I couldn't find a definitive answer to the op, but i don't think the German gov owns it. i read the owners got into big trouble with the German gov for not complying with tobacco advertisement...which suggests its privately owned
The Nürburgring GmbH is actually owned by the federal state (Bundesland) Rheinland-Pfalz and the county Ahrweiler, but it's basically privately managed. The state just asks every once in a while what the GmbH is doing with it's money and why it is not making any profit.
They gave a licence to virtually recreate the track very very recently (GTR Evo rings a bell?), doing that again so soon without getting much of it (somebody ask SimBin how much they payed!) is very unlikely...
rFactor has a beautiful reproduction of Nurburgring: Nordschleife, the GP track, and the VLN track. It's great, the best I've seen in a computer game. But actually racing in it is horrendous: the races are very long or not worth playing, and the amount of time lost to get back into pits after damage, etc., is worthy of a nanny-nap. Oh, and there is distinct lack of overtaking due to the length of the track.
Aston GP/GT/Historic and Fernbay Black are long enough, IMHO.
If we want a "classic" track, I think LFS should go for Spa or Bathurst for one-layout tracks; or Silverstone for multi-layout ones.
Hmm. I kind of see where you're coming from here. They manage to have multiple cars on there irl, why would LFS be that much of a problem? Plus, being such a large track, odds are everybody's gonna get split up pretty quickly.
You can't blame the track for that. We just 128 cars on track at once. If the Nurby was added, and there were no technical limitations (damn to hell whoever invented bandwidth), I can see there being enough people for this.
Bob, when racing teams test and setup the cars irl would it be beneficial to simulate the track as well?..well i guess maybe for training purposes LFS could strive to claim to be a racing engineers base testing application I have never seen the tools of racing engineers nor have i ever been in pit-lane, so my question may seem silly, what tools do these engineers use?