About 15 years ago, I spent a ‘track day’ at Silverstone with my best friend Sean Langan. The climax was an Audi TT race, the result of which has always been a matter of dispute. I crossed the line first, but a race official told us afterwards that, technically, I should have been disqualified for illegal overtaking. Needless to say, we both claimed victory.
This disagreement was destined to remain unresolved, until last week when Quintessentially invited me to the Millbrook Proving Ground to test-drive the Aston Martin range. I asked if I could bring Sean along and, to my delight, they said yes. The rematch was on.
Millbrook is a testing facility owned by General Motors set in 700 acres of rolling countryside in Bedfordshire. It’s used by everyone from the British Army to JCB and contains a range of different tracks where human crash-test dummies put the latest vehicles through their paces. There’s quite a lot of emphasis on ’elf and safety, as you’d imagine, but it’s by no means risk-free. Last month, a Honda test driver was killed while working here.
Unfortunately, individual races weren’t on the agenda. Most of Millbrook’s tracks are only designed to be driven along by one car at a time and, in any case, Aston Martin were reluctant to let Sean and me go head-to-head in a couple of £150,000 supercars. Nevertheless, there were opportunities to compete. There was a ‘city handling circuit’ in which we were expected to drive between zigzagging cones at 30mph and one of the tracks is known as the ‘mile straight’, on which we’d be taking turns to see what speed we could get up to in a V12 Vantage.
The day contained so much promise, but it soon became clear that Sean and I are simply not the same men we were in the mid-1990s.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in