In the end, the 'Ring chooses its champion.
With fog stubbornly refusing to lift after hours stifling racing, teams thumb through the rulebook as the officials declare the finish the same as the order set when the race was suspended, just before midnight. The five final laps are done behind a pace car, and those running outside of the podium in the GT3 class are grating at being held back. But that's the Nürburgring, 25 kilometres of unforgiving circuit with a mind of its own. And mid-pack, running a dominant 1-2-3 finish in the Touring Car class, the 'Ring chose Hyundai.
Thanks to the racing game Gran Turismo and perhaps Top Gear's numerous visits, the Nürburgring is possibly the most famous racetrack … in the world (did you read that with Jeremy Clarkson’s dramatic cadence?). Even in videogame form, where a mishap can be reset just by pushing a button, the 'Ring has a reputation for being challenging. Its surface is narrow, the aluminum barriers hedging drivers in as close as Luke's Deathstar bombing run, and the tarmac is redone yearly in sections, so the surface is ever-changing. It also spreads out over nearly a thousand acres in the Eiffel Mountains, so it may be raining or, on several occasions, snowing in one part of the track and dry elsewhere.
Further, unlike many iconic racetracks, the average person can lap the Nürburgring for real if they want to. A single tourist lap costs the equivalent of $45 Canadian, a low price to check it off your bucket list. Add in the tendency of manufacturers to use the 20-km Nordschleife (“North Loop”) as a yardstick to boast about the performance of their sportiest offerings and a nearly century-long history that includes some of F1's deadliest era, and the Nürburgring has the feel of other temples to speed like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway or Le Mans.
Like Le Mans, hundreds of thousands of spectators descend on the 'Ring each year for a 24-hour endurance race. Unlike Le Mans, it feels more specifically local to the area. The 24 Hours of Le Mans has higher racing classes and arguably more prestige. Outside of specific racing fan circles, you'd struggle to find someone who remembered who was on the team that won the race in 2019 (if you're curious, Audi racing veteran Frank Stippler was, repeating the feat with this year's victory).
So, it's brutal, capricious, and, even for the front-runners, the glow of victory is fleeting. So what's Hyundai doing here, complete with a whole three-story structure that features sim racing, a full-size concept car, and a live DJ booth all evening?
To understand how Korea has adopted the ‘Ring as its home, we must first travel to Hyundai's motorsport headquarters in Alzenau, east of Frankfurt, about two hours from the Nürburgring. Here, Hyundai builds its racing machines in a factory repurposed from a former life of building solar panels.
Hyundai's motorsports ambitions here are mostly centred around rally. As a manufacturer, Hyundai has won three World Rally Championships, the most recent of them coming this year, but it has been in the sport for a quarter century. Lined up in the factory is that history lesson, stretching back to a rally-prepped Tiburon coupe.
Success came with a racing version of the i20 subcompact, roughly equivalent to the Yaris, which is Toyota's WRC effort. Though Hyundai offers a performance version of the i20 in Europe, rally cars are wildly different from road cars and are purpose-built machines that would theoretically cost more than a million dollars each if you could buy one.
But the takeaway here is the compact and engaged size of Hyundai's motorsports effort. Even empty, the factory has a family feel, as befits a small and scrappy sport like rallying, the air of what it would have been like in the glory days of Subaru and Mitsubishi's rivalry. Posted right where the cars are assembled in a place of significance is a banner carrying the words of the late Hyundai rally driver Craig Breen: “Don't forget to have fun. You have to have fun. Life is very short.”
Initial N
Hyundai Vice President for its N brand is the Korean-born Joonwoo Park, who draws attention to the central N in his name. He is a nearly irrepressible font of automotive enthusiasm, rattling off his youthful obsession with all kinds of car culture: Gran Turismo and home sim rigs, JDM fare like Best Motoring and Initial D, and love for high-performance German engineering.
Domestically, Korean car culture isn't as mature or varied as found in nearby Japan. It exists, but at the fringes of a vast sea of pretty homogeneous everyday traffic, black and white crossovers and sedans and so on. The N brand's signature baby blue is a fish swimming against a current here, and while the breed is small, it has created something unique and vibrant.
The big reveal of the weekend is a special Time Attack version of the Ioniq N, and Park is quick to point out that besides the extreme aerodynamics, the car is mechanically close to what can be bought right out of a Hyundai showroom. Hyundai's N brand wants its production cars to share lineage with the racing machines, not just the overall shape, as is the case with the WRC cars.
Albert Biermann officially retired from Hyundai a few years ago, but it's no surprise to find him here at the Nürburgring. A former engineer at BMW's M group, he's been coming here since the early 1970s, first as a spectating youngster, later as a competitor. Korea wooed him away from BMW M as the latter grew into a more corporate identity, and he was able to change the face of the company. First, N stood for Namyang, Hyundai's main test facility in Korea. Biermann would make sure it would also stand for Nürburgring.
