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Lewis Hamilton need not worry

There’s nothing quite like a race suit to magically transform you into Super Boy Racer.

Pulling on a race suit is a transmogrifying experience, much as one imagines peeling on the blue lycra and red gumboots and underpants is for Superman.

It's a mental trick, really, based on the fact that whenever you've seen someone wearing such a colourful pair of overgrown overalls before, they've been a proper racing driver, capable of feats of great skill, speed and daring.

Looking down at your padded chest, you start to think that maybe this whole racing cars lark might be a bit of you.

Then you hear the engines fire up and the walls of the pit garage reverberating and wonder if it's too late to slip off the suit and slink off and hide in the toilets.

Deep breaths, come on, how fast could a car with a 1.6-litre Ford engine be?

Well, it might only produce 85kW, roughly the same as a Toyota Echo, but this engine is sitting in a Formula Ford race car, which weighs just 400kg.

The power-to-not-very-much-weight ratio is what makes the car a little intimidating. That and the fact that it looks, and feels, not much bigger than a bathtub, and sits even closer to the ground.

They might be light on power, but make no mistake, they're serious race cars, with a potential top speed of 250km/h. Formula Ford has been the racing nursery for such stellar names as Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and Mark Webber.

It's a pretty safe bet that none of the punters in attendance on our visit will be hitting those heights. Before anyone had even touched a car there was the sort of fear in the air you'd expect to find before a group swim across a piranha infested river.

We stood, shifting our race-booted feet nervously, as the instructors from U-Drive Race Cars gave careful, detailed instruction on how to double declutch the four-speed dog 'box and, more pressingly, how to squeeze into the cockpit.

Then it was out on the track, in formation behind the pace car — a Subaru WRX — which proceeded to drive like a Volvo with a bowling hat on the parcel shelf.

For the first few laps, this was not really impinging on our pace anyway, as we all struggled to come to terms with a gearbox that requires not-so-tender, shoving care, and attempted to get our lines right around Oran Park, with the help of traffic cones on corner entries and exits.

After a while, though, I was overcome with an emotion I'd never experienced before — a burning desire to overtake a WRX.

The second session put the pace into the pace car, with top speeds of 130km/h down the straights, but the potential in the Formula Ford was so strainingly evident that I was still struggling with the concept of patience.

In truth, this careful introduction to what is an entirely foreign world is more than wise, it's advisable. Getting too quick, too soon, would be a half- baked recipe for disaster.

Finally, in the third session of the day, we were unleashed on the track, with only one other punter sharing the hotmix.

This was more like it. The go and flow of the car combining with the track, the punishing, head-snapping acceleration and the temptation to squeeze corners by riding the ripple strips — even though this felt like hitting a cattle grid at 120km/h, in a billy cart.

It quickly became evident, however, that the fun police were still on the track, in fact they were in the car with me, in the form of the car's rev-limiter.

Unimpeded, the Formula Fords would scream their way up to 7000rpm, or more, but the U-Drive folk cautiously set the limiter at 4500rpm. Around most of the track, it's enough, with the throttled scream of hitting top-revs in third an intermittent experience.

Wind on to the straight, however, and you hit the limiter in third, then fourth, well before the start/finish line, which means you can't actually fly up to Turn One as fast as you'd dare, only as fast as U-Drive dares you to.

To be fair, it's still pretty quick — the car will hit an estimated 150km/h even with the limiter — and no one else seemed to be complaining about the rev limit.

And keeping up the pace, while flatly refusing to acknowledge your own fear, is still an enormous challenge. The complete absence of bodyroll, the tense, tight handling and the mind-bending, G-forcing brakes make each lap a punishingly pleasurable experience.

Lapping the other driver on track with me was the purest form of schadenfreude, but because we weren't allowed to time ourselves (“timing is racing, and racing is not allowed,” we were told) it's hard to tell if we were actually getting quicker.

It certainly felt fast, though, as did the 12 free laps we got, which seemed over all too quickly.

Ten minutes later, my heart was still pounding in my chest as if I'd just completed that piranha swim, and then taken a jog through a killer bee nest for good measure.

Parachuting and base jumping aside, there really are very few ways you can feel the kind of adrenalin offered by a race track experience like this, which is why we highly recommend it, even at a pricey $575 for a half-day. Once you've completed that, you can step up to the full-day advanced course — where the rev-limiter is lifted to 6500rpm — for $895.

Sergio Fleitas, who'd driven up from Canberra to do the course, a gift from his wife, Isabel, was a typically happy customer.

“I've been watching F1 for years, and now I know it's not as easy as it looks,” he grinned.

“Driving these cars was great fun, it gives you at least an idea of how hard it is to drive a race car.”

For more information, call LIVE Adrenalin on 1300 733 942

 

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