High speed sinanigans - TravelPUNK Backpacker College Student Budget Travel Message Boards!

**MeTurk** · 01-19-2007, 06:43 AM

Don't know if this is the right place for this kind of stuff but it's the closest I could find.

This year I'm planing some sort of auto related holiday and I thought I'd pass on the info I came across on race tracks, super cars and rally driving.

My original idea was to drive my car to the Nurburgring and spend a day seeing what she could do. The Nurburgring is a big race track in Germany that is open to the public whenever there are no races lined up. You'll see everything from Ferrari's to coach tours on the track. That was going to cost me €3000 inc. fuel and ferry's so I went back to the drawing board.

Next I thought I'd rent a car but not just any car, it had to be something that could make the most of the Nurburgring so I found this site http://www.eliterent.com/ they rent Ferrari's, Aston Martins all the top of the line cars that I thought I'd never sit into... and at €2000 a day I never will but they did have a mini cooper works (top speed 250km/h, 210bhp) which would have been a rocket but still fairly expensive as you have to pay for per kilometer as well.

All maybe too expensive but still on my to do list.

That left me with rally schools, I have planed to go to Finland to meet some couchsurfer friends and Finland is famous for it's rally drivers. http://www.rallycenterfinland.fi/index.jsp?newLang=_1 looks like the only one it's expensive at €900 for the day but your getting trained to the grade of real rally drivers by world championship winning drivers so I've settled on that.

You can do a rally school in Ireland for half that price and there proper schools with dedicated tracks.

http://www.rallyschoolireland.ie/

http://www.rallyconnection.com/

Here's a good outdoor go-kart track in Ireland for good measure http://www.pallas-karting.com/

Here's a link to Irelands only international race track. http://www.mondello.ie/ They also have open days and formula SR single seaters courses for cheap enough €250.

**omisan** · 01-19-2007, 09:51 AM

Nice stuff. Thanks for all the links!

I figured if I buy a BMW in the near future (highly unlikely, but who knows?) I'm gonna do the European Delivery program, where I get to go pick up the car in Munich, tool around for a couple of weeks (including a track day at the Nurburgring), and they ship it home, for thousands less than buying from a dealer here... Not a bad deal!

In the meantime, I don't know if any of the manufacturers do this in Europe, but companies like BMW, Lexus and Audi have demo days at race tracks here. They'll set up a course, give you half a day's performance driving training, then let you loose on the track for a couple of laps. The best part is they're usually FREE! Highly recommended

**Joker** · 01-19-2007, 10:08 PM

Omid, the Euro delivery program really doesn't save you thousands and thousands, depending on the model its a minor savings at best. But the trip itself is worth it (we're talking about $3K when my dad bought his 645i last year.).

For that matter, anyone can run the Ring in whatever vehicle they rent IIRC...

**omisan** · 01-20-2007, 09:33 AM

$3700 savings on a 3-series coupe

Not quite rolling in money yet, that's no figure to sneeze at

At least it's enough to cover the trip over... except maybe the gasoline. *sigh*

**MeTurk** · 01-22-2007, 05:41 AM

Quote:

The best part is they're usually FREE!

FREE?!! That sounds class, you'd pay at least €400 for something like that here.

Fuel is the reason I didn't do the road trip to the Nurburgring, prices around Europe are all between €1 - €1.30. Unless you go for a desiel BMW, their only one sec. slower than the petrol cars.