Post by Kasey Kagawa

Formula 1 is supposed to be the fastest road-racing motorsport around. Millions upon millions of dollars poured into R&D, an international race spectacle that features the absolute pinnacle of technological development and driver skill, all dedicated to going around a track as fast as is physically possible. And when it was announced that BMW was bringing one of their BMW-Sauber F1 cars from last year and Nick Heidfeld, their best driver, down to be driven around the Nordschleife at the Nurburgring, the infamous “Green Hell” that was deemed too long, too demanding and too dangerous for F1 racing, we were all expecting some sort of mind-blowing record that would stand for years to come.

Well, Heidfeld went around the ‘Ring over the weekend, and posted a fastest lap of 8:34, which isn’t exactly world-record pace. Actually, it’s not even fast for a production car. Allowing for some irregularities in timing and length traveled (Sport Auto, who posted most of the available times, usually run a lap that’s about 0.2 km or 7 seconds shorter than the full track), Heidfeld’s time puts him squarely in with cars like the Subaru Impreza WRX STi, the original Audi RS4, the E39 BMW M5, the Nissan 350Z, and the Porsche 993 Carrera 2, not exactly supercar territory. As a matter of fact, the best that BMW-Sauber could throw at the Green Hell was a full 99 seconds slower than the current record for a street-legal car, a 6:55 posted by Michael Vergers in a Radical SR8, and I’m sorry, but if a multi-million dollar F1 racing machine can’t beat a fiberglass kit car with 363 HP, there’s something else going on.

I’m not saying that BMW-Sauber and Heidfeld intentionally ran slower than they could for no reason. There’s more than a few explanations why they took what could have been one hell of a PR moment for the BMW-Sauber F1 team and for BMW personally and turned it into another PR farce, such as not wanting to worry about damaging or destroying the extremely expensive race car for the purposes of a demonstration, wanting to avoid having to maintain and repair the car after running such a hot lap around a very large circuit, or that Heidfeld simply wasn’t as familiar with the circuit as he could have been, but all of them don’t stand up. They weren’t using this year’s car, so they didn’t need to worry about it breaking and not being useable for the next race, and it’s not like they didn’t see this was coming, as they’ve known about for at least a month, giving Heidfeld no excuse for not spending the day before working on his lap times on the track at the very least. Next time BMW, if you’re going to try to dazzle us, bring your A-game instead of phoning it in.

Nick Heidfeld tackles the Nordschleife in a BMW F1.06 [Autoblog]