Day 1
Monday, 4 November 571 km / Cape Town to Oudtshoorn
We here at CAR like to consider ourselves a grown-up and conservative bunch, ready to pore over technical specifications and quietly discuss the virtues of the many cars we scrutinise daily. Yet, there’s something about our annual Performance Shootout that manages to bring out the big kid in all of us.
Walking down the row of sports-cars quietly lined up opposite Huguenot Monument at the foot of Franschhoek Pass, even the most jaded motoring journalist would concede to a tingling “nightbefore-Christmas” sensation coursing through their veins at the prospect of what lay ahead. Some 1 000 km of motorways, mountain passes and arrow-straight back-roads stretch between our starting point in Cape Town and our destination, Port Elizabeth.
Such exuberance needs to be tempered with a touch of adult restraint; it’s Monday morning so it’s fair to assume most folks would rather wake to the warble of birdsong, rather than a chorus of ear-splitting barks and cracks from sports exhaust-adorned tails of a dozen high-performance cars.
This is especially galling when you consider there is some wonderfully sonorous machinery among this eager huddle of cars. Some turbocharged four-cylinders, an inline-six here and there, and a couple of barrel-chested V8s are all waiting to be let off the leash to charge into the Cape hinterland. And none looks keener to spoil
