Fast cars and bacon butties = heaven on earth
Yes, that really is us at the wheel getting the Subaru to lean into the corner
It’s not very often we’re allowed to step away from the computer screen, so imagine our delight when we were shipped off to Staffordshire to drive some very fast cars.
Getting our priorities right, we signed in and then headed straight for the cafe for a tasty bacon butty. Truth be told we were hoping it’d calm our nerves, but all we could see from the window was a whole plethora of shiny sports cars leaning into corners and that made us even more excited.
First up was the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII (always in roman numerals, fact fans!). Now, it’s been a while since we’ve driven a right-hand drive car, so it was comedy watching the instructors face drop in disbelief as we tried to get in the passenger side. By the time we pulled out onto the tarmac track we noticed his hand was firmly holding the door panel. And was that white knuckles?
He needn’t have worried as by the second lap we’d got back into it and it really was great fun to drive, even though we kept trying to cheat and dropping from fourth to second gear and as instructor Steve said “missing out third gear altogether”. Oops. Next up was the Subaru WRX Sti circa 2003 in Blue Mica with gold alloys and 300bhp, don’t you know. And what a totally awesome car. This one really is our favourite car ever and we were giving it hands in the air as we overtook the Lamborghini!
So, we thought we’d been driving quite fast, but it wasn’t until our high speed passenger ride in the Ford Focus RS that we realised we were trifling amateurs. SO fast. Our brain was having trouble processing the images from our eyes we were going THAT fast. A truly incredible drive we never thought a Ford Focus was capable of.
The Ford Focus RS – in the right hands it really is quite fast!
Having recovered from the Focus, we headed over to a special gravelly section where we were to have a go at proper rally skills, namely handbrake turns. The poor little Peugeot 106 rally car was really taking a hammering as we drove really quite badly. Our patient instructor Ayden didn’t seem to mind (maybe because he doesn’t have to repair the car?!), but it really is unfathomably mad trying to just keep a grip on the steering wheel when the tyres are just scrabbling for some grip. Much fun though and no-one seems to mind when you take out a few plastic cones as you spin round.
To celebrate the end of our top half day rally driving experience, we thought we’d go for another bacon butty (hungry work all this fast driving you know!), but we decided that’d be just too extravagant, so we said our goodbyes to the friendly bunch at Staffordshire and hopped back into our Kangoo with an earth-shattering 85bhp. *sigh*.