STILL HOOKED ON SPEED
THE IDEA TO TAKE AN OCTAVIA vRS to Bonneville Speed Week was cooked up in a far-fetched ‘what if?’ conversation with then Skoda PR manager Pietro Panarisi. A ballsy and unlikely way to mark the tenth anniversary of the vRS performance brand, it would be a true adventure – one with no certain outcome, but the real possibility of achieving something truly extraordinary: a 200mph Skoda. And I was to be the lucky so-and-so who got to drive it.
As with all one-off builds, time was the greatest adversary. Overseen by then Skoda technician Ricky Elder (now proprietor of RE Performance, where he builds 1000bhp twin-turbo R8s and Gallardos), the car was completed on-schedule but, with a long boat ride ahead of it, we only had time to give it a gentle shakedown along the concrete runway at Bruntingthorpe before it was loaded into a container.
Landing at Long Beach in early August 2011, the car was transported to Salt Lake City in Utah, where the core
