Taxi! Or not.

We rocked up at the track around 6pm or so, and it was, to all intents and purposes, deserted. On a good day, the car park is apparently packed to the brim with exotic and otherwise mental motors, but the sole flag-bearer for the speed-merchant crowd was a be-stickered Impreza with the name "Maddog" alongside an English flag (didn't see that one coming) stencilled onto the rear quarterlights.

The weather was still overcast and the track slick with rainwater, and we hummed and hawed for a bit. It's possible to hire a Ring Taxi - a BMW M5 driven by a professional driver for a single lap - for €150, but their office was closed. We bit the bullet when it became obvious that we had neither time that night nor extra days to spare.

We moved all of the loose items from my car into the Fiat's boot. It suddenly, and worryingly, dawned on me that I'd left the excruciatingly detailed 30-page track guide at the hotel. "Not to worry", Jez said, brandishing a single A4 sheet of paper with a low-res map of the 'Ring on it. Most of the 73 corners were so small as to be absent, and five or six unlabelled exclamation marks appeared at parts to be feared for unspecified reasons. I reassured Ashley that we'd come back alive and we headed out in the Saab.

It was absolutely excellent. The track's far wider than GT4 would suggest, and even although the car understeered (and occasionally, more disturbingly, oversteered) in most corners, there was more than enough space so that I never really worried about encountering the armco. We got waves from the few spectators still out and about, crawled past an accident site, were passed by a couple of scarily out of shape Alfa 75s and were finished almost as soon as we had started. I took roughly 12 minutes to cover the 13 miles; not bad for a sub-£1k Saab in the wet on my first go, I told myself. Jez reminded me that someone had once taken 10 minutes in a Transit van, but I was not to be cowed.

The low petrol warning light had come on half way around because A) we'd been driving all day and B) the track was so inclined at some points that the last lot of fuel was sloshing to one end of the tank, so after a quick break to convince Ash it really wasn't all that bad, we emptied the boot of the Fiat, piled in and pulled out with Jez at the wheel.

Ash really shouldn't have come. The Fiat had an almighty snarl when revved hard and an alarming tendency to lose grip at both ends. Jez had a corresponding tendency to drive like a nutter. We got round in 11 hair-raising minutes. Ash was a bit quiet, and continued to be so for the next couple of days. I felt a smidgen guilty.

We headed back to Adenau after the second lap, out of fuel and time. I'd hesitate to say that a single lap was worth a week's holiday if only because of the ridiculous cost of getting there, but I'm definitely going back. Utter, utter genius. If you've any petrol in your veins at all, you have to do this.