AUTOMOTIVE
Many of you will have visited a circuit to experience
a supercar track day - perhaps you may have left
feeling like you didn’t necessarily learn a great deal.
The cost of going wide can be catastrophic and
the instructors know this and therefore encourage
restraint, and rightly so. At the Ice Academy however,
this isn’t the case. Although it’s not encouraged to
leave the circuit, you couldn’t help but feel that due
to the relatively small risk involved with going wide
on a corner, it allowed you to push your own ability
and gain confidence in a way that track driving just
simply doesn’t allow.
At sundown, we headed back to the hotel where JLR
had their very own exclusive tepee lounge. Inside was
a warm cosy fire, great company and a full evening
of sharing stories, photos and reminiscing on the day
gone by - not to mention bet placing on who would
be the first to require the assistance of a recovery
vehicle the following day.
Still slightly unsure about our new-found skills,
I awoke to find myself praying that whilst asleep
my brain had hurriedly built new synapses to
better make sense of the sensory onslaught that is
becoming the new normal.
Our first session was on the large circle, a perfect
circle 400 meters in diameter, which was designed
to easily throw the car into a drift at speed and then
sustain it, lap after lap after lap.
Enter the Jaguar F Type. The spiritual successor of
the E-Type.
This was the moment we had been waiting for. The
rest of the day was a blur of speed, snow smoke
and laughter while we experienced the full range of
tracks and circuits available to us. Upon uploading
content from this experience to various social media
outlets, someone asked me “are you James Bond?”. I
certainly felt like him.
The F-Type was a different beast all together, with it
being rear wheel drive, the importance of the throttle
became all too clear. The balance between sustaining
a drift and performing a pirouette as you spin on exit
was a tricky thing to dial in. The slightest increase in
power would only serve to remind you to stop being
greedy. Smooth is slow, and slow is fast.
Issue 37 2019
The Art of Luxury
35