Porsche 997 Turbo vs. Honda Fireblade
You don't often get to see this - a fast car and a sports bike hammering it out on track together. Rockingham's bumpy, twisty National circuit, as it goes. Honda Fireblade or Porsche 911 Turbo: who's the daddy?
THERE'S ONE HELL of a lot of heat coming out of the back of that 3.6-litre, 473bhp Porsche, and it's spitting up chunks of grit and rubber that are stinging my flesh. And if that camera falls off I'm in trouble...
And we're doing this why? Visordown teamed up with Autocar magazine and their tasty wheel man Steve Sutcliffe for one of those perennial 'car v bike' on-track shoot-outs, trying to prove something or other about who, or what, is best.
All in the name of fun, of course. Which it should have been. Except totalling the Fireblade on the first lap wasn't in the script. Dickson, you muppet. Cue desperate phone call: "Hello? Bertie Simmonds? Can we borrow your Blade..?" Cheers mate.
Who was fastest? Er, the car actually. Sutcliffe's best lap was a 1m 21sec to the bike's 1m 22.25. Remarkably, unexpectedly close, as it turned out, and the relative speeds through the corners were eye-openingly similar.
Does that make cars better than bikes? Of course not.
I was carrying at least a second a lap's worth of shoulder injury thanks to that unscheduled (and mortifyingly embarrassing) morning get-off, and riding with another second or so in hand because I really, really didn't want to dump two Fireblades in one morning. They're my excuses and I'm sticking to 'em.
And anyway, it's a cracking picture.
