By Liz
Love this road, which winds down the Santa Rosa Mountains towards the desert valley outside the little town of Borrego Springs, CA, about 100 miles south of Palm Springs and roughly the same distance east of San Diego.
Thousands of feet of elevation change in a matter of several miles, achieved via a countless series of twisty and hilly corners like this one.
On a clear day like this, you see the incredibly expansive view.
By Liz
The idea behind the “100 percent” ride this spring was to combine as many driving environments into a single trip as possible.
It was a single trip, but it encompassed several days and involved many people representing various areas of the car.
Starting in San Diego, as seen here, we wound around the excellent roads on the outskirts of San Diego County and headed towards the desert areas near Borrego Springs. We encountered great twisty roads, lot of elevation and weather changes, which will be seen in subsequent posts over the next few days.
By Rob
I wanted to take a quick break from our Germany posts to recap something really important that occurred recently back in the states. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we had one of our largest development rides earlier this spring in the Southwest US.
This was what we call the 100-percent ride, meaning that it represents the point where we shift a certain project from “development” mode and turn into “launch” mode.
This ride involved the best and most fully developed cars we’ve had, which is a big moment. It’s one of the biggest rides we have, and involves lots of our top execs in order to verify the car is what we planned.
By Rob
I was thinking of the toughest areas of the Ring and immediately came to the Karussel.
It’s called that for the obvious reason: it’s a constant radius turn just like what we’d call a “carousel” in English. The best word to describe it is “abusive.” You can see from this photo that it has a bit of banking to it, and the pavement is very uneven.
One of the main things that makes the Ring such a great test of a car is the extreme forces it places on the vehicle. In the Karussel, the lateral and vertical forces – what we call “loading” on the chassis -- are really high. If you’re going to have a failure (something breaking or fatiguing), this is likely where it will happen.
You can see in the photo that we’re not using production wheels on this car. During this test last year, the production wheels were still being styled. But of course we knew the engineering aspects of our production wheels (sizes, etc.) So here we’re using Fiske Wheels (how’s that for a plug?) We found that this set from Fiske was closest to what we will have in production, at least in terms of the size and basic construction.
By Rob
No, that’s not how we make posts for the blog. And, yes, we did let him out of the trunk before we started driving! Actually, this is one of our top engineers gearing the car up with test equipment.
We constantly take readings at Nuerburgring. In fact, we frequently have a passenger in the car monitoring a laptop. And, well, it takes as special talent to use a laptop while riding in a car speeding around Nuerburgring without getting sick.
We measure a lot of different aspects, but I’d say that -- given the extreme speeds and conditions -- powertrain, cooling and similar durability issues are among the most important things we measure here.
By Rob
Just a tourist shot here. This is the little downtown of the tiny town of Nurburg. So, yes, Nuerburgring basically means the track surrounds the town of Nurburg. This is the very beautiful and somewhat quiet Eifel Mountain region of Germany. That's Nurburg Castle poking through the mountains and trees at the very top of the photo.
This is the Grune Holle restaurant on the left side of the street. Many a good meal is served there. Grune Holle refers to the nickname Jackie Stewart gave to the Ring: Green Hell.
By Rob
We approach Nuerburgring with the greatest respect and caution. Only drivers with the utmost training and experience will drive in our tests. Safety is just part of the concern. Vehicle testing relies on consistent and repeatable driving. That’s hard to achieve anytime, let alone in a super-severe environment like Nuerburgring. The key is to drive each lap as consistently as possible. This normally also means going quite fast. I’d call it nine-tenths driving. Nine-tenths here is incredible. We have a handful of drivers we consider Nuerburgring capable, including our chief engineer, myself and several others. It’s really only after something like 100 laps that you feel even a little bit “familiar” with this track.
Unlike some of our bigger track tests or ride trips in the US, the team at the Ring is a comparatively small crew. The photo here shows the garage where we normally set up. We rent some space from the good people at Manthey Racing, operators of a Porsche racing team. But this garage is a few miles away from the track. So, unlike a normal race track, there’s not much in the way of trackside adjustments. Nonetheless, we bring over a small group of technicians who do a great job dealing with the cars and the people driving them.
We’re harder to take care of than the cars, I’ll bet.
By Rob
I’m not going to tip off the spy photographers too much, so I won’t say exactly when we’re next going to be at the Nuerburgring. But suffice it to say that we’re getting tuned up for another trip. So I thought it’d be good to go over the basics a little bit.
