CHRIS HARRIS

Want to have some real fun in a real car? Then wind in your neck and have a game of how slow can you go...

A month savouring the joys of slow cars. I am becoming

an evangelical bore on the subject of low horsepower. A foreign visitor to this planet would think we’re completely bonkers – making cars that go faster and faster, then setting laws that force them to travel slower and slower. What’s the point? According to the European Union, speed limiters will be mandatory in a couple of years. This does make the outraged car nut inside me want to march on Brussels with angry placards, but, in reality, I’m taking a more relaxed, fatalistic approach. I’m thinking of driving much slower cars.

Driving, when you pare it back to its basic principles, is nothing more than operating a wheel, some pedals and a gear lever. It doesn’t really matter how fast you go, the inputs are the same; the only thing that changes is how blurred the scenery becomes. This was brought home to me with perfect clarity at the Goodwood Members’ Meeting. Yes, the usual Ferrari GTOs and Jaguar E-types were being driven with huge skill and delicate slip angles, but the race that really captivated me featured chain-driven, Edwardian monsters.

The drivers were all exposed to the elements, meaning you could see how hard they were working – and to a man, and woman, they were crazy busy. Advancing this, priming that, juggling some tragic braking system that, thankfully, was jettisoned alongside other terrible ideas. It made me think that they were having more fun, they were concentrating on the act of driving far more intensely than any other competitors. And yet their lap times were hilariously slow, not that it mattered one bit. Once you’ve seen the Beast of Turin, a 28.4-litre colossus being manhandled around Goodwood, you recalibrate your definition of what driving really is.

A few days later, I found myself driving as fast as the car would go, locked in a dice with a near-identical vehicle. I can genuinely say that I was using 100 per cent of the performance available, that I couldn’t have gone any quicker. Usually, I’d now be waiting for the lawyer to remove that last sentence, but there wasn’t a hope in hell I was going to come anywhere near the speed limit, let alone exceed the thing. We were in 425cc Citroen 2CVs, on the way back from a non-alcoholic visit to a pub in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been in many multi-thousand horsepower convoys this year, and nothing has come close to the fun I had on that drive.

Momentum was everything: lifting for a nanosecond had consequences for miles, and executing the perfect line was the only way to maintain the gap. I was completely engrossed in the business of driving. To every other road user, I was some sad cod-hippy getting in the way of their SUV hell, but I can honestly say that, right at that moment, no one was having more fun driving in the UK than us two. With a total of 25bhp.

The future of mobility is electricity and other clever things. And, at some point, I’m sure someone might develop a car that can, in some part, drive itself. But the future of enjoyable driving is reducing speeds and increasing the drivers’ workload. For now, that means buying something old and joyous, but I suspect someone clever will cotton on soon, and then the race to 300mph will look even more ridiculous than it does now.

“TO EVERY OTHER ROAD USER, I WAS SOME SAD COD-HIPPY IN THE WAY OF THEIR SUV”