FACE /OFF
I’VE JUST BEEN UNDRESSED BY A £1.4MILLION McLAREN ELVA.
It’s my own fault for refusing to wear the unforgivably dweeby McHelmet designed for this roofless, screenless screamer. My cosy bobble hat substitute is forcibly ejected, dances through the heat haze across the rear deck and is lost in the slipstream.
If you were in the Fiat Panda overtaken by a solid gold rocket car on the A87 near Fort William last month and pulled over to retrieve it after you’d finished laughing, could you post it on to the Inverlochy Castle Hotel? I’d like to stay again.
TopGear staffers do not habitually overnight in castles, but it’s important to get into character. We’re here to rendezvous with the apex of supercar excess: speedsters. Cars devoid of shelter, practicality, and any dregs of common sense. Jack has spent several months negotiating the loan of a Ferrari Monza and Aston Martin V12 Speedster, and thrown in the fastest car Caterham makes to see if TopGear might be able to offer a bargain alternative to this roofless self-indulgence.
We’d harangued McLaren for an Elva: the Senna’s (much) more beautiful, less downforce-literate cousin, but the prototype was too busy touring the world gathering deposits to be risked in the Scottish Highlands. So we elect to do without. Days before zero hour, there are murmurings from Woking. Staggered we’d got its competitors to agree and wracked with FOMO, McLaren has scrambled an Elva to Inverlochy in the nick of time.
You join us the evening before the shoot. Rowan squelches in from a location scout in the Caterham he’s voluntarily buzzed up from London. We gather in the entrance
