A Stock Car On The Nurburgring Is A V8-Powered Fish Out Of Water

A Stock Car On The Nurburgring Is A V8-Powered Fish Out Of Water

There’s something you don’t see on any given Sunday.

Race cars go on race tracks. Pretty basic rule of thumb, right? Sure, but not every race car belongs on every race track. That’s what makes this video such a novelty.

It’s the latest segment from Bridge To Gantry, and as with all their videos, it was shot on the Nürburgring – just not in the type of car you’d expect to see there. Where the Nordschleife regularly plays host to touring cars, GT racers, even the odd Le Mans prototype, this video was shot in a stock car. By which we don’t mean a showroom stock road car, but an American silhouette racer like you might see in Nascar.

It’s not an actual Nascar-spec racer, mind you… but it’s not very far off, either. This Chevy Monte Carlo SS was built for the 2009 DNRT V8 Championship, a Dutch series not unlike Nascar’s own Whelen Euro Series. It packs a big old 6.0-liter eight-cylinder GM crate engine producing upwards of 500 horsepower in the most basic and brutal of ways – more than the 400 hp produced by the Whelen racers, but less than the 700+ produced by today’s Nascar Cup challengers. It has a solid rear axle, unassisted brakes, and no driver aids to speak of whatsoever.

It’s the kind of car you’d sooner expect to see circling a speedway than negotiating all the twists and turns of the Green Hell. But boy does it look like one heck of a ride, even (or perhaps all the more so) when placed out of its element.

Given the traffic it’s encountered, we doubt it would set any lap records. But we can’t help but wonder what it’d do if given the chance. Given that a similar (but more powerful) Xfinity Series machine will lap, say, the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve (for example) about as fast as an LM-GTE racer, we wouldn’t be surprised if a stock car like this one could manage a Nordschleife lap time of around eight minutes.