Sacred sites on road to metal heaven

GERMANY, the centre of automotive universe, has plenty of museums and factory tours for petrolhead pilgrims.

Dave Bell’s Seabreacher costs $115,000, and can jump 5m in the air.

IT’S just a little while until Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Kwanzaa and Winter-een-mas, so you’re already thinking about where you can go to avoid the responsibilities of the house, dog, cat, bird, fish and, it being the season of festive infidelity, perhaps even the car. First stop has to be Germany.

Believe it or not, Merkelstadt is metal lovers’ heaven. We start our tour in Stuttgart. Here you get two nearly brand-new architectural masterpieces devoted to great god auto. The real looker is the Porsche Museum, with 80 porkers on show.

The whole structure sits on just three V-shaped columns. Right now there’s an exhibition with five decades of Porsche prototypes and concept cars. You can combine the museum with a factory and restaurant tour where a particular highlight on the menu is US prime beef grilled fresh right in front of your eyes by Porsche’s very best mechanics.

Over the road (figuratively speaking) is Mercedes. A more sophisticated creation by Dutch (another fun-loving race) architects UN Studio, the Mercster museum has double the number of cars, with even more food outlets. You can see a “single continuous timeline of over 125 years of auto industry history”.

Not only that, but there’s also an engine tour. Who doesn’t want to see a diesel engine put together? I hate to tell you, but it’s not as much fun as Mercedes World at Brooklands outside London, where, for a small queen’s ransom, you can drive any Mercster you like around a small track.

But Mr Mercedes, Dieter Zetsche, doesn’t want you just stopping at Stuttgart. Nein, he says, head to Gaggenau (the town, not the dishwasher) for the Unimog Museum, then to Neumarkt for the Maybach Museum and finally to Ladenburg for the Dr Carl Benz Museum.

After that, it’s an autobahn drive over to Ingolstadt, where Audi not only has a museum but also the marketing and customer building with cars, sales staff and two restaurants, a bar and a wine shop. All for $3. What more could you want?

No visit to Germany is complete without Wolfsburg where VW, the mother ship of Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Ducatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, SEAT and Skoda, has the Autostadt, a fun park (yes I know a contradiction in terms in Deutschland), a museum and a factory tour. But wait. If you’re the sort of person who is the first one with the lampshade on your head at the party don’t miss the Wolfsburg Watershow. The biggest in the world!

Then we’re off to Munich where BMW, the fathership of Mini and Rolls-Royce, has the three-hour tour of everything for $30 (no wheelchairs or strollers).

We’ve kept the best to second last. Just south of Cologne is the Nurburgring. This is a 21km track with 73 corners where up to 10 tourists a year get killed, not surprising since anyone in a car, bike, bus, caravan or other horseless carriage can speed around the course for $45. If I were you I’d book a ride with Claudia Hurtgen in the 420 kW BMW M5 Taxi for about $400.

Finally, if you can’t get away, head to Perth with $115,000 and Dave Bell from Seabreacher will sell you a submarine that looks like a shark. On the surface it’s good for 80km/h, below 40km/h, but best of all it’s the same size as a great white and can jump 5m into the air. Who needs the Nurburgring?

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