Hit The Tar, Mack

And don't you come back...

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Yes. Yes. Yes! For my 21st birthday my (awesome) Aunt, Uncle and Cousins got me a track day driving experience and today was the day that I traded in that little slip of paper for 2 hours of driving heaven!

On the best day of the year so far (thanks, Nature!) - taking the car I hired yesterday - Eve and I drove down to Oxfordshire to the middle of no where the countryside to a secluded track which had a very tasty-looking parking lot: 2 Lamborghini Gallardos, 2 Aston Martin V8 Vantages, an F360, an R8, a GT3 and an Aerial Atom.

My driving day let me loose on the GT3, the F360, the Gallardo and the Vantage and Oh.My.God! Ridiculous fun, obviously! The power, the precision, the noise, the balance and the poise with which these cars are capable of getting round corners is genuinely mind boggling. You can't help but break out into the silliest grin you've ever had in your life when you get behind the wheel and bury the accelerator into where the foot matts would be, if these cars came with carpet. There's no dual-controls so you really do have to pay attention to the advice given by the instructors. A definite must-do for anyone with even the slightest interest in driving and I would do it again in a heart-beat.

All I have to do now is make sure that in the future I can afford a supercar (and a private track to drive it round).

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So this picture is the R8 lined up on the start grid ready to tear it down the opening straight. I tried to capture the essence of driving; the machine and the road. Fortunately the lighting this morning was beautiful. I feel like the leading lines on the edge of the race track (and the start grid, that lead into the bottom-right corner of the frame) do a fairly decent job of drawing your eye towards the 'horizon'. I probably could have edited the picture better, but I still don't really know what I'm doing, when I'm editing pictures. I know what the settings do and what they alter, but I still can't make up in my mind what the 'best' version of this capture is. Such an impossible task.