Six of the Beasts

Driving a supercar isn’t meant to be easy. It’s part of the deal; you can’t have stomach-flipping acceleration, a top speed north of 190mph and looks that induce fits of the vapours in Castrol GTX-swigging men and lingerie models alike without a little pain.

These highly strung, fuel-guzzling divas are bloody awkward at low speeds, you can’t see anything that isn’t directly in front of you and if anything breaks or you pilot it into a hedge (which you will) you’ll have to remortgage the house.

So how is it that I’m effortlessly performing a three-point turn on a narrow, wall-lined road in a scarlet car that sits waist-high to pedestrians and is capable of almost 200mph? The short answer is that the car I’m in, Audi’s astonishing R8 V10, has done as much as any other to blur the boundary between the car you can use to nip down to Waitrose and the car you can use to blow away almost anything else on the road.

I say almost, because the 518bhp R8 and I have got serious company on the usually quiet midweek roads around the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire borders. Aside from the Audi there’s an Aston Martin V12 Vantage, a Porsche 911 Turbo, a Ferrari F430 F1, a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder and a Nissan GT-R; over 3,000bhp between them and a total value not far off £700,000.

This collection of metal is assembled for Dream Car Hire’s six supercar day; drive six of the most potent cars you can buy in the UK for around an hour each on public roads, following route instructions to changeover points. It’s a little like orienteering, but with the focus on careering along B-roads in Porsches and Ferraris rather than jogging around damp forests in polyester anoraks.

Given that I’m about as useless at map reading as it’s possible to be without being both blind and map-less, it’s fortunate I have photographer Mike Hoyer alongside me. Only once does our steely veneer of navigational professionalism slip, as we direct £105,000 worth of vorsprung durch technik onto a two-mile strip of single-track farm road, but more of that later.

A few hours before our agricultural excursion I arrive at Dream Car’s HQ – an innocuous-looking modern warehouse on a business park in Abingdon. My fellow drivers and I are fed, briefed and led out to watch as a millionaire’s wish list of supercars emerges from the garage and lines up in formation.

I can’t decide which set of keys I want to be handed first; I feel like a big kid let loose in the world’s most generously stocked sweet shop, even more so when I’m directed to the brutish Aston.

 

Aston Martin V12 Vantage

My God, it looks mean. Aston Martin’s V8 Vantage is a familiar sight in the City but the V12 less so, which makes it a genuinely arresting sight parked on an industrial estate in Oxfordshire. It sits lower than the standard Vantage and has carbon fibre splitters front and rear, wider sills, a pronounced boot ‘flip’ and carbon fibre louvres on the bonnet.

These are just cosmetic changes, though; the real difference is to the beating heart of the car. Rather obviously, given the name, the V8 engine has been exchanged for the monstrous six-litre V12 from the bigger DBS for a gain of 90bhp and only 50kg of extra weight, and if you were in any doubt as to whether Aston’s engineers had remembered to stick the bigger engine in you won’t be for long.

"The clutch has quite a high biting point so you might want to go easy on the revs," one of the Dream Car team tells me as we prepare to set off. So I cautiously press the accelerator, gently raise the clutch and WHOOMPH, the Vantage unleashes an almighty roar, raises its bonnet and flings us down the road.

Managing the Aston’s eagerness at low speeds is a case of accepting the ludicrous quantities of available shove throughout the rev range. You know that whenever you put your foot down that big V12 will respond immediately with unrelenting savagery and a glorious wall of sound in accompaniment. It’s a hairy-chested car for the hairy-chested man; if Sean Connery’s James Bond were to return he’d do so in a V12 Vantage, with its six-speed manual ’box (the only non-paddle shifter here), muscular presence and distinct lack of fannying about.

 

Porsche 911 Turbo

An anonymous lay-by is our rendezvous with car number two, Porsche’s second generation 997, and the contrast between the Porker and the Aston in both appearance and character couldn’t be more stark. While both are more potent evolutions of vanilla models – more power, more presence and more money – the ice-white Turbo looks a decidedly younger car than the Aston, all pumped arches, big wings and slashed vents.

It’s also very, very fast. Sure, the Aston’s quick too, but the 493bhp 911’s on another planet entirely, and the gateway to interplanetary pace is a small button. It’s a rapid car already, but with the ‘Sport’ button engaged the turbos generate even more boost pressure and inject a whole lot of evil fun. With a clear bit of Tarmac ahead and cojones engaged, I press that magic button, mash the accelerator pedal and we’re immediately propelled with monstrous ferocity towards the horizon. The previously ordinary exhaust note suddenly changes, as though someone’s tipped a bag of gravel and an angry rottweiler into the 3.8-litre engine, and the Turbo appears to be sucking the scenery in through the windscreen.

And yet despite all that I still wince when I glance at the speedo – are we really going that fast? ‘Sorry officer: the Sport button made me do it...’

We barely see another car in our 50 miles or so with the 911 Turbo, and any traffic we do meet is dispatched with ridiculous ease as we carve through countryside bathed in autumnal light. It has been timed from 0-60mph at 3.2 seconds, the same as a McLaren F1, and 
I don’t doubt the figure for a moment.

