Almost every serious racing driver I know drives a boring road car. When I was at the Leipzig test circuit in my 20s, pitching myself for a Porsche works seat at a junior driver test, I was told that if I succeeded, I could take home any model in the Porsche range as my personal road car on the day I signed. The swift follow-up confirmed the most popular choice among the current works drivers was the Cayenne S diesel SUV.
What?! We young, red-blooded racers were shocked. ‘With any 911 in the current range available, your steely-eyed rocket men want a coal-burning tractor? Don’t they want to go fast?’ The Porsche works star on the evaluation team that day stepped in. ‘Of course, but a diesel SUV is much faster than a 911 on real roads.’ And it’s true, isn’t it?
Ride height, visibility, torque, four-wheel drive… The road system is messy, and the ‘dad machine’ gets there first, cheapest, safest and most comfortably, with all your luggage in tow. ‘Shhhh! You can’t tell them that!’ ‘No, no, those fast cars are the fastest – they’re race cars for the road.’ It’s a little awkward for motorsport to acknowledge, what we do on the race circuit has very little to do with what goes on in the transport system, but I contend that that’s exactly the case.
