Vroom

Last week I went to Castle Combe for my first track-day of the year. The car, my guest and I all came home in one piece and we had a great time. We both had a "moment" on the track. With one exception my car has benign and well balanced handling characteristics – unless you push it too far and then it will make a concerted effort to kill you. It's foible is lift-off oversteer. You're going fast around a corner and wish to reduce your speed slightly, you instinctively take your foot off the throttle and that loads the rear tyres more heavily, they lose traction and the car drift sideways (or spins if you don’t make a correction).

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I was in the car while my guest was driving around Tower corner. It became apparent that we were going too fast and were heading off the track rather than around the corner. He lifted off and the car started to drift dangerously sideways. It felt like an age (probably less than half a second) before he remembered what to do, put his foot back on the gas and made a slow and untidy exit from the corner.

My moment simply involved entering Bobbies chicane too fast. Instead of running into the tyre wall on the second apex I pressed the middle pedal (too) firmly and slowed to a crawl in a straight line amid a cloud of tyre smoke and noise.

One of the joys of the track day is looking around the paddock at all the different vehicles, like bird watching or train spotting. You normally see a shower of MX5's, Lotus Elises and Renault Sport hatchbacks, Monday was no different. You also normally see an obscure single seater that spends the whole day in the paddock up on ramps with a laptop hanging out of the engine cover - Sadly I didn't see one of those but there were two really interesting vehicles:

An unrestored 1976 Porsche 911 racecar. It was beautiful, tiny, and showing its age. The owner said it was worth about £250,000 and would be worth a significant sum once it was road-legal and tidied up. I admired his nerve in taking it on a track with inexperienced drivers like me to give it a shakedown.

An old articulated lorry. I've seen those before, but this one had an amazing system of gantries and contained six race prepared MX5's, an enormous amount of spare parts and tools, and a small workshop.

Richard "It's normally a Radical" B