200MPH IN A 70MPH ZONE

The Nevada Open Road Challenge is a motorsport event like no other. GREG KABLE heads to the desert to join in

- GREG KABLE

There aren't many places left where you can legally drive at more than 200mph on a public road.

I've come to one of the remaining few.

Twice each year, the Silver State Classic Challenge closes a vast section of Nevada's Route 318 and transforms it into the world's fastest public road motorsport course. No barriers. No runoff. No catch fencing. Just endless desert, distant mountains and a strip of Tarmac stretching to the horizon.

The May event, the Nevada Open Road Challenge, uses a two-leg format totalling 151 miles, making it the world's longest sanctioned public road race. The Silver State Classic Challenge in September runs as a single-leg shootout at 90 miles. Having run since 1988, it might be the least-known yet most wonderfully unhinged form of motorsport in the world.

A DRAG STRIP IN THE DESERT

The host town of Ely is deep in eastern Nevada, more than 200 miles north of Las Vegas. It feels like an old mining town that moves at its own pace. Casinos and motels wear faded signs from another era, diners serve towering pancake stacks and coffee in thick white mugs and there is a sense the modern world passed this place by.

Then race week arrives, and suddenly Ely fills with Porsches, Corvettes, Mercedes-AMGs, Dodges, Vipers, Shelby Cobra replicas and home-built monsters producing absurd amounts of horsepower. Parked among them this year was my car: a Volkswagen Golf GTI.

Much of the field is obsessed with horsepower figures and elaborate aero packages, but VW's front-wheel-drive performance hatch represents a different philosophy: accessible performance. Some 50 years after the original redefined the affordable fast hatchback, our 2.0-litre turbo four-pot Golf GTI, with a comparatively modest 241bhp and 273lb ft, was about to take on a whole new challenge. But the deficit of power shouldn't be an issue, because the Nevada Open Road Challenge is not simply about going flat out.