Drive: Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsport takes on Silverstone

The entire interior has been ripped out, leaving just the basic shape of the dashboard, some switches and the column stalks to remind you which make of car you’re in. A brilliantly clear Cosworth data-logging system replaces the conventional dials.

So the car should be a lot lighter than a standard Cayman GT4. But it’s not. Because once you’ve factored back in the air jack system it carries, the welded-in roll-cage, communications systems, fire extinguishing kit, removable roof section (mandated by rule makers) and standard 90-litre race tank, the car weighs 1320kg, which is about the dry weight of a GT4 road car.

In a racing context, it is as easy to drive as the street Cayman GT4 is in a road context. You might find the unfamiliarity of the cockpit, the sight of those slicks and the knowledge you’re in a racing car a trifle intimidating, but you need to remember these are cars designed to be driven by people without much racing experience and come with all the electronic aids found in the road car. For similar money, you can buy a Porsche 911 Cup car, which is a very different proposition indeed: with no ABS, no traction or stability control, a sprint-spec tyre that needs constant management and demanding limit handling, it requires an altogether different, more senior approach.

But in the Cayman, the only real challenge is adjusting your horizons, because while its basic characteristics are quite like those of the road car, they appear at a level that has nothing whatever to do with street machinery.

It’s an easy car in which to get comfortable. There’s plenty of leg and head room, the steering column adjusts in the normal way and the car fires up and sounds as you’d expect. You trundle out onto the circuit, where you’re provided with your first big test. If the tyres are cold, they don’t work at all, so you need to drive hard enough to heat them up without binning it in the process. Here, the electronic systems help, as does left-foot braking on the straight with your right foot still hard on the accelerator, using disc heat to warm the rubber.

Then you can let it go. At once, the car’s straight-line performance becomes its least interesting aspect. First, you must get used to how the car brakes: the GT4 Clubsport doesn’t have huge downforce by race car standards so you don’t need to worry too much about adjusting brake pressure as the downforce seeps away but you still fly past the point you’d expect to brake, count to three and then hit the pedal, perhaps twice as hard as you’d consider in any road car. The ABS doesn’t so much as cheep.

The next thing to learn are the cornering speeds, which at first seem unfeasible but end up being merely breathtaking. But you won’t go fast in the car until you’ve blended these two disciplines and learned how to brake and corner at the same time. Any idiot can learn when to get back on the gas. The key to a lap time is all about the entry-to-apex phase, easing in almost fully on the brakes, then releasing pressure to allow cornering forces to build, always keeping the tyres as close to the limit of their longitudinal and lateral capabilities as possible. And on a quick circuit like Silverstone, once you’ve established a rhythm and the car starts to fly, you never want to get out.