Porsche 911 (997) Carrera

So After Years of testing Porsches, it was finally Porsche’s turn to test me: its chance to exact revenge for the years of torture I have inflicted on its tyres, brakes and clutches. I expected it to be painful, and it was.

For most Porsche owners, a trip to the Porsche Experience Centre alongside Silverstone’s Hangar Straight is a pleasant day out. Access to the swanky clubhouse and the three miles of private test track (built on the old rally sprint circuit, used in Rally GB) are a considerable perk of Porsche ownership. Buy any new Porsche and you get a 90-minute session with one of the centre’s ‘driving consultants’ designed to get you comfortable with your new car’s power, and demonstrate how its safety systems might save your ass. As well as the handling circuit and a new set of straights for full bore acceleration and braking, there’s a low grip area, an ‘ice hill’, and a kick plate which will snap your car’s rear end out in a random direction for you to save (or in my case, on several occasions, fail to).

If you’re a really serious customer, Porsche might also send you here to collect your 918 or your GT3, or even let you have a back toback test in cars with different specifications if you’re having difficulty deciding what options to tick. Given that ceramic brakes alone can cost as much as a decent family car, it seems only fair to offer you a test-drive.

You don’t automatically get a session at the centre if you buy an approved used 911 like mine, but if you’re spending enough you can probably sweet talk your dealer into sending you. And anyone can buy their way onto one of the ‘experience’ sessions in a specific Porsche model, or onto one of the longer courses designed to improve your driving skills.

Given the towering ability of most modern sports cars, if you want to go faster the first thing you should improve is yourself. The Porsche Experience Centre doesn’t limit that to driving skills. It’s also home to the Human Performance Centre, run by a bunch of sadists with sports science degrees and past lives in the Spanish Inquisition. They have strong history of making fast blokes fitter. Mark Webber is a regular, and I nearly fainted at the sight of the 74 year old Richard Attwood, one of my great heroes and Porsche’s first Le Mans winner in 1970, pictured in the brochure stripped to the waist on the treadmill having the special medical that ‘senior’ racing drivers require. The FIA should just give him a lifetime pass.

You don’t need to have a 911 to use the place, but it is a nice way to arrive. I booked in for a body composition analysis, in which a clever machine calculates what proportion of your body mass is water, skeleton, muscle and pie, and for a lactate-threshold test that helps you fine tune your training. This one is properly cruel. You cycle for three minutes at a power output of 100 watts, after which someone sticks a needle in your finger to measure the lactic acid in your blood. Then they up the power by 25 watts for another three minutes, and jab you again. They keep doing this until you’re hitting your personal rev limiter and have the centre’s staff (and in my case, Le Mans winner and ex-F1 driver David Brabham, who just happened to be passing) standing around the bike, shouting at you and getting the next needle ready.

My own performance figures were rather less impressive than those I’ve extracted from Porsches over the years. But despite the dissolute lifestyle of the motoring journalist it seems I’m less close to death than I thought, and you might be reading my words for longer than you’d hoped. I left with the facts I needed to improve my own performance to match that of my glorious 911, and, after a quick spin around the centre’s newly expanded tracks, a clear plan to come back and explore my car’s
limits, rather than my own.