motor

Skaala · 12-16-2004, 09:33 AM

"This circuit is fascinating in ways other than its total distance or difficulty. Amongst top racing drivers the Nurburgring Nordschleife is feared, respected and praised. I feel I finally understand why."
- Kazunori Yamauchi

Ask any racing fan worth their salt to name the world's most challenging race circuit, and you'll almost certainly receive the same reply: the Nurburgring Nordschleife.

Not to be confused with the current Nurburgring Grand Prix circuit (the Nordschleife was deemed too dangerous for F1 racing after Niki Lauda's fateful crash in 1976), the Nurburgring Nordschleife is a 20.8km tribute to German engineering, a mighty track that encompasses three villages and incorporates a staggering 176 turns of varying size and difficulty. It's the ideal track for road-testing cars, featuring as it does almost every possible variation of bend, camber, slope, curve and incline that a vehicle is likely to face anywhere in the world.

Soon, the ultimate challenge for the world's greatest drivers will become the ultimate challenge for even the most hardened Gran Turismo players, as the Nurburgring Nordschleife makes its debut in Gran Turismo in its gruelling entirety.

For Polyphony - and in particular GT mastermind Kazunori Yamauchi - it's a technically outstanding labour of love that has taken 12 years to come to fruition. "Back in 1992, when we started to develop Gran Turismo, the Nurburgring Nordschleife was something that glittered far in the distance, and was to us a land of admiration â€¦ I dreamt of including this course in Gran Turismo one day."

Despite the tremendous advances made to Gran Turismo's engine since it debuted on PlayStation, the course was still a challenge to replicate to a degree that would satisfy Yamauchi-san's extremely high standards. When interviewed at E3 2004, he revealed that the team were forced to make changes to the way that track data was managed, purely because the Nurburgring required so much data to be loaded at one time compared to the game's 50+ other tracks. Take into account that literally every 15mm of this 20.8km has been painstakingly reproduced, and it's not hard to see why this vast amount of data was required, either.

True to its 'ultimate test track' status, the Nurburgring also meant that Polyphony had to achieve near-perfect engine physics for each of the game's 650+ cars. "Just as the Japanese sports cars have been trained at Nurburgring, I feel that Nurburgring has trained Gran Turismo," says Yamauchi-san.

The years of tireless effort were most certainly worth it, too; a test driver with 15 years' experience of the track drove a Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34) on both the real circuit and the GT4 recreation, and achieved lap times (approx. 8mins 15-20secs) with a mere 1 percent variation. The driver also commented that he could use GT4 to experiment with driving techniques that would be too dangerous to try out in real life.

While it's unlikely that the majority of you will get the opportunity to make a similar comparison, you'll still get the chance to tackle every straight and bend of this immensely challenging circuit - in all of GT4's myriad vehicles - when the game parks itself in all good games stores in early 2005.

simply can't wait....