Night driving in a GT2 RS
04-26-2011, 03:15 PM
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Night driving in a GT2 RS
Great piece by Henry Catchpole on his Evo Mag blog. Sounds like fun...one can dream. : )
There’s really only one time of day to drive a GT2 RS on the road – when everyone else is tucked up in their bunks, doubles, singles and queen-sizes fast asleep. You want the world and the roads to yourself. In normal daytime traffic a 611bhp RS is simply too fast. Sure, you can overtake everything, but after a while you long for a stretch of road where you’re not going to catch a dawdler every other gearchange and you tire of being scowled at for perfectly reasonable, albeit swiftly executed, overtakes. No, a GT2 RS needs the deserted highways of the night. Fortunately, as anyone who follows me on twitter knows, I’m not the world’s greatest sleeper…
The feature we had the RS in for (this month’s cover story) was taking place in south Wales and I decided to get across there for breakfast time. There’s just a big empty space in the dash where PCM would normally sit, so, as I settled into the bucket seat at 3.30am, I reverted to my favourite type of route finding. I’d love to say I pulled out a sextant at this point and looked at the stars, but it was actually a Philip’s large-scale road atlas. Anyway, the beauty of looking at squiggles on a page rather than punching at letters on a small touch screen is that, if you’re like me, you tend to ignore the motorways and instead imagine a straight line between start point A and finish point B before picking the best looking roads along the mental lay line. Likewise, this method of route planning really requires the solitary silence of night so that you don’t run the risk of being stuck behind an Ocado van for 20 miles.
As I had somehow ended up driving the GT2 RS for most of the preceding week I’d started to get almost comfy with it. It had started to feel a bit like it was my RS. When you initially drive something with such lunatic acceleration it can be a struggle to compute what’s happening quickly enough – you can feel like a bit of a passenger, unable to drive it to its full potential. But with greater acquaintance you settle into it; your eyes get used to looking that extra distance down the road so that they can keep pace with the scenery and your mind relaxes as it adjusts to the greater anticipation required. Familiarity means that blips, shifts and dabs become more instinctive and seamless too, so they’re like that ease of conversation you have with your really good friends,
‘My’ GT2 RS was almost perfect night time stealth spec: black with carbon (so, black) detailing and running on German ‘plates. It felt like you had about as much anonymity as it’s possible to have when driving something with a wing that wouldn’t be out of place in the WRC. It’s a Batman sort of stealth – you appear, make people gasp, then disappear in an instant, and all people can recall are a sort of deep voice, some pointy ears and a cape... possibly.
At 30mph rumbling slowly through deserted towns and villages with only the odd cat or fox disappearing into the shadows, the GT2 RS feels stiff. In fact it’s verging on uncomfortable even with the dampers in their more relaxed setting. The roll cage creaks behind you occassionally as you jolt and thump over potholes, drain covers and speed bumps. It seems impossible that it will ever cope with a B-road at speed. But as the orange street lighting peters out and your speed increases, the ride transforms. As you start to really attack a road, bumps are ruthlessly dispatched and even with the suspension in compression and steering loaded in your hands your fears of being deflected off line by bumps that appear in the Xenons mid-corner never materialise. Just the occasional big camber drags you left or right as it distracts the grip of one of the massive tyres.
Smooth, flowing roads are fantastic as you pick lines of least resistance and ride the huge swell of torque, but narrow lanes with hedges tight up against kerbs are the biggest rush. The proximity of blurred scenery to your shoulders seems to exacerbate the tunnel effect already created by the headlights and the feeling of speed seems to triple. I love the feeling when you’re in a long corner on part throttle at a constant speed but with the revs hovering above 3000rpm and the turbos primed; you can feel this huge amount of energy and potential just sitting in the rear axle waiting for you to sight the exit. You know the huge thump in the back that you’re about to get, you know that any second a runaway train is about to pile into you, gather you up and fling you down the road… and the anticipation is delicious.
I’d still want a GT3 RS if I were lucky enough to be buying, but I bonded with the GT2 RS far more than I ever thought I would. I can completely understand why some would crave the 2 rather than the 3 because having that turbocharged fairground feeling at your beck and call is utterly addictive. I’d have to become nocturnal if I owned one though, or organise lots of breakfast meetings a long way away from home.
