The Nürburgring is still a thing for automakers at the LA Auto Show

Jonathan Gitlin

Over in Germany, you'll find what may well be the scariest race track of all time. The Ni1/4rburgring Nordschleife is a 12.9-mile (20.8km) ribbon of tarmac wrapped around the Eifel Mountains that challenges a car like nowhere else on earth. Originally built as a public works project in the 1920s, it got too fast for Formula 1 in the 1970s, then too fast for sports prototypes in the 1980s.

Despite relatively few changes over the decades, the Ni1/4rburgring still plays host to professional races today, as always operating as a test track and even a limited-access toll road when not being used for competition. For a while, the track's fearsome reputation faded from the public consciousness. But its inclusion in several popular video game franchises has done much to reverse that.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments