Stepping up

Getting older is curious. In many ways it’s a comforting, often reassuring process: there’s just less time to make a complete mess of things and even if you do, so long as you have fulfilled your biological and parental obligations to the next generation (if, indeed, you decide to go down that road), it just matters less.

But if you drive cars for a living, and sometimes that requires you to drive very fast cars as rapidly as you can make them go, you do start to wonder. Can I still do this? Am I about to make a twit of myself? Do I even want to do this? Is there a plausible excuse for getting out of doing this? Which is pretty much how I felt as, fat and 58, I tried to coax and cajole my creaking lower limbs past the rollover structures of a McLaren Artura Trophy Evo and into its stripped out interior.

I’m not sure why, but this test sort of crept up on me. Invite came in, sounded fun, was accepted, went in diary, didn’t think too much more about it. I’d raced this car’s predecessor, the 570S GT4, in its own one-make series at Spa in 2018 and having never driven it before, still managed to come second behind someone who, according to the team ‘lived in the car’, which I thought was okay.