With the cost of everything going up, are Nurburgring prices going up too? How much is a Nurburgring ticket going to cost you? Is it cheaper to buy a season ticket? How can you get free bonus laps? Are Nurburgring track days better value?
We look at all this and more in this article.
Contents
Nurburgring prices for Touristenfahrten in 2024
If you want to purchase individual lap tickets, the Nordschleife ticket price for 2024 is as follows:
- Monday – Thursday: 30 Euros per lap
- Friday – Sunday: 35 Euros per lap
- Public holidays: 35 Euros per lap.
Keep your eye on the Nurburgring twitter page. Once in a blue moon they offer discounted lap tickets for a particular tourist driving session, like they did on the 31st March 2022:
Tourist Drives for 20 quid 😎
— Nürburgring (@nuerburgring) March 24, 2022
1 hour longer, 5 euros cheaper 👏
➡ Thursday, 31 March | 04:00 - 06:30 PM
➡ Tourist drives Nordschleife
Photo: @RingRaceShoot pic.twitter.com/1Uqdo6QEJt
Nurburgring Grand Prix track tourist driving prices
On select days throughout the year, the Nurburgring Grand Prix Strecke (GP track) will also be available for tourist drives. The entrance locations for the Nordschleife and GP track tourist sessions are in different locations – so make sure you know where you’re going.
The GP track tourist drives are held in 15 minute sessions, and the cost of one 15 minute session is the same regardless of which day of the week it is.
- Monday – Sunday (including public holidays): 35 Euros per 15 minute session
How to buy nurburgring lap tickets
online
Since 2017, you have been able to pre-pay for your Nurburgring tickets by signing up to an account on the Nurburgring website and loading your account with Euros. Your account dashboard allows you to view your transaction and lapping history, as well as providing some real-time information on the track such as the weather, webcams and its open / closed status.
You can download a QR code from your account, which you would then need to send to your phone (easiest may be to take a picture of it with your camera on your phone). The barriers to enter the Ring have QR code readers which you can then show this code to.
There used to be Nurburgring app which allowed you to view all of this data and top up your account easily from your phone, but this has been removed from the Android and Apple app stores.
Physical tickets
You can still purchase physical Nurburgring tickets as well, in the form of a Nurburgring Green Hell card. Your online Nurburgring account allows you to assign a card to your profile, so your current account balance can be mirrored on your card and this can be used to get you through the barriers. You can view your current cards or deactivate them if you need to.
You don’t have to use the online loading system at all if you don’t want to. You can just go and buy a physical ticket and ask the attendant to load X number of Euros on to it for you.
You can purchase your physical tickets from the following locations:
- The ticket office in the car park opposite the Nurburgring entrance (often a big queue on busy days)
- The ED Tankstelle petrol station just a couple of minutes drive away from the Nordschleife entrance
- The Ring Info centre on the Nurburgring boulevard, near to the rollercoaster
Want to know how busy it currently is at the Ring? Check out the live Nurburgring webcams to get an idea of how long you might need to queue to buy a ticket, or get through the entry barriers.
Also check the opening hours before heading to the circuit to make sure it’s actually open.
If you are hiring a Nurburgring rental car, check with the company whether lap tickets are included or not – normally they offer packages both with and without laps. If you want to film your laps in the rental car, most companies will have some kind of camera mount setup in the car already. If not, make sure you’re aware of the filming and camera rules.
Before you head out on track you will want to check out the official Nurburgring rules for Tourist Driving. Familiarise yourself with these – they’ll help keep you and everyone else safe.
Green Hell Credits - free Nurburgring bonus laps
There is also a bonus system which awards you free Green Hell Credits (GHCs) depending on how much you load on to your account in bulk. GHCs can be redeemed against the cost of laps, where 1 GHC = 1 Euro. These are the bonus tiers:
- 0-99 Euros – 0% bonus
- 100-199 Euros – 10% bonus GHCs
- 200-499 Euros – 15% bonus GHCs
- 500+ Euros – 20% bonus GHCs
To see how many GHCs you will be awarded for loading a given amount of Euros on to your account, log in to your Nurburgring driving account and click on the My GHD tab.
