It’s been a long while now since I’ve always wanted to drive an Ariel Atom (sic). Probably since I saw it first on Top Gear.Watching the clip again, I can see exactly why it appealed – I did indeed enjoy driving motorbikes and had the odd sports bike of my dreams. And now it isn’t really appropriate for me to take life and limb into my own tank-slapping hands. The idea of something that accelerates like a bike but doesn’t require a whole heap of skill to keep my legs attached to my body appeals very much.
And it’s supercharged. I’ve never driven a supercharged anything. The closest I got was when my good pal Andy got married and had to drive me from Hoton to Leicester to pick up some disco lights I’d promised to get for his wedding. Unfortunately I was without transport, so he had to drive me and the lights himself. On the morning of his wedding. On the plus side, it was in a supercharged Jaguar XK8. Which was pretty swift for dispatching of such best man tasks.
So I decided to one day drive an Ariel Atom. I had toyed with owning one, but some things it just doesn’t make sense to own. (Not so a fire truck – who wants to rent a fire engine when you could own one?) When I get maudlin and morose, I tend to stay up late at night watching youtube videos of cars driving fast – and drag racing. The antidote to this is to actually make a plan, so I duly did so, and learned that there was a school in Virginia where you can race them around a track under close supervision. It was going to be a pain to get there, and expensive to boot.
A few weeks back, I was gob-smacked to learn that you could drive them here in Austin – well San Marcos to be precise – at Harris Hill Road track. And that’s what I’m going to do at 8:30am tomorrow morning. It’s exciting, and it will leave me I’m sure with some good Hero2 footage, as well as a sense of emptiness that one of my decade long ambitions has been fulfilled.
Harris Hill is nuts. Granted, if you’ve seen my footage of Austin go-kart driving, I know nothing about racing lines, brake dragging around corners, or grip and such. But I’ve watched footage of people racing around the track and it looks bananas. What you can’t see from the aerial view below:
is that there’s a huge elevation change. The top right part – the s-shaped bend hides a dirty secret. There’s a huge rise as you go into the tight bend, followed by a huge drop. I don’t really know too much about corners – there’s something called an apex, which is defined in mathematical terms, and also in terms of where you want to be turning hardest, and presumably slowest as you go around a bend in any given car. I know that sometimes you can’t see the apex when you go into a bend – it might be further round than you can see as you approach. But to have an apex at a different elevation while trying to manage the limits of grip in a corner while you’re also trying to race gravity towards the tarmac is surely a challenge.
Well it would be if I were anywhere near the limits of the car. I’ll probably drive really slowly around the bends. I like accelerating in straight lines, and that’s really why I’m driving the Ariel Atom at the Harris Hill Road track. That and the supercharger. Footage to follow, assuming I remember to turn the camera on.
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