The ultimate track toy? Flat out in 500bhp Revolution SC500

My car has been raced by six-time Olympic gold-medallist (not to mention LMP2 Le Mans driver) Sir Chris Hoy, and he’s on hand to give me some handy tips.

“I reckon you’re going to like it,” he says. “It’s a really accessible car. Just don’t tread too hard on cold slicks as you enter the track. I’ve seen one of these rotate at the pit-lane exit.” Which isn’t as comforting as he intended.

Making matters apparently worse, in my first session, the track is variously wet, damp and dry right around the lap, which are just about the most difficult conditions you can encounter. A fully wet and therefore consistent track would have been significantly easier.

Yet the car is so reassuring that after a couple of laps, I’m winding back the traction control and revelling in powering out of the tighter turns of the full Donington Grand Prix circuit with the back starting to break loose.

The six-speed paddle-shift gearbox provides limo-smooth upshifts and satisfyingly dramatic downshifts, complete with an angry snarl from the V6 and no need for the clutch in either direction. With the conditions keeping cornering speeds under control, I feel happy, confident and in control of my environment.

But not for the first time in such cars, I find it harder by far in what should be the easier conditions afforded by the bone-dry track that presents itself for my second run. And I know why. I’m getting annoyed with myself, because while I felt that I could push the car to the limit in the wet, in the dry the forces on your body are so far beyond the norm, it pushes the business of driving outside the arc of the immediately familiar and into some strange hinterland where you still know what to do, just not exactly how to do it. In the meantime, snake-hipped hotshots half my age and weight post one up the inside, waggle their tails to say thanks and are gone.

Such are the perils of arrive-and-drive journalism. Fast and (relatively) affordable though the SC500 is, if you want to be on the pace, there are no shortcuts; and unless you have otherworldly talent, you will need to test, test, analyse the data and then test some more.

If you’re not getting somewhere after that, it’s probably not for you. If you are, the Sports Prototype Cup series where you will race Radicals and sometimes LMP3 cars awaits.

Wanting to find a way to explain to you just how fast this car is, I asked a man called Nick Padmore, who was at Donington testing old Formula 1 cars. There probably isn’t a quicker racer of historics out there. And after comparing lap times, he concluded that the SC500 would lap a track at about the same pace as a similarly powerful and far lighter but much less downforce-enhanced F1 car of the kind raced by the likes of James Hunt and Niki Lauda in the mid- to late 1970s.

Once I had heard that, I didn’t feel so bad about lifting for the Craner Curves after all.

The Revolution might be televised