There are 4 options to load your account, the first 3 are pre-set amounts where it shows you the amount of bonus GHCs awarded. The 4th option is a user-defined amount, where you enter the amount you want to load and it shows you the bonus credits you will receive.
The minimum amount you can load on your account to get one free weekday lap is 200 Euros. For this you will get a 15% bonus, so you will be awarded 30 Green Hell Credits.
The minimum amount you need to load to get a free weekend lap is 235 Euros; the 15% bonus will give you 35 bonus GHCs.
Bear in mind that because of the tiered bonus system, you would get 30 credits if you loaded 200 Euros on to your account in one go. If, however, you did two separate loads of 100 Euros, which is in the 10% bonus tier, you would get two bonuses of 10 GHCs, so only 20 credits in total and not enough to redeem a full lap on weekend nor weekday.
Above are a couple of examples of how many GHCs would be awarded for different Euro load amounts. Loading 600 Euros on to your account would give you 120 bonus Green Hell Credits.
If you were only going to do weekday laps at a cost of 30 Euros a lap, you would get 20 laps from your original load of 600 Euros, plus another 4 laps from your 120 bonus credits. So a total of 24 laps, which you can either think of as getting 4 free laps, or you paid 600 Euros for 24 laps which averages out to be 25 Euros a lap.
If you are planning to do a good number of laps, think about loading your card in bulk to gain from the higher tiered bonuses.
Season ticket / Saisonkarte 2024 nurburgring prices
In 2024 the cost for the yearly season ticket is 3000 Euros. With this you get an unlimited number of laps to be used on any of the tourist driving sessions across the whole year, on both the Nordschleife and the Nurburgring GP track.
The Nurburgring are offering an early-bird discount on season ticket purchases for 2024. If you purchase a ticket before the 22nd December 2023 you will save 250 Euros, so the season ticket will cost you 2750 Euros.
As a season ticket holder you get some other benefits like a personalised card, a Nordschleife trackwalk, ‘backstage’ access to NLS endurance races, a 20 Euro voucher for the fan shop, 10% off one purchase of track photos at Racetracker.de and a few more things that seem barely worthwhile and slightly insulting considering you’re shelling out 3 grand!
Click here for more info on the season ticket and a full list of the benefits.
To make the season ticket worthwhile, you need to do a good number of laps. The numbers below are how many laps you would need to do to break even on the cost of the Nurburgring season ticket against buying individual laps. If you do more than the breakeven number of laps over a year, the season ticket becomes better value.
Full price season ticket
These numbers above do not include the free laps you might get from bonus Green Hell Credits, as mentioned earlier. Bear those in mind if you are weighing up whether a season ticket is worth it or not, as buying in big chunks to get the discounts will push the breakeven point higher.
For example, if you bought lap tickets in a 500 Euro block to get the maximum 20% bonus, you would receive 600 GHCs. This gives you 20 bonus weekday laps at 30 Euros each, or 17 bonus weekend laps at 35 Euros each.
Nurburgring track day prices
You may wonder whether doing a track day at the Ring is better value than tourist laps. If you haven’t already, check out our post on Nurburgring Track Days where we discuss the benefits of a track day over tourist driving, and also share a few tips on what to look out for when booking a track day.
Be mindful that different trackday providers at the Ring have different policies on third party liability, as discussed in that post.
We have put together a comprehensive list of the track days at the Ring in 2023. To get this full hi-res PDF list, with direct links to track booking pages and information on each track day provider’s third party insurance policy, enter your details and hit the button below to have it sent straight to your inbox.
Nurburgring 2023 trackday list download
PDF with all dates and prices for the 2023 Nurburgring track days.
To compare the value of track days to toursit driving, take this Nurburgring track day with Circuit Days, a cost of £599 or 670 Euros. To buy a weekend lap ticket for Touristenfahrten is now 35 Euros, meaning 20 laps or more during the trackday would bring the per-lap cost down to less than the 35 Euros of a TF lap.
20 laps in one trackday would be good going, but with no closures and some consecutive lapping then it is feasible.
