An “exclusive opportunity” to try a long-awaited new car turns into a media circus – what did I really learn?
The alarm goes at 4.30am. Ahead of you is a 150-mile drive that thousands will be doing this week: the well-trodden way to the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Except you’re going a day early, to the neighbouring racing circuit, for a date with 1600bhp. Yes, sixteen hundred.
You’re carrying out the magazine’s first test of one new all-electric, tri-motor sports car. The FoS is an increasingly popular venue for the public debut of new performance cars. Manufacturers therefore tend to build preliminary media test drives around it.
The invite to this one definitely said it would be “an exclusive opportunity” suitable for “experienced testers”. When you arrive, however, it seems those definitions have been stretched a little. There are six cars in the pit lane but perhaps 10 or 12 road testers you recognise – and as many vloggers and social media influencers again, all milling excitedly around the cars, smartphones in hand.
When Jenson Button turns up, he does us older hands an unexpected service by distracting the Instagram crew as they swarm on him demanding their selfies. Even so, if there are this many people in the UK with “plenty of track experience” of 1000bhp-plus electric sports cars, then my name is Michael Faraday. Still, we’re all here. Better get on with it.
Next, after disclaiming any legal rights you might have had, against either the circuit operators or the car manufacturer in the event of accident or injury, you are ushered into a half-hour press conference.
This follows time-honoured convention. First, some superfluous product introduction, which, if you’ve read the press material sent to you in advance, you will already know. Second, some design waffle about “flowing lines” and “sculptural artistry”, which will be about as useful for your story as the first part. And, finally, some technical information – which won’t be quite as extensive or detailed as you might have liked, because they had to make time for all of the earlier rubbish. Your PR contact will promise to send you the slides via email, but will they arrive on time? You have questions, but you won’t ask them here because why share the answers with the whole room? In any case, time is short. Remind me, why did we bother with this bit again?
Now, you wait for the one-and-only, three-lap, perhaps five-minute track stint you have been promised, in the car you have come all this way to drive. Colleagues take their turn, returning looking little the wiser than when they had departed; somebody you’re chatting to wonders if this might be the farthest he’s driven, for the least useful amount of test time, in some four decades in the job.
Finally your turn comes. There is 1584bhp under your right foot, apparently. You do a gentle installation lap; a quicker flying lap; and then, just as it feels like the beginnings of your impressions are forming in your mind, it’s all over – before you have even had a chance to acclimatise yourself to that funny, grabby brake pedal, never mind anything else.
You haven’t been able to drive exactly as you would like, which might ordinarily involve experimenting with drive programs, stability control settings and launch control. The instructor in the passenger seat was under strict orders to not let you exceed a given speed; to not let you slow down or stop on track; or generally to not let you do your job quite as you might have chosen to. The fact is, even if he had stayed absolutely mute, you wouldn’t have driven as you would if he had not been there at all.
No matter how many times you ask, that’s your lot. Have a demonstration of our automated parking system, sir. Take a short road test loop in a car that you haven’t actually come here to drive (although, of course, you will). The main event is over. Three laps. Five minutes. Not too fast, now. But tell me, what did you think?
By mid-afternoon you’re back at your office desk, writing up what impressions you could glean against an imminent deadline – first on the car you didn’t expect to drive, and then on the one you did. Then, at the end of an 18-hour day, you’re finally off the clock.
People tell me regularly that I must have “the best job in the world”. True, it can certainly have its moments. But only rarely do they go on to ask: “What’s it really like?”
That, for the record, was a not-unusual, alarmingly real Wednesday.
