Ever wanted to take a Formula one car for a drive? Who hasn’t! It might make the daily commute a much quicker affair and you’d certainly both impress and annoy those drivers in the sports cars that shoot past you every Monday morning. They would be next to useless in wet and cold weather (no roof!) and unless you had a dedicated pit crew on hand changing the tyres from wet to dry everytime the rain came down it would be annoying. So the next time you see one screaming around Spa or Silverstone have you ever thought about taking one out of Parc Ferme when they are too busy celebrating a podium place to notice? How easy could it be?
First of all you’d have to hope that Lewis Hamilton or George Russell had left the detachable steering wheel in the cockpit otherwise it’s going nowhere. A normal equivalent to this would be to have a Ghost Immobiliser fitted to our car. Ghost immobilisers from MPH are some of the best you can get and they make the car unusable to everyone but you.
Say you’d got into the cockpit and the steering was still there, you then have to figure out how it turns on. Formula one steering wheels have a complicated array of buttons for fuel mixes, car settings and speed monitors before you even get to the ignition switch. Even if you could get it out of the track you might be stuck in pit lane mode which means you’re going to top out at 38 miles per hour, which seems a waste.
Also every Formula one car’s driving seat is made purely to the drivers body specifications and that you’d stick out like a sore thumb to the Police then perhaps it’s better just using a simulator?