Orient Express

The other reason I went is that I’ve never driven an inter-galactically powerful two-seat hypercar from China or anywhere else. And while I am instinctively dubious about such ludicrous power, very sure no EV powertrain is ever going be a preferable pillar of driving pleasure to an internal combustion engine, and would be deeply suspicious of any claims of environmental friendliness relative to conventional supercars (because an EV has to be driven many tens of thousands of miles before equivalent ICE cars overtake their total emissions), I didn’t think I could pronounce on the subject from a position of zero experience. So off I toddled.

I’ll tell you this: the Denza Z is a fine looking machine (as, incidentally, is its four-door sister the Denza Z GT which has Ferrari Luce levels of power for around one fifth of the money). And for that thank the wisdom of Denza’s BYD parent appointing Wolfgang Egger as its design director back in 2017. This is a man who’s held the top design job at Alfa, Audi and Lamborghini among others and he’s clearly still right on top of his game.

They were parked in the Goodwood pit lane surrounded by an unfathomably vast assortment of BYD and Denza staff and to say they were a touch twitchy about how the day might go is putting it mildly. And with good reason: this is not just the launch of a new car, but an entire car brand. Deliveries of its first car, the Z9 GT, won’t begin until October, the same month you can order the Z and its chunky looking BAO 5 electric SUV. Deliveries of those may begin before the end of the year; failing that it’ll be Q1, 2027.

Another thing. The Z is so new, the small assemblage of British motoring media were the first journalists in the world to drive the car. And looking around the room, it seemed they’d chosen those journalists quite carefully too, not for what they were likely to say about the car, but what they were likely not to do with it on track, such as throw it into the scenery.

It’s always been at moments like this when I feel I’m earning my living – thrown into a car you’d never sat in before, with preposterous power, told you have three laps of perhaps Britain’s least forgiving circuit and be expected to arrive at conclusions a trifle more illuminating than ‘fuck that’s fast’. To mitigate the risk, Denza put an instructor in each car and then explained that, because the cars were so important, said instructor would be providing helpful parameters within which you were expected to drive. Had I come all this way to drive the most powerful car I’ve ever driven at Goodwood, only to complete my slowest ever laps?

I had not. Sinking into the driving seat – well shaped and comfortable – my hired hand leaned across, said ‘Hi Andrew, you’ve probably done more laps around here than me, so I’m just going to be ballast’ and that was that.

The driving position is reasonable, but with not quite enough reach adjustment on a steering wheel with a squared off bottom. The digital dials are at least circular but fainter than I’d like (I didn’t have time to see if there was a rheostat in some menu) and the centre display is one of those bog standard, feature-loaded rectangles I’d be able to tell you far more about had I more time with the car.

It makes noises. Car noises. That and the presence of paddles makes you hope this is the first supercar to wise up to what Hyundai did with the Ioniq 5 N and simply create the illusion that you’re in an ICE car. It worked phenomenally well there, and would have done so again here – I’d have gone full V12 because why wouldn’t you? – but no. The sound varies with ‘engine’ speed, but has no great character and because you can’t change gear – even virtually – that wonderful punctuation you take for granted in the humblest petrol cars is absent, and with it whatever charm may have been possible with the idea. The paddles, if you’re interested, control functions like drive mode and braking regeneration.

The light at the end of the pit lane goes green. I have cheekily inveigled my way into the Denza Z Racing, which tops the range at £172,000 (there’s a £159,900 Spider version too). This is the track-honed version, complete with an impressive rear wing and other aero bits, the near-vestigial rear seats removed to offset the weight gain, coil springs instead of air, even bigger brakes (all cars have ceramics as standard) and fatter, stickier Pirellis rather than more road-oriented Bridgestones. It is the Pirellis that are chiefly responsible for the 1.96sec 0-62mph time. Lesser Denza Zs take a yawning 2.25sec. They’ll also do only 186mph poor things, the Racing fully 217mph.

Just don’t read too much into the fact that the aero pack will develop over a tonne of downforce, because unless you know the speed at which it is developed, the number is meaningless, unless you’re driving a sucker car like a McMurtry, which we’re not. Happily we do know the speed: 217mph. So the great news is that anyone ambling along at that kind of velocity can turn left or right secure in the knowledge there’s quite a lot of downforce on top of you. And good luck with that. But you can extrapolate from there, and a more realistic number is the approximately and still impressive 500kg of downforce it will generate at 150mph, which is just about the fastest at which any sane person would attempt to corner a road car on road tyres, even when on a race track.

