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Brace yourself: The Mclaren Senna has landed.

I’ M CALLING IT: The Mclaren Senna is one of the all-time greats. Fifty years from now, you will see it plastered on posters and headlining Pebble Beach auctions. It’s a very small club, populated by the likes of the Ferrari F40, the Porsche 959, and the Senna’s ancestor, the Mclaren F1. To join, a car has to have performance that seems decades ahead of its time. And that’s what you get: a milliondollar wedge of wings and diffusers that you could race at Le Mans and then drive to the nearest Starbucks – which is about an hour away from there, or maybe less if you’re driving a Senna.

I missed out on driving the F40 and 959, partly because I was ten years old when they came out. So I wasn’t going to pass on the chance to drive a Senna at Estoril, a 4 km road course in Portugal. To prepare, I studied video of a BMW M5 lapping the track, knowing this was slow motion compared to what I’d be doing.

The spec sheet says the Senna hits 200 km/h in 6.8 seconds and stops much quicker than that – the -2.1 g worth of braking power would leave me with bruises from the shoulder harness. But the corners are where the Senna proves it’s a lightly domesticated race car: At 250 km/h, that insectoid bodywork is making 800 kg of downforce. The faster you go, the more the tyres grip, Earth’s gravity ratcheted up just for you. That just isn’t normally how cars work. And the Senna automatically trims its wings for reduced drag on straights, hence a 335 km/h top speed. This level of engineering (and money) erases compromises. When I arrive, rumour around the track is that yesterday two drivers, when they got out of a Senna, immediately threw up. Motion sickness arises when the messages from your senses don’t match what your brain expects. In a way, then, they were expressing the extent to which the Senna exceeded expectations. At Estoril’s fast kink you can go wide open, but I can’t help backing off just a touch, my brain unable to accept the idea of a 265 km/h corner. On the straight, I’m hitting 285 km/h before the brakes crush me into the harness. The car’s rending of the atmosphere sounds like a passing jet to bystanders. Hurtling toward the braking zone, I hear my own hyped-up exhalation through the radio. Whoosh! ‘You’re nearing the limit,’ says Danny Watts, former Le Mans champion and my co-driver. ‘You’re getting excited.’ In his polite British way, he’s telling me that I’m drunk on adrenaline. I’ve never driven a Le Mans GT1 car, but I have an idea of what it’s like, because the Senna is also a laboratory of performance technology. The leading edges of its bodywork are protected by stuff called helitape, normally used on helicopter rotors. The lower windows on the dihedral doors are Gorilla Glass, which is lighter and stronger than typical automotive glass. The shift paddles have their own wire directly to the transmission to make the shifts a few nanoseconds faster. All 500 Sennas are spoken for, so the rest of us will geek out in other ways. It’s a car to daydream about. My kids will drive it in Forza Horizon 4 – it’s the cover car – on Xbox, and probably tell me they went faster than I did. In real life, the Senna is the final answer to any discussion about lap times. Name the track, this is the quickest. Until they come out with the Senna GTR.