Riding in a supercar changed my life

Like most people spending the majority of their time on the internet, I’m not happy. I don’t wake up happy, I don’t smile much during the day, and I don’t go to bed wishing the whole merry world good night. But yesterday, dear friends, I experienced true existential joy, the sort of primal exaltation typically reserved for religious experiences or astonishingly great sex — and it was all thanks to a supercar.

My ridiculously fortunate job has me at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in southern England this week, serving as the Verge’s car newbie trying to find out what all the fuss is about. More on the festival itself later, but let’s get right to the point of my enlightenment. I took a ride up Goodwood Hill, one of the signature showcase events at the show, in a McLaren 650S Can-Am, driven by the inimitable Chris Goodwin, chief test driver for McLaren and one of the company’s most convincing salesmen. He certainly swayed me into becoming a lifelong supercar fan, but he did it with speed, not words.

So here’s what it was like going up Goodwood Hill with an expert racing driver at the wheel: The first 150 meters or so was pure, sublime acceleration that turned distant things into nearby things way too quickly for my mind to be okay with it. All sorts of basic “humans shouldn’t be moving this fast” alerts were going off inside my cranium. Then we got into the corners and uphill parts and Chris started swinging the car around bends at speeds that, again, didn’t really agree with my idea of what’s possible with real-world physics. The most impressive thing about these cars is the level of control they have — anyone can make a thing go really fast, but it’s the smooth deceleration and change of direction that truly made this McLaren ride an otherworldly experience. After the eye-opening start, all I could do was exclaim “wow,” almost to confirm to myself I hadn’t passed out, and then I just focused on breathing and soaking up the ride until the end.

I’m told the drive up Goodwood takes just over a minute, but it felt like a mere handful of seconds. It was a thrill the likes of which you only experience in some life-or-death situation. And I do think that has something to do with it here: everything about the speed at which Chris was driving signalled danger, and it’s the taming and mastery of that danger that felt so gratifying and empowering, even if the master in this case was the pro driver and not me. And there’s some semblance of time travel about the way the car just moves and eats up distances faster than any being from the natural world.

I don’t want this to be an advertisement for McLaren, but this 650S Can-Am, which is a super exclusive limited edition of just 50 examples, will be seared forever in my memory. It thoroughly, and conclusively, illuminated the reasons why people chase the sensation of speed, and it made me understand why someone would spend a quarter of a million pounds (£255,000 / $335,000) on such an impractical car. What is also showed me, though, is the best of advanced technology. There’s an incredible breadth and depth of engineering that goes into the 650S to stabilize it around corners, dynamically adjust fuel delivery for optimal acceleration and deceleration, and generally make for an unforgettable driving experience. I love the fact that all of that hard maths and physics is invisible to the user, who’s left with a mouth slightly agape and a mind utterly perplexed.

For a few seconds yesterday, I felt alive. For those few seconds in that speeding car, there was no Brexit bullshit, no angst about my slipping youth, and no worrying about the future. I had no idea what the next corner looked like and it didn’t matter, because the moment was all-encompassing. It was reckless abandon, it was a physical and emotional experience, and it left me in a happy haze that still lingers now, half a day later.

The Goodwood Festival of Speed has been nothing short of a delight for me. I’ve seen parents and children sharing moments of wonder and (mild) worship around the classic cars. I’ve heard German, French, Italian, and Spanish teams working around the paddocks, while I, a Bulgarian, was covering the show with American and British colleagues. Goodwood brought all of us together, it provided a stage for automotive history to show its best colors, and it filled the muddy English countryside with good humor and cheer. The unique thing about Goodwood is that it’s more than just an exhibition, as the majority of cars on show do end up taking the run up Goodwood Hill. This is a car show the way a car show should be done, and for me at least, it was the truest festival of speed ever. I can’t wait to come back again next year.