But true rally driving is more difficult, as you discover if you enrol on a rally course. Driving at speed down forest trails and through water-filled craters is nerve racking and bone shaking. Suddenly the rules of the road don’t apply — and neither should the faint hearted.
“Rallying is about challenging yourself physically and mentally,” says Nigel Wetton, a former competition driver and today’s instructor at the Silverstone Rally Experience. “It’s about driving a car as quickly as you can down gravel roads that you have never seen before. It’s about technique and guts.”
I’m sitting in a damp Portakabin for a pre-thrash briefing and everyone is nodding sagely. Technique and guts. Check. “There are three key areas to keeping the car on the track,” he continues, “and everyone who comes here thinks they know them, but without exception none of them do. They all think, ‘How hard can steering, braking and gearchanging be?’ It doesn’t take long on the track for them to appreciate the answer.”
Fifteen minutes later my race-tuned Peugeot 206 with close-ratio six-speed gearbox and roll cage is sliding towards a tree. I can’t see exactly how far away the tree is because the side window I am looking out of is streaked with mud, but the distance is diminishing rapidly.
My left hand is fixed to the handbrake, which is yanked up, locking the wheels, while my right is at an awkward angle on the steering wheel at full lock. The engine is revving so loudly I can barely hear Wetton through the intercom in my helmet. He is telling me to give it more bananas. More? Surely he means less. I come off the throttle and stamp on the brake. Nothing happens. The car is still travelling sideways. There is a jarring bump and a thud, the car lurches to the right and comes to a halt. Then it stalls.
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Of all the motor sport disciplines, rallying is the most counter-intuitive. Drivers must go round a course at breakneck speeds with hard immovable objects on either side, and whereas in track racing the lines you must drive are clearly defined and are to be approached smoothly with no skidding, on the rally course the driver is encouraged to make the car mishandle. Controlled anarchy if you like. Wetton regards track drivers with barely concealed contempt: fancy Dans with no brawn.
Despite this there is no doubt that rallying is a delicate art. The car should slide around hairpins with balletic ease, driver and machine embraced in a muscular mechanical dance, pirouetting around the track to the undulating whine of the engine and the slalom rhythm of the bends.
This rarely happens on the Silverstone rally track, where wannabe Colin McRaes come to try their hand and see if they can live up to their PlayStation alter egos. “When men get here they think they know it all,” says Wetton. “They tend to drive too fast too early, but speed without technique is a waste of time. Fortunately we have quite a wide buffer zone between the track and the trees and the most likely thing that a driver is going to hit are the cones along the verge.”
As it happens it is the cones that have stopped my slide. Wetton is pulling two from under the Peugeot while I try to compose myself. Hitting cones may not sound like a big deal; heading towards a tree in controlled conditions and at no great speed might not sound too frightening either; but I’m shaken by having been in an out-of-control car that has crashed.
Wetton reattaches the front bumper and gets back in. The trick, he says, is to anticipate the next bend. Get in the right gear then dab the brakes. This sends the weight of the car onto the driven front wheels, increasing grip and acceleration. The wheel is turned, the handbrake applied and the locked rear end slides around the bend. You slip off the handbrake, and floor the throttle to steer you around the apex and power away. All this happens in the blink of an eye.
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The problem is not just getting the order right, but also processing the instructions from Wetton. “Next left, hard left, power, third gear, brakes, second gear, handbrake on, off, power, third gear, straight, go on give it some, next right . . .” By the time you’ve thought through all that, you are, like me, well and truly in the cones.
“Ha,” laughs Wetton, who says his mother owned a garage and that he was born with a spanner in his hand. “In competition driving the co-driver is often giving the driver instructions three bends ahead. So even if he is going round a right-hand hairpin he is hearing about a fast left hander to be taken in fourth gear. It’s all about anticipation; your mind should be two or three steps ahead of where the car is.”
To demonstrate, he climbs behind the wheel. The Peugeot, which has been quietly growling in a cloud of its own smoke, roars into life as if it knows that an experienced hand is at the helm.
Wetton rattles up through the gearbox to fifth. (I never got higher than third). Gravel ricochets off the windscreen and spray from the puddles seeps through the seals of the window. “Now let’s try a slide,” shouts Wetton as he dips the car to the left then throws it to the right. For a moment it is unclear in which direction we are travelling, time takes on a vague and lazy drift, the frantic windscreen wipers seem to slow and the engine noise dies away.
Then Wetton slams down the throttle and we are powering forward in double time, my helmet is thrown against the head restraint and we exit the corner in a blur of speed. Wetton is having the time of his life. Me? I’m laughing like a drain.
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The Silverstone Rally Experience costs £155 and is open to anyone with a full driving licence. The course takes about 1½ hours. Go to www.silverstone-circuit.co.uk or call 08704 588 270