03 Oct 07
The idea of taking a good car for a good drive in all bar the most remote corners of the UK is something close to a cruel myth. If the law doesn't spoil your fun, the traffic undoubtedly will. Yes you can have a quick squirt between the cameras and if you're lucky you may even be able to string a few corners together before someone ambles into your path. But hour after hour of proper motoring on accessible yet quiet roads in the heart of England? You have to be kidding.
Apparently not. If you are as organised as those behind this year's fabulous Tour Britannia, this automotive nirvana is not some impossible dream but an entirely realisable reality. It's not cheap, costing from a little less than £2,000 to a tad more than £4,000 per car depending on the details of your entry. But with the event starting on a Monday and ending on a Friday, and with 1,000 miles of great roads, studded with fabulous race tracks and fiendish special stages, I couldn't find a single one of well over 100 competitors who did not think it worth every penny.
During the week we visited Brands Hatch, Mallory, Donington and Oulton Parks as well as what I now believe to be Britain's best hillclimb course at Loton Park. We tested ourselves and our cars to the limit at them all, as well as places such as Cholmondley and Belvoir Castles, and finally returned to the event base at Coombe Abbey in Coventry exhausted but entirely elated simply to have made it.
Like 4Car's John Simister I took part in the regularity section, which meant we'd not be racing at the tracks but trying to string together two laps in as close to identical times as possible. Infuriatingly, despite the extra horsepower emanating from the engine of the Porsche 911 I shared with my brother and a cockpit bristling with all manner of electronic trickery designed to make this sort of thing easier, we couldn't get near the metronomic consistency of the crack father and daughter Simister crew. Still it was fun trying, especially as the organisers gave us a few 'reconnaissance' laps, in theory for us to practice our timing but, in reality, altogether too tempting not to go flat out.
