Small wonder

Actually, I don’t want to drive it. It seems too fragile. At $5.5 million it is certainly too precious, especially to be out there with all those other lunatics on a race car only test day at Donington Park. No gentle track day this. If I just leave it where it is, snug and warm in the pit garage no harm can come to it, or me for that matter.

I can slide down that narrow channel until I’m fully ensconced in that cockpit and pretend I’m Giancarlo Baghetti (still the only person to win a World Championship Grand Prix on debut) en route to class victory and second overall in the 1966 Targa Florio. Maybe I could ask the fine folk from Girardo & Co. who have brought it here for me today to fire up its jewel-like 2-litre V6 engine. Would save me having to make the vroom-vroom noises myself.

The Dino 206 S waiting for me is so delicate, so preposterously beautiful it seems impossible that it was designed for the rough and, all too often back then, tumble of racing. It seems no less implausible that it was once raced by drivers who cared only how fast it could make them go, and not at all for preserving any aspect of the car’s design or engineering one nanosecond longer than that required to get them to the flag at the other end of the race or, no less often in this case, mountain.