Nardò Ring
test track
The Nardò Ring, originally known as Pista di prova di Nardò della Fiat (Fiat's Nardò test track) when it was built in 1975, is a high speed test track located at more than 23 kilometres (14 mi) north-west of the town of Nardò, Italy, in the southern region of Apulia, in the Province of Lecce. It was acquired by Porsche Engineering in 2012 from its former owners, Prototipo SpA. Porsche now calls the site Nardò Technical Center.
Description
The track is 12.5 kilometres (7.8 mi) long and is round, has four lanes for cars and motorcycles totaling 16 metres (52 ft) in width and has a separate inner ring for trucks at a width of 9 metres (30 ft). In the cars/motorcycle ring the lanes are banked at such a degree that a driver in the outer most lane doesn't need to turn the wheel while driving at speeds of up to 240 km/h (149 mph). In essence, at the so-called neutral speed which is different for the four lanes, one can drive as if in a straight lane (The centripetal force required to drive in a circle is provided by the ground reaction force, which is angled away from vertical and therefore has a horizontal component pushing the vehicle into the turn).
Extremely fast cars still require the steering wheel to be turned when going faster than the neutral speed. For example, the Koenigsegg CCR which set a speed record for a production car at the Nardò Ring did so with the steering wheel at a 30° angle. This speed record has since been beaten by the Bugatti Veyron at Volkswagen Group's private Ehra-Lessien straight line test track in Germany, and hence the CCR only holds the speed record for the Nardò Ring. In the process of fighting a turn as needed when going faster than the neutral speed quite a bit of potential top speed is lost and hence a fast car will go faster in a straight line than what is possible on the Nardò Ring. Even at the neutral speed, in a banked turn a car runs a bit heavier than it would in a straight line, since the downforce created by the banking increases the rolling resistance on the tires.
“Nardò Ring” enters the record as test track. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nardò, Ring and test can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1256520. Authority coordinates are 40.327, 17.826. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nardò Ring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.