The Nardò Ring

Thursday, 21st June 2007 by

Near the top of Italy's heel, there's a mysterious-looking structure - an absolutely huge circle, 4 kilometres across! You might guess that this is a particle accelerator, but in fact it's a perfectly circular high-speed test track - The Nardò Ring.

The ring is 12.5 km in circumference (around 7.8 miles) and is banked all the way round to allow the cars to achieve their absolute maximum top speed; which in practice means that a driver often need not turn the wheel at all once they get going. Essentially, cars can drive in a continuous straight line and yet somehow always end up exactly where they started...

The official site and the Wikipedia page are a little lacking, but see our other post about the Super Secret Volkswagen Test Track if you found this interesting.

Thanks to Ben, Luca D, munehiro, wanten, Luca, Rob James, woowoowoo, Craig, Dave, nixx, Alice Rizzoli, Mark, Francesco, Patrick and finally Tom!