Many of you might be familiar with it already – perhaps you’ve been there, or know of it from racing lore. For the whole story, go to the official site or consult the many books and other resources about the “Ring’s” incredible history.
The bottom line is that it is the toughest and most-demanding circuit in the world. Today the Ring consists of two courses – the Norsdschleife (“northern loop”) and the GP-Streke (“Grand Prix course.”) The Nordschleife is open to the public at certain intervals and is what is used for vehicle testing. The Grand Prix course is where professional events, like the German Grand Prix, are held.
So, why do they need a separate layout for Grand Prix events, if the track is so great? The basic reason is that the Nordschleife was deemed too dangerous for motor sport. Somewhat paradoxically, it’s deemed safe enough for the general public and auto engineers! Go figure.
The Nordschleife is 20.8 km or just shy of 13 miles in length. That’s extremely long for a track, of course. The elevation changes are constant and sometimes severe. There are more than 100 corners – no one can really agree on the number, too many to count! You can see from the diagram here that the course is divided into nicknamed sections. This is key to driving the Ring with any degree of safety or expertise.
You can’t possibly remember and prepare for all the corners, but you do have some hope of keeping each section straight. One of the major difficulties that the sections help with is vision. The severe speeds, corners, elevation and densely wooded surroundings mean that there is very little forward vision at times. Before you are done with one corner or hill, you are halfway into the next. Keeping the specifics of each section in your mind is the only hope you have, really, of staying on the appropriate line.
By Rob
Sorry we had a little break in the blogging action over the past week. This is a really intense time in our process. We have recently verified our chassis development for the 2008 model – it’s what we call the “100 Percent Ride.” You might recall we posted about our 65% ride that occurred a few months ago. “100 percent” doesn’t mean that we’re done. We’re never done. This is the point where we get into launch mode. There’s still quite a bit of work for us to do during the launch, certainly. And we’re definitely in the earlier stages for model years beyond ’08.
So the development driving continues, as always. We just finished a big ride in the Southwestern US. We’ll be sharing that in some posts in the coming days. And we’re busily getting ready for another trip to Germany later this month, including the Nuerburgring. And the weather is (finally) good at our home base. That enables us to get busy at our own road course – a place very few “outsiders” have ever seen. We’ll be bringing you posts and photos and videos from our private test track in Michigan, along with “trips” to Germany, Arizona, California and Nevada.
Honestly, it might be a little confusing. . . we’re going to jump around a bit from place to place on the blog. But in the process, we’ll be showing some of the most vital aspects of what we do.
By Liz
And finally, the last round of answers to your most-recent FAQs! Keep them coming.
Overseas/International Tests:
A few folks have asked us about the testing we do outside of our home country, and whether we are responsible for that, or if we call upon folks in those local areas. By and large it is myself, Rob and our team based in Michigan that do the great majority of the tests no matter where they occur. Rob, for example, blogged about his driving in Sweden, and he will be on his way to Germany for more testing very soon. On occasion, we draw upon “local” experts from our extended GM family in other regions of the world, such as Europe or China. But that’s fairly rare. We’re developing cars with the intent of consistent excellence anywhere in the world . . . so we like to have a team that has knowledge of conditions and requirements all over the world.
Training and Selection of Track Drivers:
We’ve had several questions about how we select and train the folks that do our high-speed track driving, such as at the Nurburgring, a photo of which appears here. Suffice it to say that this is extensive, and we’ve built a lot of expertise in this area. Rob will be posting more about this very soon, so stay tuned.
Durability Testing:
This was a great question a few of you asked. Thank you. We did show you recently examples of pretty rugged tests involving temperature and mud/dirt. We’ll be featuring more pics and videos on this in the coming weeks. There’s a very formalized and demanding rigor put into reliability and durability testing, and it happens on a constant basis. We'll have more to come about this ...
V-Series!
Got your attention there, eh? Yes, we’re testing the next-generation CTS-V as you might have seen elsewhere online via spot photos and videos. That’s about all I can say about that! Seriously, the current 400-hp CTS-V that we’ve been selling to high acclaim for the past few years is going on a short hiatus while we launch the next-generation CTS. Of course, we’ll be bringing back the high-performance CTS-V in the not-too-distant future. And that means we certainly are developing early prototypes now, and we hope to share a little bit of that with you on this blog. So keep your eyes peeled.
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