Nurburgring a challenge

I drove the 20km track at the weekend for the first time and it is every bit as challenging as Mt Panorama. After second place with Warren Luff in an Audi R8 in the Bathurst 12-Hour earlier this year Audi invited us to take part in the four-hour race at Nurburgring to gain accreditation for the 24-hour races there and at Le Mans next year.

But things didn't quite pan out. The track is just amazing. We were going 268km/h on the back straight and frequently over 250km/h with an average lap speed of 176km/h. It captures many of the aspects of Bathurst and even has a Dipper although it's not as intense or aggressive as Mt Panorama.

There are a lot of very fast blind crests where you have to position the car correctly to set up for the next corner. The biggest challenge for me was reminding myself where I was on the track. It certainly didn't come naturally like Bathurst. There are also parts where the car gets all four wheels about four inches (10cm) off the ground. It's an incredible circuit.

At this stage I don't know if we've succeeded because I crashed in qualifying and we never got to race. It's a bit disappointing in the end, but I learnt a hell of a lot. We had a two-hour practice session and one-hour qualifying yet I only managed five laps because it's the longest race track in the world. Luffy has driven there before and track knowledge is very important so we decided early on that he would qualify and I would start the race.

Warren qualified with 8:18.6 and I did 8:25.2, so we would have been ninth on the grid and just six seconds off pole. The winning Porsche would have started alongside us in eighth and our sister car only qualified 18th. We were the second fastest Audi out of the six competing. Luffy had a fresh set of tyres to have another go so we could have been even better.

Anyway, I'd just done my timed lap and was on a second timed lap when disaster struck. About the 8km mark I was passing a much, much slower Golf and he clipped my left rear wheel which sent me straight into the fence. The closing speed between the fastest category of cars like ours and the others is incredible. I haven't experienced that for a long time.

Trying to get a clean lap with 200 cars of differing speeds was ultimately quite difficult. The crash was devastating for me and especially for Warren. Unfortunately, the car was unrepairable in the two hours we had left to get on the grid. Audi had an onboard camera in the car and they can see it's a racing incident with no one to blame.

The Audi Experience Team was looking forward to having a good race and was happy with our times, speed and how we adapted to the car and the circuit. Even though we didn't race, we had qualified well and Audi is investigating whether we can now compete in the 24-hour races. It's unclear at the moment. Interestingly the winning car was the only Porsche hybrid in the field.

With its F1-style KERS system it was fast, winning by a lap, mainly because it could do 10 laps to a tank where everyone else was only managing eight or nine laps. After the race we were straight on to a plane and home for a debriefing on the Winton round and then straight into a test day at Queensland Raceway with our focus on Darwin in a couple of weeks.

Mark Skaife also had a chance to do a few more laps in the car in preparation for the endurance rounds. And it was good to see former World Rally Champion driver Chris Atkinson have a test in Russell Ingall's car. It's always good to see a driver from a different category have a go at our cars. There is a massive difference between our big and heavy rear-wheel-drive V8 sedans versus the sort of small, four-wheel-drive turbo cars he has driven.