“IT HAS A SENSE OF HUMOUR, AND THAT’S A RARE THING”
We didn’t start with the Praga. We started in a pair of Skoda Enyaqs and a VW Multivan, crawling silently around Autodrom Most in the semi-darkness of the previous evening. A track day had just finished, the pulsating echoes of motorbikes had stopped reverberating off the grandstands, silence had returned. And in our cars there’s no radio chatter or banter, we’re all quiet and circumspect. Because even at 20mph it’s clear this is a Big Boy Pants track.
The corners are numbered, not named. Less evocative. It’s harder to express fear and trepidation when reverentially whispering about turns 4 and 19, rather than some mythically titled bend such as Pouhon or Paddock Hill. But ultra fast, ‘are they really flat?’ 4 and 19 are a genuine test of mettle and metal.
A full lap seems to take ages, we regroup at the end of the main straight and discover we’ve all come to same conclusion: Most is about 30 per cent bigger than we expected. We’re cowed by its scale, the elevation and direction changes, the cresting blind entries. The next morning precisely no one makes a beeline for the 800ers. Even two days later the 804bhp McLaren Elva and 819bhp Ferrari 296 GTB will remain demonstrably faster than anything else, hitting 165mph on the main straight, pushing so fast out of corners that they put you on different parts of the circuit to anything else, require different lines and approaches.
But we start with all the cars trawling round together for the cameras at 30mph. It’s a good excuse to look at them alongside each other, the impact they have, the scale and size of them. I’m in the M4 CSL and feeling small. It’s