As a performance EV, the Ioniq N is a new type of product for Hyundai. It is, of course, blisteringly fast and crammed with technology – drift mode, anyone? – but it is also more SUV than hatchback, and nearly double the price of another N in Hyundai Canada's fleet, the Elantra N. Hyundai is planning to expand a motorsport role Ioniq with a one-make series, and beyond the Pikes Peak effort, has two more tricks up its sleeve before the end of the year.
For now though, if you want to buy a Nürburgring champion that does double-duty as a sensible daily driver, that'd be the Elantra N.
To Finish First, You Must First Finish
Touring Car Racing, TCR, is the kind of sport the likes of Biermann gets thoroughly excited about. It's where he began as an amateur racer, and he was there when the E30 M3 proved its mettle as one of the best in the knife fight era of the sport. The Elantra N seems like Hyundai copying Honda's recipe book by putting a turbocharged engine in a front-wheel-drive sedan while firming up the suspension and brakes to make a performance car. But there's more to the story.
Last year, Bryan Herta Autosport took the TCR Championship in North America for the fifth time in a row. Even with this dominance, it was something of a Cinderella story, as one of the two racers sharing driving duties was Robert Wickens, the Canadian IndyCar hero who was partially paralyzed by a crash in 2018. Wickens has been very public about his struggle to get back in the racing seat, using hand controls, and the championship win was the sweetest payoff.
Wickens' co-driver, American Harry Gottsacker, was part of the four-man North American team running the Elantra N here at the Nürburgring. Joining him is Mason Filippi and Canadian veteran driver Mark Wilkins of Ontario. Young racer Bryson Morris rounds out the team, and, at just 19 years old, put the car on pole ahead of the two other Elantra N teams from Europe and Asia.
The car setup here is the fastest it gets, with the most allowable power (just shy of 400 hp). Being front-wheel drive, the Elantra can get the power down more effectively early at corner exits compared to the rear-wheel-drive GT3s and GT2s, and when rains hit the track, Hyundais were running ahead of some of the 911s and BMW M4s. But it's not the speed that the racers first talk about; it's that the Elantra N has proven to be a dead reliable racing platform. It's ideal for endurance racing.
With qualifying sorted, crowds of fans thronged onto the front straight as the cars were staged in order. There seemed to be little order to anything, the mob flowing out of the way as crews pushed through the cars, then forming back behind them.
Likewise, during the race, the pit box was controlled mayhem. With a field of 130 cars, there are often two or three teams to a pit, making them especially crowded when onlookers elbow in. The Americas Elantra hurtles out of the night with the Canadian flag on its right-side rearview mirror. It receives fuel, new tires, and a driver change, and then spits off down the pit line with a crackle of turbocharged four-cylinder fury.
Fanbase N
The spectator zones at the Nürburgring are part of the draw, and they are less motorsport enthusiasts and more Mad Max encampment. People come out the entire week before to watch qualifying, building wooden structures to house them. There are hot tubs, DJ stands, makeshift viewing platforms, tents, big screen LCDs projecting the racing, and something like 15 per cent of Germany's annual domestic beer consumption appears to be going on.
The parking and camping areas are already muddy, and local farmers stand to make bank by dragging out all the performance-oriented road vehicles on low-profile tires come the Sunday drive home. The fans who showed up in the Unimog probably had the right idea. The night turns into a notorious rave, thumping Euro bass mixed with racecars screaming past.
Come the foggy morning, more than a few hungover fans are pushing their cars out early. Given that there's not much racing to see, the camera operators soon turn things into Germany's newest reality show: Hangover vs. Mud. It's a madhouse – but at the same time, everyone respectfully packs out all their garbage and recycling.
Among the hardcore, you see the expected BMW, Audi, and Porsche badges. (There is also a ton of Harley-Davidson paraphernalia. Germany loves big American V-Twin bikes.) Plenty of the campers have vintage stickers from beloved teams like Haribo Racing.
But you’ll occasionally see a stylized N or a flash of Hyundai's periwinkle bright Performance Blue. The N fans are here at the Nürburgring, some to cheer on the team, some just because the 'Ring is a pilgrimage, and part of the reason they love their car is because the place is part of Hyundai's adopted heritage.
Victorious, the racers and team gather for a group photo at the finish, Biermann and Park right up front. The racers are perhaps a bit deflated, eager to have put more laps in on such a historic course. They have every confidence that they'd have maintained that 1-2-3 layout, perhaps engaging in some friendly international rivalry between the Asian, European, and Americas teams.
At the Hyundai temporary centre, staff are already packing up. Ask Park, and he'll tell you that the site is exactly where BMW M used to have their race week facility. The Bavarians are now just on the other side of the racecourse, Toyota's Gazoo Racing just a short way further up from them.
Hyundai will, of course, be back here next year. The Nürburgring picks its champions. If you could ask it, it'd tell you: This is right where Hyundai's N division belongs.