The Nürburgring motorsport complex is located in the Eifel mountains of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, in the town of Nürburg. The facility encompasses the historic Nordschleife configuration built in the 1920s — a 20.830 km circuit that earned the nickname "the Green Hell" from Scottish racing driver Jackie Stewart — alongside the purpose-built 4.556 km Grand Prix circuit constructed between 1981 and 1984.
The GP-Strecke, used for WorldSBK rounds, was built to meet modern FIA safety standards and replaced the original Nordschleife as the primary venue for international racing at the facility. The new track offered conventional pit facilities, adequate run-off areas, and a layout more amenable to television coverage than the sprawling and impossible-to-broadcast Nordschleife.
During the 1990s the Superbike World Championship used the Nürburgring GP circuit as a round venue, providing a German stop on the calendar and tapping into the sizeable motorsport audience in central Europe. The circuit's layout, while considered by some fans to lack the raw character of older venues, presented riders with a balanced combination of medium-speed corners, braking zones, and a main straight that rewarded top-end performance.
The period when WorldSBK visited the Nürburgring coincided with some of the championship's most competitive eras. Carl Fogarty's dominance aboard Ducati machinery through 1993 to 1999 — winning the title four times — defined WorldSBK's identity during these years, and the Nürburgring rounds were contested against the backdrop of the Fogarty-versus-field narrative that drove European motorcycle racing coverage.
The Nürburgring's association with motorcycle racing predates WorldSBK considerably. German motorcycle Grands Prix were held on the Südschleife for many years, and the German GP continued at the venue until moving permanently to Hockenheim in 1980. The WorldSBK rounds at the GP circuit in the 1990s thus carried a historic weight, placing production-derived superbikes on a circuit with deep roots in German motorsport culture.
The transition of the German Grand Prix for motorcycles away from the Nordschleife had been a safety-driven necessity: the original circuit's 22.835 km length and complex of blind crests and corners made adequate marshalling and medical coverage prohibitively difficult for the era's growing field sizes and increasing speeds.
The Nürburgring no longer features on the WorldSBK calendar, with the championship's German presence having faded as the calendar evolved to prioritize circuits with stronger commercial agreements and newer facilities. Nonetheless, the Nürburgring rounds of the 1990s represent a chapter in the championship's development when WorldSBK was actively cultivating a European footprint beyond the traditional Ducati strongholds of Italy and the UK. For sim racing, the Nürburgring GP circuit remains a standard-bearer of European road racing tracks and appears widely across motorcycle and car racing simulations.