I give myself one lap to dial in, which even when not going fast is only around 90sec because an out lap omits the pit straight. At once the signs are good. The Denza feels solid, completely planted and troubled not at all by Goodwood’s famously undulating surface. Confidence builds.

It’s equally clear from the out lap that, despite all the Racing modifications, this is not a car that’ll lead to the mass desertion of seasoned GT3 RS track jockeys as they march their way to Denza’s first UK retail outlet in London’s Westfield shopping centre to place their orders. However reassuring it is to drive, it does not feel nimble.

The exit of the chicane presents itself and there’ll never be a better time. I’m really impressed by what happens next, because while all that power comes backed by no less than 884lb ft of torque, when you put your foot down you don’t feel like you’ve just been rammed by a Peterbilt truck. Yes, the rate of acceleration is astounding, but there is some progression here; it’s not just all dumped in your lap and you’re told to get on with it. Indeed you notice it most by how quickly the braking point for Madgwick appears. I know this place, have probably done upwards of 1000 laps here, but it still took me slightly by surprise, as if my brain were struggling to keep up with the car, like a sound wave trailing behind a supersonic jet.

We’ll be needing the brakes now and I don’t like them at all. At this level, vast carbon ceramic discs are not enough: you need feel, progression and weighting appropriate to that of the other primary controls. It is lacking in all these areas. That they shed the speed without apparent effort or fade – which they do – should be a given.

The car feels very stiffly sprung too, excellent for keeping body movements under control over the notorious Madgwick hump, but I do wonder what it’ll do for the ride on the public road; there is only so much adaptive dampers can do to attenuate the effects of the inherently firm springing medium.

It grips hard, but when I want to go, it won’t let me. The car is held back until some computer calculates there’ll be enough grip to accept part throttle at first and then full chat. I am told the stability systems are permanently on in the cars today, which I expect is another measure Denza took to make sure it still had a car to launch by the time we were done.

Unsurprisingly it’s at its best in the quick stuff. You can really feel the wings working in the Fordwater kink, but in the long, slow to medium right at Lavant where you’d quite like to skid it about a bit, the electronic fun police under the dashboard have other ideas. One last blast down the back straight, enough to briefly glimpse 150mph come and go ages before the braking area and that’s pretty much that. I run it out over the kerbs at the exit of the chicane just to see how it copes with them, and it does so admirably. One more crazy burst of acceleration and we have to start cooling it down. The game is over.

I asked someone from Denza how many Zs it expected to shift in the UK and he refused to tell me, saying the company doesn’t release such figures. Very sensible too, in the circumstances. Because the truth is it’s hard to think of the person who’s going to spend that kind of money on a battery-powered supercar from a company no one’s heard of, however good it is. Which says far more about our snobbish attitudes towards such properties than it does about the car itself. Which, for what it is, and based on what I could discover in possibly the briefest official test drive I’ve ever had in a car, is very good indeed. There is a sophistication the Denza Z brings to the business of going fast, both in how it performs and handles, that I’d not expected before I climbed aboard.

Of course I have no idea how it will perform on road though I have already flagged concerns about the ride of the Z Racing, though the air-sprung standard car might be a different proposition altogether. And its range is very limited – between 237 and 255 miles according to spec – and that’s on the official cycle, so far less than that in reality. Denza counters by saying the Z and its Z9 GT stablemate are the world’s fastest charging EVs, capable of accepting a 1500kW charge, which is nearly four times faster than the pursuing pack like the Lotus Eletre and BMW iX3 which can only manage 400kW. In theory the Z will charge from 10-70 per cent in five minutes, and to 97 per cent in only nine, which really is not far off petrol refuelling speeds. The only problem is there’s nowhere at present you can charge at remotely that speed. Even so, Denza says there’ll be 300 of its ‘Flash’ chargers in the UK by the end of next year and over 3000 across Europe, and that you won’t have to be a Denza or BYD customer to use them. It seems the company is trying to do now what Tesla first did with its Supercharger network and create a charging infrastructure which is a reason to buy the car all by itself.

But would I give up a thousand actual horsepower to have a flat-six making real noises behind me, and with paddles that actually change gear? I’m afraid I would. The Denza Z is a hugely impressive car which in terms of bang for your buck and charging speeds moves the game to a whole new level. I do think it’s great looking too. All it really fails to do is establish an emotional connection between car and driver and, impossible to measure though it is, and silly as it might sound, for cars like this it is in fact the most important thing of all.