ROAD RUNNER

We've seen racecars for the road before... the new Porsche 963 RSP takes things a little further

- WORDS OLLIE MARRIAGE

A man wipes the soles of my shoes with a cloth.

This isn't the sort of service you usually get when climbing into a car. But then the Porsche 963 RSP isn't your usual sort of car. It's the sort of car where having clean, dry soles matters.

You don't want to be slipping on the brake pedal when you're howling along at well over three miles a minute and the end of the Mulsanne Straight is fast-forwarding towards you. Nor if an ageing Renault Scenic happened to stumble out of a side turn into your path. Well that could never happen you'd think, how on Earth would it get past the marshals and the barriers? But in this instance it really could happen, because this is the Porsche 963 RSP. And it's road legal.

This morning it drove around a modest town in northern France - an experience its driver described as "very challenging". Seeing as this was Timo Bernhard, the man who drove the 919 Hybrid Evo to the fastest ever lap of the Nürburgring, we could chalk this morning's drive up as "not something a mere mortal should ever attempt".

I learn why after I post myself in. The thickly padded, softly upholstered seat is a delightful surprise, so too the fragrant whiff of leather. It's lighter and brighter in here than I expected and I can even see out reasonably well. There's a cupholder. Aircon. What I can't see is a button labelled 'start'.

I'm handed a set of headphones. A voice says, “OK, we are now going to start the car”, and roughly an hour later, having toggled, flicked, clicked, pushed, pulled, pressed and checked, there's an electric whine and some 'green for go' lights have illuminated. People with laptops have been involved. The car had been prewarmed before I got anywhere near it. Now I've got to get it rolling, and that means I have to use the hand clutches...