The original Dodge Viper wanted to kill you | Thank Frankel it's Friday

I can’t remember exactly where I was on the track, other than somewhere scary around the back, but I do remember trying to describe just how difficult this car was to handle in such conditions; at which point the car, as if by way of timely, helpful demonstration, tried to throw me in the bank. And I can still remember that empty feeling in my stomach when I realised I needed not only all the skill I possessed but a sizeable slice of luck to avoid smearing what was at the time on the only Viper in the UK across a picturesque slice of West Sussex.

The Viper. I write this as we approach the 30^th anniversary of its birth. We had never seen anything like it. Its looks were preposterous but wrote no cheque the car beneath could not cash in full courtesy of its 8.0-litre, V10 engine. Eight litres! It seemed like a capacity more suited to a truck which, we later learned, was precisely from where the engine had been sourced, then re-cast in aluminium.

It seems silly to say so now, but even its 406PS (298kW) output was something pretty special in 1992. Today there are hot hatchbacks that are as potent but in the day not even the Ferrari Testarossa had that amount of steam. And in a lightweight body, it made the car fly. The torque was something else again.

All my early Viper miles were in the dry, where I felt it handled amiably enough. There was huge grip and while the steering was quite lifeless, the greater bar to your progress was the confidence sapping width of the thing. It felt enormous, very much a car designed for over there. So I gave it a favourable write up, then took it Goodwood, scared myself witless and rather wished I’d been more measured in my praise.

There were plenty of adventures in that car, memorably plated ‘WOW 110T’ with a black screw cap artfully placed between each ‘1’ to make it say ‘WOW HOT’. But the one I will never forget was a run from London to Brescia to chase the 1993 Mille Miglia. I went with my then deputy Steve Sutcliffe and discovered as soon as we collected the car we could stow the roof or our luggage, but not both. Faced with a week away without so much as a change of underwear, or doing 1,000 miles around Italy with the roof up, we took option three and left the roof behind. If it rained, we’d get wet.

That year, it rained, and rained and rained, almost from the moment we got to France. But we discovered the faster you drove the drier you stayed, so we did something which was quite common to Steve and myself at the time but seems unimaginable today. We found the car’s maximum comfortable cruising speed and, stops aside, stayed there all night. That speed was 135mph.

There was only one thing worse than driving at that speed with not very good lights in driving rain in a car already with an entirely deserved reputation for abysmal in the wet, and that was not driving. I’m a terrible passenger at the best of times, and these were the worst. So, and this might surprise you, when Steve was driving I simply went to sleep in the hurricane force winds that raged around the cockpit. I even managed to sleep through an enormous tankslapper he’d had in the middle of the autoroute.

My greatest scare while I was driving was feeling the steering go light, turning the wheel slightly to the left then slightly to the right, neither manoeuvre making the smallest discernible difference to our direction of travel. Too scared to brake, I just came off the gas and let the V10 slow us until the fat front tyres bit through to the tarmac again.

We made it to Italy, all around the Mille Miglia course and despite the Viper trying on numerous other occasions to introduce me at speed and with violence to various hedges, walls, fields and barriers the length and breadth of Italy by the time we were back in Brescia I had developed a certain affection for the old rogue, one I retain to this day. Say what you like about the Viper but you never got bored driving it.

Then, as we were preparing to head home, someone else offered to swap their airline ticket for the Viper’s driving seat. Fly or drive? I grabbed the ticket, handed over the key and headed for the airport. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to drive the Viper any more, just that I felt you can only have so much luck and, having survived 2,000 fairly flat out miles in it, I’d had about all I deserved.

Images courtesy of Bonhams.