If you want to experience the full excitement of driving a car on track, you simply have to go racing. It's an immutable automotive law - racing is the purest and most intense form of circuit driving, bar none. The pressure of qualifying, the drama of a wheel-to-wheel battle, the stress of having some crazed lunatic in an identical car over your shoulder desperately searching for a way through, the sheer joy of finishing 14th, your best result ever... it's all very exciting.
Space for a passenger, if you want
Having said that, there are lots of reasons for not taking the plunge into competitive motorsport and sticking to track days instead. The eye-watering cost being one. The demands it can make on your time being another. Maybe you just find the prospect of racing intimidating - it would be weird if you didn't - or perhaps you're just so unutterably useless behind the wheel of a motor vehicle that racing and all the associated danger simply isn't for you.
I think the best reason for not going racing, though, is that you can actually experience a decent percentage of the thrill of motorsport within a track day context - and therefore do away with a fair amount of hassle - by simply choosing the right machine. Which brings me to this, the Caterham Seven 420R Donington Edition, the car that gets closer to reproducing the fun of racing than anything else I've driven in a decade of testing cars.
Race car for the track
That does make a lot of sense given this limited edition model is probably the closest thing Caterham has ever built to a road-legal racing car. In fact, it's so closely related to the 420R competition machine - Caterham's top-spec racer - that you'd only need to kick off the headlights and slap on a couple of numbers before you could compete in it (which would completely undermine the very point of buying a track day car rather than a racing car, but you see what I'm getting at).
Bathurst, Monza, Daytona, Motegi... Donington
The Donington Edition jointly celebrates the 60th anniversary of Caterham Cars and the 40th anniversary of the reopening of one of Britain's most challenging circuits. It isn't a full factory project, but instead the work of BookaTrack Caterham, the new Caterham franchise that was established by the renowned track day company with its showroom at Donington Park.
There'll only ever be 10 Donington Editions and each one will carry a numbered plaque. The blue, white and red colour scheme is inspired by the circuit's corporate colours and is unique to this car. It's based on the 420R road car, which slots in just beneath the wild supercharged 620R in the Seven line-up and is, therefore, a fearsomely quick car in its own right.
But the revisions that have been made to the Donington Edition are so far reaching that the car is closer in execution to the competition machine. It uses the full race spec roll cage, rather than a slightly sorry looking rollover bar, and it also pinches the six-speed Sadev sequential gearbox from the 620R and top-level racers.
213hp at 7,600rpm. Proper
The engine is a 2.0-litre Ford Duratec that's good for 210 very snorty, very ill tempered horsepower. It isn't a peaky, difficult engine, but it does rev out with such intensity and aggression that you'd swear it was mad at you. The clutch is a race-spec item, although it isn't quite as tricky as the one you'll find in the racing car.
We wanted to bring the 420R racing car experience to track day drivers in a road-legal model," says Stuart Faulds, the BookaTrack Caterham workshop manager who developed the car and will personally build all 10 examples. "We set out to make an accessible but fast track day car. It's almost as quick as the racing car, but it's fairly easy to drive and it isn't on a knife-edge. It doesn't have any weather protection so I don't envisage them being used on the road much, although it is actually pretty good to drive on the road."
It's stupendously good to drive on circuit, though. In fact, it's every bit as immersive and engaging as the racing car itself; it's only the less frenetic nature of a track day compared to motorsport that makes the whole experience any less thrilling. The race-spec springs and dampers are unique to this car and it has a noise limit-friendly rear exit exhaust rather than the racing car's noisy side exit pipe.
The sequential gearshift is just the coolest thing: pulling gear after gear with your right foot flat to the boards; banging down three as you pile into a tight corner hard on the brakes with just the faintest kick of the clutch pedal. It doesn't get much better than that.
Point and smirk
Driving any track-prepared Caterham on circuit for the first time goes like this: you start off braking hard for corners and getting right down the gears. Then, as you get braver, you brake a little less and start releasing the car into the corner. Soon enough, you realise you can take every single bend a full gear higher than you first thought. That's when it all starts coming together, when you get the car swooping through corners, linking one to the next, the whole lap a cohesive and fluid rumba rather than a disjointed point-to-point, stop-start staccato shuffle.
Want one? Get one. It's brilliant
If you can get a Caterham flowing, you'll get it shifting quickly, and the Donington Edition flows as well as any racing Seven I've come across. The sticky Avon ZZR tyres generate bundles of turn-in grip - as does the pointy chassis balance, which gives the car more front end than the entire Baywatch cast - but whereas the racing cars can be snappy and unforgiving, the Donington Edition is altogether more approachable.
The irony of this thing is that it's so close to being a racing car that you really ought to pull yourself together and just buy a bloody racing car instead. But if you don't want to get drawn into motorsport's financial vortex or you just don't have the time, the Donington Edition will at least give you a pretty good taste of what you're missing.
CATERHAM SEVEN 420R DONINGTON EDITION
Engine: 1,999cc, four-cyl
Transmission: 6-speed sequential, rear-wheel drive
Power (hp): 213@7,600rpm
Torque (lb ft): 150@6,300rpm
0-62mph: 3.8sec
Top speed: 136mph
Weight: Probably not much
MPG: N/A
CO2: N/A
Price: £47,500