Driving CAN be fun!

Fresh from my bollocking for using the DVLA logo, here's another of my sporadic posts, only this time, it's not through laziness or having nothing remotely decent to write about.

In fact, I haven't been able to get rid of this massive grin on my face for more than a week now.

You see, driving is not fun any more. Rather than the freedom of the open road and spectacular scenery, driving in the UK is, quite plainly, crap.

Congestion, speed cameras, sleeping policemen, bleeping arcade machines at motorway services, road works, traffic wardens, environmentalists, BMW 3-series drivers, traffic lights, highways officers, pointless lane closures, stupid one-way systems, toll roads, government "think-tanks" and a plethora of quangos all conspire to make travelling from A-B as difficult and as hellish as possible.

But there are a few places where you can actually enjoy driving in the UK, and I happened to find one such place last week.

As a belated birthday present, I took to the track at Silverstone for one of those "driving experiences" that you often see advertised in the Boots Christmas catalogue, only they're usually at some decommissioned airfield, not the home of the British Grand Prix.

I quite fancied taking my own motor around there but unfortunately, my insurance company wouldn't let me unless I gave them a big bag of money, so I had to make do with what those chaps at Silverstone offered me:

That happens to be a Lotus Exige S - the S stands for supercharged which evidently turns a very fast car into a very, very fast car.

Still after I'd done with that, they decided to let me lose in one of these:

That is a Ferrari 360 Modena and is, quite simply, outstanding. If you're the sort of bloke that watches Top Gear, you might think that much of the speed is exaggerated by the cameras / editors but it certainly doesn't feel like it when you're behind the wheel of one of these 'supercars'.

Surprisingly, they were both very easy to drive. The difficulty comes in driving them quickly, which seems a silly thing to say but bear with me.

For most of us, the only time we've sat behind the wheel of a car is on a public road. Your head tells you that if you don't slow down for the upcoming corner then you'll end up in the ditch opposite or that if you vear to the opposite side of the road, you'll be taken out by a articulated truck heading in the opposite direction.

It's that mindset and the theory of racing lines anddriving quickly that's the difficult part and there's a hell of a lot more to it than what your Max Power Saxo-driving boy racers certainly think. It was easy reaching 132mph on the Hangar Straight, it wasn't so easy going around the tight right-hand corner at the end of it at 50mph+.

I must give massive credit to the guys at Silverstone who were fantastic and for anyone even considering something like this, then I would fully recommend it. I'm seriously looking at my next free weekend to sign onto the rally driving course and even that may not be my last one!