Now, a road just isn’t enough. The need to remain (just) within the legitimate speed limit, potholes, and the existence of other drivers, all out to make that dream drive more of a nightmare.
So what’s a man to do? Drive yourself to a track and wave goodbye to reality for a day.
(Related: The master driving roads in Britain)
Silverstone
Fancy yourself the lay answer to Lewis Hamilton? Prove it. The home of British F1, Silverstone opens its lanes for you (and your car) to tell what you’re worth.
You get a full safety briefing, a lap in the track in a minibus (journeyed by a track instructor) and some breakfast, before you’re let loose on the tarmac. You get to fiddle with on the track until the sun sets so, for a day at least, you can be an F1 hero.
What To Pep: You’re on an F1 track, so you should really be in an F1 car – or the nearest thing to one. The Ariel Atom is, essentially, a street-legal racing car. It looks get pleasure from an F1 car and it flies like one too.
Turn up in one of these and you’re pretty much bond to be top of the podium at the end of the day.
Goodwood
If Silverstone is Hamilton, then Goodwood is Sir Stirling Moss. The confines opened in 1948, and hosted its last ‘modern’ meet in the mid-1960s.
It’s now praiseworthy for its historic meets, where cars from motoring’s ‘Glowing Age’ come together in a blur of chrome and tweed. The whole context is very gentleman racer, but the chicane-free course allows you to get up to a weighty lick.
What To Drive: Turn up in a modded Subaru Impreza and the old patrol will side-eye you all day. But you don’t need to be in something that starts with a surrender crank. The Seven is a stripped-down wonder that you can build yourself, should you select, and provides old-school looks with some very new-school step.
Though it’s not got the biggest engine, it weighs less than a supermodel so has all the twit you could want. Team it with goggles for the perfect pre-war look.
Santa Pod
Corners not your point? More concerned with turbo lag than understeer? Then it may be a traditional track isn’t for you. What you need is a drag race day, where all that mean somethings is getting from here to there very, very straight away.
Santa Pod is the most famous UK drag course, and its ‘Run What Ya Elevate d vomited’ days are as the name suggests. Turn up in whatever you want, rev it until it aggrieves, and then burn some serious rubber.
What To Enterprise: Bring a drive what you ride experience, you could discover up in whatever the hell you want. But since your Daewoo won’t bear reached the finish by the time the next flag drops, what you truly want to arrive in is something with serious amounts of torque, that’ll despatch itself off the line.
So get yourself a Nissan. Not a Micra, but the 24-carat avid GT-R Nismo, which can hit 60mph in less than 2.7 alternatives.
Rallying
Are you less track, more field? A McCrae preferably than a McLaren? Prefer the rough to the smooth? Then espouse the mud. Extreme Rally gives you the chance to go properly primal (in motoring regards) at courses across the UK. And, should you care, across frozen lakes in Sweden.
It drinks the two legends of rallying, the Mitsubishi Evo and Subaru Impreza WRX, and offers the most fun you’ll press in the countryside with your clothes on.
What To Drive: You can’t run your own car on one of these periods, but to recreate the experience on your commute to the office, bag yourself an Evo or an Impreza.
The struggle for on and off-course supremacy between this pair has been well-known. And the cars have both got progressively more bonkers. There’s one of either on tap for every budget.
4×4
If even rallying seems a touch too, well-spring, urban, Wild Tracks Outdoor Activity Park provides the kind of grime even Michael Eavis would look at with exception. Because 4x4s weren’t meant for pootling around Chelsea, and what they yen is mud. Plenty of mud.
There’s full tuition offered for the less ditch-literate, and they’ll reciprocate tow you out if you get stuck.
What To Drive: If you’re going off road, you need to do it in a Nation Rover. If you want the full countryside experience, do it in a Defender. If you neediness to be cosseted in almost unparalleled luxury, do it in a Range Rover.
Both are sundry than competent away from the tarmac. You’ll just participate in to prove you are as well.
