VX-phwoar...

Vauxhall's VXR 220 is a car at home on the race track, so I drove it on the road...

AS A motoring journalist it is all too easy to slip into superlatives - and with the exception of certain TV programme presenters we do try hard to avoid them. For this particular piece it's going to be harder, because the Vauxhall VXR 220 is one special beast.

I knew this the moment it was delivered, and the guy from Vauxhall departed with the cheery words "Have fun – they all come back crashed." I had it confirmed half an hour later, when an excited girl in an MX-5 frantically waved me into a layby after spotting what I was driving. Turned out she had a VXR too, and thought her's was the only one in the south-east of England...

What I should immediately tell you is that even if upon reading what follows you are duly smitten by this roller-skate on serious steroids, your pipe dreams will remain just that - pipe dreams. Vauxhall only made 65 of these cars, and they were snapped up seriously quickly.

So what's so special about it? Well the starting point is the Vauxhall VX220 Turbo, the Lotus-like little roadster which regular readers of these pages will know is a car that I've enjoyed immensely in the past. To this Vauxhall applies the VXR treatment; VXR is the Luton marque's recently launched performance brand, promoted on the back of continuing success in the British Touring Car Championship racing series, and designed to create very limited high performance versions of certain models - bland these are not. So far along with the VX220, the awesome 5-litre Monaro coupe has been VXR'd, and next year there will be a VXR version of the three-door Astra.

So the VX220's 2-litre powerplant gets a new turbo, an air filter that flows more freely and its electronics reprogrammed by a very clever computer geek. Instead of the 200 horses of the stock turbo, there are now 220 on tap. Doesn't sound much? Yes but these extra stallions are lassoed to a machine that in weight terms is sylph-like to Kate Moss levels. Floor the loud pedal, watch the revs rise and feel the turbo kick in (and boy does it kick in). In the right conditions this thing hits 60mph from rest in 4.2 seconds, which is faster than the latest Porsche 911 S and even all but the most uprated version of a Ferrari 360... You are getting the drift now aren't you...

Perhaps drift is not the most fortunate of word selections. Make no mistake, this car is not the easiest in the world to drive. Along with the extra power comes a chassis with uprated and lowered springs, dampers stiffened by 30 per cent, and a shell 10 per cent more rigid than the stock VX220's - which is pretty much of a bone-jarrer anyway. The grunt passes to the road through Speedline five-spoke alloys, just like you see on racing cars, and Yokohama tyres - just like you see on racing cars... That attractive female and VXR 220 owner who excitedly waved me to a halt (she might havewanted to exchange superlatives with a fellow fan but she just made me jealous - she OWNS one...) told me that these tyres could be a right handful in the wet. But having driven the car through heavy rain I concluded that they weren't that bad, once you had got some heat into them - just like you need to do on a racing car...

The chassis modifications are what finally convinced me that this car is far more a trackday special than road machine. On the smooth cambers of a race circuit you carve your way through corners and the grip seems to go on for ever, while your grin gets wider and wider - to cheek-aching level. On a typically potholed South-eastern road it's a case of holding on tightly to the very small-diameter Momo steering wheel as every bump and rut threatens to pitch this lightweight rocket into the hedge. You need to especially concentrate at close to speed limit rate, when the steering suddenly goes very light indeed, and even the slightest movement can be amplified many times at road level. With this in mind you'll be pleased to hear that stopping ability has been addressed too - cross-drilled vented brakes, uprated pads, yup, just like a racing...

Okay the VXR 220 is a very impractical car. It has no bootspace of any note - the front end is filled with bits of radiator while there is a pouch just about big enough for a briefcase behind the mid-mounted engine. Put any shopping in there however and it would be roasted by the turbo by the time you reached home. And the wide sills mean that there is no elegant way to get in or out of the VXR 220 - in fact more sizable people won't get in or out of it at all unless you take the roof off.

None of which matters. During my week with the VXR 220 there was a permanent queue of people clamouring for a ride in it, and none of them worrying about maintaining their elegance while slipping down into its tarmac-scraping confines. On the road the sheer performance simply takes over, along with the evocative growl of the engine just behind your head, and especially the very audible hiss each time you come off the turbo.

This car, all £30 Grand's worth, belongs in my dream garage - though my dream garage would also need resiting, adjacent to my own private race track...