If you (a) enjoy good writing, (b) enjoy Iain Banks, and are sad he’s gone, or (c) just love Formula 1, then you should definitely go read this. Here’s a bit:

It’s all about the power, and weight transfer. The F1 cars weigh 600kg. In a Lamborghini Diablo – a maniac, kaka off-a-shovel device if ever there was one – each bhp has nearly three kilos to move around. In what we’re to be driving, each horse only has to shift 800 grams. Under acceleration drivers get hit with 2.5gs, under braking it’s four gs.

[…]

‘Allez! Go!’ Clutch out.

The sound assaults. I feel like a shell in a gun. The car leaps forward like a Navy fighter slung from a carrier. Feather slightly, pull back on the right paddle for second, exit pits. Assume the line. First gentle corner again, burst of – Holy shit! – power, then the counter-intuitive braking. It’s not really counter-intuitive, it’s just counter to anything I’ve learned in a road car, apart from how to do emergency stops. You stamp on the pedal. And stay stamped. It’s 40kg of pressure called for in the F3s; 80 in the F1s.

‘I brake, I wait’ Stephan said. The first part of the braking zone is the one place in each corner you have even the most microscopic amount of time to think, because initially, brake is all you do. Meanwhile, having just rearranged themselves after acceleration and then cornering, your internal organs struggle to find yet another novel configuration. I suspect bits of my insides that didn’t know the other parts existed have found themselves on term close to intimate, all jellied up together like passengers in a tube train. I start changing down (not too fast, or the engine blows up). Apex. Push the accelerator delicately, smoothly, trying to keep the whole foot on it, not just the ball. The LCD screen swings the revs on a ballistic curve from left to right, starting at 3000 and ending at 13,000rpm. The power…is crushing, awesome, frightening, dazzling. And synesthetic; over-spilling to invade and co-opt the sense that don’t appreciate it from first principles, obliterating divisions in the mind, searing tis impression forever into the deepest places in the memory. The car reacts instantly to every input like it’s responding to intentions, not actions.