Nürburgring Akademie e.V. – Motorsport from a different perspective

The teams and their drivers will have to wait a full ten months before the IDM returns to the Nürburgring. The next round in the Eifel is not scheduled until early September 2027. Those who prefer to pursue an academic path rather than becoming racing drivers or mechanics need not give up on racing and everything associated with it. The Nürburgring Academy offers the right guidance when it comes to choosing a career.

In collaboration with various universities and companies based in the motorsport sector, the Nürburgring Academy has organised, amongst other things, subject-specific block weeks, lectures, seminar papers and workshops at the Nürburgring in recent years. What began with the ‘Motorsport Management’ degree programme at Kaiserslautern/Zweibrücken University of Applied Sciences and the ‘Motorsport Engineering’ programme at Stralsund University of Applied Sciences has since grown into a network covering a variety of topics and involving several universities. To provide these collaborations with a unified organisational structure, the Nürburgring Akademie e.V. was officially founded on 28 May 2018 and has been growing steadily ever since.

The universities as partners at the Nürburgring

The network currently comprises the universities of Kaiserslautern (Motorsport Management), Stralsund (Motorsport Engineering), Trier (Mechanical Engineering/Vehicle Engineering with the Motorsport Engineering module) and RWTH Aachen (Vehicle Engineering and Engine Technology). On the sports science side, the RheinAhrCampus in Remagen, the IST University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf and the SRH University of Applied Sciences in Heidelberg form part of the Academy; their degree programmes in Sports Management and Sports Facility Management have been specifically enhanced to include the subject of motorsport.

Also part of these partnerships are Mittweida University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Applied Computer and Life Sciences, and the Apollon University of Health Management in Bremen. Building on the training modules for medical students on clinical placements in emergency and rescue medicine, which the Marienhaus Group has been running at the Nürburgring for many years, this existing collaboration has been incorporated into the academic cooperation network and will shortly be expanded on the medical side to include Aachen University Hospital and the European University of Applied Sciences Rhein/Erft.

The Nürburgring Association

The Nürburgring Association sees itself not only as the organisation that provides the premises or the circuit for development and testing activities, but also as having set itself the task of actively supporting these developments. In addition to providing personnel and financial resources, the Nürburgring helps to formulate topics for student projects drawn from motorsport or the management of a motorsport venue, and offers technical and logistical support for their completion.

This applies to semester projects, Bachelor’s or Master’s theses, dissertations and seminar papers, as well as to workshops, residential weekends, statistical analyses, audience surveys, workshop visits and much more. The link between the content and the core competence of motorsport is always taken into account and established.