The Porsche corners with no less enthusiasm than it attacks the straights, finding preternatural levels of grip that are accessible even to an ordinary driver like me. It’s also incredibly easy to pootle around in at low speeds, disconcertingly so when you know what it’s capable of.

 

Audi R8 V10

Climbing into virtually any other car would be an anticlimax after the Porsche, but the R8 V10 is still an intriguing prospect, even if its badge is less evocative than all of the others here, bar the Nissan. An Audi this may be, but it’s an Audi with a near identical V10 engine to the Lamborghini Gallardo.

Inside and out, the R8 is a thing of exquisitely crafted beauty – unlike the Porsche, it doesn’t rely on a 50-year-old design template, and it shows. You sit low in the sculpted seats, with a swoopy dash and flat-bottomed wheel in front of you and that wonderful engine a few inches behind your head. It’s a good place for it to be because the noise from the 5.2-litre V10 is sensational, as is the stellar pace accompanying it. If not as shockingly fast as the Porsche, by any other measure it’s properly quick.

It also, as I’ve already said, makes very light work of doing the unfussy stuff like parking and crawling around in traffic. Case in point: our brief excursion onto tractor-ravaged one-lane Tarmac. There aren’t many cars capable of 196mph and 0-60 in 3.9 seconds that can be hustled along narrow, bumpy lanes with barely a wince, thanks in no small part to trick adaptive damping; the Audi’s fast, comfortable and a genuinely thrilling place to be no matter where you take it.

A stop for lunch at the scenic Plough in Clanfield offers welcome respite from the serious business of driving, and a decent opportunity to shake my arms out of their near-permanent steering wheel death-grip. Food dispatched, we return to the sun-drenched car park with its bizarre assortment of performance cars next to frightened-looking family hatchbacks.

 

Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder

The Lambo’s mine next, and I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than in a convertible Italian supercar on deserted Cotswolds roads in the afternoon sun. Until, that is, the police arrive. Fortunately they only seem interested in the cars and gently warn us not to make too much noise or drive too fast.

I have to dig particularly deep to find the untapped resources of will power necessary to stop me blasting off down the road with the blare of the Sant’Agata V10 bouncing off the walls. My restraint doesn’t last long, but it’s worth the wait – the exhaust note is glorious, better even than the Aston’s, and the noisy blips that accompany each downshift make me laugh out loud every time.

God knows what I look like, grinning like a benign idiot in a convertible supercar with an orange leather interior on a freezing autumn day, but I couldn’t care less. I glide around at indecent speeds on a wave of Lambo-induced euphoria, until the incessant hot air blasting from the heater dries out my contact lenses and I decide to pull in and switch to glasses rather than land us in
a hedge before I’ve even had a chance
to drive the Ferrari.

 

Ferrari F430 F1

The light’s beginning to fade when I climb into the F430 and it cuts an imposing, blood-red figure. It may have been superseded by the 458 Italia but it’s still an arresting sight: low and angular, with its frighteningly purposeful-looking V8 on display in the rear window.

Unlike the Audi and Porsche, the Ferrari grudgingly tolerates low speeds, and the bright yellow tachometer practically begs you to press on to the red line. When you do, you forget about the goons in Ferrari caps, the ‘prestige retail space’ on Regent Street and Ferrari World Abu Dhabi; this is a proper Ferrari built with Modenese passione.

It also provides my best drive of the day. We set off with the Lamborghini in pursuit as darkness begins to set in, with 18-cylinders, more than 1,000bhp and nearly £300k of pure-bred Italian metal blasting through empty lanes. What any passersby would have made of it I’ve no idea, but it’s not an image (or noise) they’d have easily forgotten.

 

Nissan GT-R

Switching from a Ferrari to a Nissan isn’t a proposition I’d ordinarily welcome, but then the Nissan GT-R is far from your ordinary Nissan. Legend has it Porsche was so shaken by the arrival of the GT-R on the scene that it immediately set about beefing up the 911 Turbo in response.

But even the Porsche can’t match it for sheer technical showboating – a screen in the centre of the dash relays data on everything you could ever wish to know and quite a lot you don’t. You can measure lateral and longitudinal G, acceleration and, to co-driver Hoyer’s amusement, there’s a graph that displays how much pressure I’m putting on the accelerator pedal (or not, as the case may be). Use all of it and the response is mind-blowing, second only to that of the Porsche; you’re forced to remind yourself, as you’re propelled forward with outrageous force, that this is made by the company that produces the Micra.

It’s too dark to exploit all of the GT-R’s abilities on our final leg back to Abingdon but I’ve seen enough to know what put the willies up Porsche. I arrive back exhausted, park the Nissan and watch the rest of the cars stream in. Driving each one has been an exhilarating and individual experience but it’s impossible not to ask the obvious question: which would I want in my garage?

Actually, none of them; why would I want to restrict myself to a single supercar when it’s possible to drive six of them back-to-back on some of the finest roads in England? Though if you’re offering I’ll take the Porsche, thanks. I wouldn’t want to run the risk of being overtaken by a McLaren F1.

From £595 per head for two people sharing
and £995 for one driver. dreamcarhire.com