There’s really only one time of day to drive a GT2 RS on the road – when everyone else is tucked up in their bunks, doubles, singles and queen-sizes fast asleep. You want the world and the roads to yourself. In normal daytime traffic a 611bhp RS is simply too fast. Sure, you can overtake everything, but after a while you long for a stretch of road where you’re not going to catch a dawdler every other gearchange and you tire of being scowled at for perfectly reasonable, albeit swiftly executed, overtakes. No, a GT2 RS needs the deserted highways of the night. Fortunately, as anyone who follows me on twitter knows, I’m not the world’s greatest sleeper…
The feature we had the RS in for (this month’s cover story) was taking place in south Wales and I decided to get across there for breakfast time. There’s just a big empty space in the dash where PCM would normally sit, so, as I settled into the bucket seat at 3.30am, I reverted to my favourite type of route finding. I’d love to say I pulled out a sextant at this point and looked at the stars, but it was actually a Philip’s large-scale road atlas. Anyway, the beauty of looking at squiggles on a page rather than punching at letters on a small touch screen is that, if you’re like me, you tend to ignore the motorways and instead imagine a straight line between start point A and finish point B before picking the best looking roads along the mental lay line. Likewise, this method of route planning really requires the solitary silence of night so that you don’t run the risk of being stuck behind an Ocado van for 20 miles.
As I had somehow ended up driving the GT2 RS for most of the preceding week I’d started to get almost comfy with it. It had started to feel a bit like it was my RS. When you initially drive something with such lunatic acceleration it can be a struggle to compute what’s happening quickly enough – you can feel like a bit of a passenger, unable to drive it to its full potential. But with greater acquaintance you settle into it; your eyes get used to looking that extra distance down the road so that they can keep pace with the scenery and your mind relaxes as it adjusts to the greater anticipation required. Familiarity means that blips, shifts and dabs become more instinctive and seamless too, so they’re like that ease of conversation you have with your really good friends,
‘My’ GT2 RS was almost perfect night time stealth spec: black with carbon (so, black) detailing and running on German ‘plates. It felt like you had about as much anonymity as it’s possible to have when driving something with a wing that wouldn’t be out of place in the WRC. It’s a Batman sort of stealth – you appear, make people gasp, then disappear in an instant, and all people can recall are a sort of deep voice, some pointy ears and a cape... possibly.
At 30mph rumbling slowly through deserted towns and villages with only the odd cat or fox disappearing into the shadows, the GT2 RS feels stiff. In fact it’s verging on uncomfortable even with the dampers in their more relaxed setting. The roll cage creaks behind you occassionally as you jolt and thump over potholes, drain covers and speed bumps. It seems impossible that it will ever cope with a B-road at speed. But as the orange street lighting peters out and your speed increases, the ride transforms. As you start to really attack a road, bumps are ruthlessly dispatched and even with the suspension in compression and steering loaded in your hands your fears of being deflected off line by bumps that appear in the Xenons mid-corner never materialise. Just the occasional big camber drags you left or right as it distracts the grip of one of the massive tyres.
Smooth, flowing roads are fantastic as you pick lines of least resistance and ride the huge swell of torque, but narrow lanes with hedges tight up against kerbs are the biggest rush. The proximity of blurred scenery to your shoulders seems to exacerbate the tunnel effect already created by the headlights and the feeling of speed seems to triple. I love the feeling when you’re in a long corner on part throttle at a constant speed but with the revs hovering above 3000rpm and the turbos primed; you can feel this huge amount of energy and potential just sitting in the rear axle waiting for you to sight the exit. You know the huge thump in the back that you’re about to get, you know that any second a runaway train is about to pile into you, gather you up and fling you down the road… and the anticipation is delicious.
I’d still want a GT3 RS if I were lucky enough to be buying, but I bonded with the GT2 RS far more than I ever thought I would. I can completely understand why some would crave the 2 rather than the 3 because having that turbocharged fairground feeling at your beck and call is utterly addictive. I’d have to become nocturnal if I owned one though, or organise lots of breakfast meetings a long way away from home.
Last edited by micahbones; 04-26-2011 at 03:57 PM.
