 20 people! The orders all come out right, just in enormous proportions. We’re given free Limoncello as a thank you for probably the largest group they’ve ever seen.
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Day 7 – France!
Thursday morning Donnie, his GF and I leave for our post Ring road trip through Vosges, France. One of the other participants bailed at the last minute because he didn’t want to do more driving. First stop is Bitche, France. Yes, that’s a place. It has a famous citadel that held out during the Franco-Prussian war. It also has a phenomenal Michelin star restaurant where we had lunch reservations and an amazing meal. We spend the afternoon driving leisurely south through the Vosges region. Glorious views and winding roads with perfect, windows down weather. Overnight is in Munster, France where we get the classic French experience. I can do about 8-10 reliable phrases in fairly accented French. Still, upon walking into the empty restaurant and asking for a table, we get the, “do you have a reservation?” We didn’t, so the answer was, of course, “sorry, we’re full.” Insert French accent. This happened a couple more times before we found a lovely little place manned by two non-French servers. Dinner was perfect.
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Day 8
Friday, we drive across the Rhine and a little of the Black Forest en route to Munich. It ends up being a longer day that planned due to afternoon thunderstorms, traffic and accidents (standing water on unlimited sections of the autobahn). We drop the car at the airport and walk over to the Airport Hilton which is a clutch location. Another amazing and relatively empty pool for a nice, long swim. We have dinner in nearby Massenhausen with Robert Fassl and Christian Auer at Robert’s favorite restaurant – and it was awesome. I was able to get some Kaiserschmarrn for the first time in several years (a shredded pancake dessert and not everywhere has is) and it was delicious. Robert and Christian are both repeat instructors for Donnie’s group and friends. I’ve had them multiple times in Sweden and at the Ring and they are amazing guys.
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Day 9
Saturday fly home. Happy my upgrade offer on LH452 clears. LAX is a zoo on landing, of course. Why do people line up to take photos of their loved ones as they come around the corner and walk up the ramp? And why do people insist on waking so slowly?
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A bit about the Ring.
The Ring is great as always. Fast, technical, challenging, etc. However, it’s recent updates and resurfacings have definitely tamed it. The curbs have been reduced in spots with more asphalt and some of the infamous bumps have been leveled – particularly at Schwedenkreuz. All this makes for a track that is faster than it’s ever been but also more difficult to compare apples to apples runs in cars now vs. in the past. The resurfacing.
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And that brings us to the car.
The Car
Cars we had were G87s, ZF8 transmissions, no buckets, all wearing Michelin PS4S in factory spec sizes. Other groups had M4s with buckets but we had the M2s – which I was excited to drive, though I did wish we had the buckets. You can see in the videos that I'm adjusting myself in the seat every so often. I was complimented on my seating position (upright and close to the wheel) by James Brookshire (fellow instructor from the states who joined Donnie), so it's not my cruising back all casual. These new seats are much better than the F8X cars, but they still just aren't buckets. Note that I have the non-buckets in my M3, but that's on purpose because I don't track it and I wanted ventilated Tartufo.
Colors for our group were Zandvoort and Toronto. I spent most of the time in a TR car but then switched to a ZB car to give a fellow driver a chance to use the BMW recording system to record. The ZB cars were all basically brand new off the boat with about 1500kms on them when we started and likely hadn’t been appropriately broken in. The run in service light came on just as we ended the last day, so who knows what was going on. Interestingly the M4s were recycled from the winter training in Sweden. I was able to cross check two Fame Green M4s from our training and then later found my Skyscraper Gray car to which I showed to my co-driver from Sweden (he was also at the Ring) and ask, “Hey Jim, remember this door dent?”
The two cars from Sweden.
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But, to the point…how was the G87. Very good. The car feels composed, planted and uneasily unsettled. It sticks like nothing. Interestingly, in the past we would be in MDM mode, with Sport throttle and sport or comfort chassis and comfort steering. This time, we were sport for both throttle and chassis, comfort on the steering and no MDM allowed. Transmission was S2 if manual and I think D3 for those in auto. In the F8X cars, we’d get a fair amount of DSC intervention when pushing it. With the G87, there was almost no DSC intervention despite being in sport with DSC on. Now, you could argue I’ve been multiple times and I’m getting better. I’d appreciate the flattery. However, I think a lot of this has to do with the chassis and the tires – though I can’t pinpoint which and why.
We know the new M2 is about 20 seconds a lap faster than the prior M2C/M3/M4. My BTG was nearly 20 seconds faster. I’ll take the time now to note that the weather conditions were similar for both days. If anything, it was a just a tad cooler this year. Given that a flying lap has a really quick GTB time (flat out the whole way), there likely isn’t much delta in there between my BTG times and the flying lap – i.e. there isn’t much time to be shaved in that stretch. The trouble is, I didn’t feel this time like I was going as balls out as I did last time round in an F82C. It didn’t feel as on edge. So, I am down to three distinct possibilities. 1. The chassis is that much better and the PS4S tires are at their limits. 2. The chassis isn’t that much better and the tires are doing all the work. 3. We weren’t going that fast.
I’ll take the third one first. Of course we weren’t going that fast, but for us we were. And, I’d say this was a faster group than my F82C group was based on skill levels. Additionally, Moritz said he probably had at best 20 seconds on us if he were going for it and we were quite quick. Granted, he’s no test driver just like we’re no Moritz. Nevertheless, I’m not sure this is it.
We’re down to the chassis and the tires. Here’s where it gets a little interesting. The M schools in Europe are finally on the Michelins. In the past, they’d been on Bridgestones (I think still Contis in the States). We’d try to get the Germans to admit they were crap compared to the Michelins, but they’d always make a sideways face and you could see they knew who was providing the tires. Now that they’re using the Michelins, they all come right out and say how shit the Bridgestones were. This brings me back to Dirk’s comments at the end of Day 3. He was talking about the new car vs. the old car and said something to the effect that of course the new cars are always faster but we like to say the new car is different not better. His mannerisms and voice suggested he “must” like the new car but he preferred the prior generation.
Where does this leave us? We have about a 20 second a lap delta between an F82 M4C on Birdgestones and the new G87 M2 on Michelins. Yes, the car is tighter. It rides better. It’s more composed. It feels less on edge. At the same time, you can feel the mass of the beast in the corners and you can sense that the steel brakes do start to get fairly overwhelmed rather quickly. There’s only one conclusion I can come to. The tire has tamed the elephant.
Honorable mention BMW. Outstanding performance Michelin.
Next time try mayo with your pommes frites! I miss the Bratwurst stands on the side of the road! 
