M25 RAVE NEXT LEFT

London’s ring road was once one big party

- MATT JONES PHOTOGRAPHY GETTY

Few machines have a talent for turning up in stranger company than the car, but the M25 in the ’90s set a high watermark — one road that somehow connected banking reform, illegal raves, millionaires, The Prodigy, Boris Johnson, many Ferraris, and a cross police officer called Ken.

And all of them, whether they knew it or not, were heading in the same direction.

Let’s start from the beginning. On 27 October 1986, British Prime Minster Margaret Thatcher accidentally created the UK’s first supercar supercycle. She deregulated the London Stock Exchange, which turned the country’s finance industry into a casino. Foreign banks flooded in, and anyone could trade anything, anywhere, without the rules that had kept a lid on earnings. The new class of super rich she created had company. Reagan’s America had been running the same experiment on Wall Street, with much the same result: greed was good, Gordon Gekko was God, and the powder was dry for something explosive — figuratively and literally.

Supercar manufacturers took note. Instead of carefully blurring the line between racecar and boulevard cruiser, they snorted it. And they’ve been chasing the same high since — in price and performance.

The £145,000 Porsche 959 hit 60mph in 3.6secs. The £163,000 F40 cracked 200mph. The 202mph, £153,000 Lamborghini Diablo entered development, so did the £540,000, 240mph McLaren F1.