Radical Road

As we blasted down Mt. Charleston with the wind in our hair, I knew I was hooked. The 562 HP V8 sat just behind us howled as I pushed the loud pedal to the floor. There was no going back - I needed more of this in my life.

Royalty Exotics

The problem started when my wife and I began taking frequent trips to Vegas. Ever since I was a little boy, I loved sports cars, especially Italian ones. Growing up in rural Kansas in the 90s, where dirt roads flourish, meant such cars were never seen in person. Until I reached adulthood, I settled for racing games like Need for Speed or Mario Kart. But Vegas has everything. On a whim I searched for an exotic car rental site and found a Ferrari 458 Spider at Royalty Exotic Cars.

The time we spent in the Ferrari made me a repeat customer at Royalty Exotics. On subsequent trips, I rented several other cars, including a Huracan, an Aventador, and an F12. These experiences were great but were also confined to vacation – I needed a car like this in my everyday life. Each rental helped narrow down what I wanted in a car of my own.

All the cars I rented were fussy and I didn’t want to deal with that in Kansas. I wanted functioning windshield wipers, a great air conditioning system, and a local dealer to service the car. These requirements whittled the list down to one car – an Audi R8.

It only took a couple months of ownership before I realized that public streets were no place for learning the limits of car that can do 200 mph. And so, through the help of terrible friends, I signed up for a track day at Raceway Park of the Midlands. This track, just outside Omaha, Nebraska, is great for beginners. It’s flat, has no walls or barriers to speak of, and it is not technical. After one day at the track, I was well and truly addicted. Two track days later, I signed up for racing school.

Bondurant High Performance Driving School

I attended the four day grand prix road racing course at Bondurant. Though the school has updated the course since I took it, the general structure is the same - days one through three involved driving a manual Challenger Hellcat, while the last was spent in a Formula Mazda.

My favorite activity over the first three days was the skid pad - a section of the parking lot coned off to create a very short oval course. Bondurant takes a Charger Hellcat and adds outriggers to the front and rear of the car. The driving instructor has a remote capable of changing front and rear ride height on demand. This creates an ideal learning environment for perfecting car control.

Car control was the biggest reason I signed up for racing school. I felt uncomfortable learning the Challenger Hellcat’s limits on-track with other vehicles. I wanted to spend an entire day out on the skid pad learning what the limit felt like and how to recover after going past it. However, I only got two 10 minute sessions and that left a sour taste in my mouth.

Day four turned things around because of the glorious Formula Mazda. Compared to the Hellcat’s 4,458-pound curb weight, the Formula Mazda weighs in at just 1350 pounds! From the moment I took the wheel behind the Formula Mazda, the change in feel from the Challenger was unbelievable. The steering, direct. The brakes, responsive. The car, raw. In every sense.

I loved every second of driving it.

Radical Road

I left racing school with a new mission - buy a proper race car. The Audi was too expensive to run on track. My racing friends repeatedly told me I would never be a good driver as long as I tracked a car that had nannies (ABS, traction control, and power steering), and by no means was I going to turn the nannies off in the R8.

The Formula Mazda made an indelible impression on me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. As I searched, I knew I wouldn’t be happy with a proper race car if it didn’t provide that same rawness. Another requirement was closed wheels. The idea of making wheel-to-wheel contact in a car like the Mazda gave me nightmares. These two requirements, open cockpit but closed wheel, drastically narrowed the available field. I shortened my list to:

• Arial Atom
• Spec Racer Ford
• Caterham Seven
• KTM X-Bow
• Radical SR3

Like any racer with more money than sense, I immediately lusted after the fastest car on the list, the Radical SR3. Modern US-based cars were priced between $70,000 and $80,000. Being mechanically inept, however, meant I needed (e.g. wanted and justified as needed) a newer car. I couldn’t stomach paying that much for a race car so I broadened my search to include Europe, especially since SR3s are produced in the UK.

It didn’t take long before I found a deal I couldn’t resist - chassis 0962 located in the Netherlands, sold by a Dutch company called inTrax. inTrax makes the dampers on the SR3 and had a demo car they wanted to unload. The cherry on the cake was that the Euro to dollar exchange rate was much better than the pound to dollar rate.

Within three days of finding the car, I put a deposit down. inTrax helped me arrange international freight on a cargo ship. As the Radical is not street legal, the factory skipped emissions testing. Tom Drewer, the regional manager for Radical North America, showed me the process to get an EPA exemption so the car could clear customs. Four weeks on a cargo ship, two weeks on a train, one day on a semi, and the car was mine!