It’s not every day you get taken for a spin by former double Formula One world champion Mika Hakkinen, now enjoying retirement as global brand ambassador for Johnnie Walker’s ‘Join The Pact’ campaign against drink driving.

And it’s probably even rarer when the usually reserved Finn exchanges witticisms with you by asking if you’ve had a chance to say your last goodbyes to your family and girlfriend before setting off like a bat out of hell.

That only added to our apprehension, given that the car we were riding in was the Caparo T1, a barely-legal road car. Think of it as an F1 car with an extra seat and headlights (yes, no windscreen even).

Not helping our apprehension any was reading the T1’s spec sheet. It packs a 3.5-litre V8 making peak power of 575bhp at 10,500rpm and enough to propel the flyweight 550kg car from rest to 100km/h in 2.5 seconds.

Unlike a Formula One car, it’s a two-seater, albeit a very claustrophobic one with the passenger sitting slightly behind and to the left of the driver.

Clambering into one is also an experience. You stand in the seat and slide downwards supporting your weight on your arms into a semi-reclining position being careful on the way not to elbow a double world champion in the face.

A good thing too, when you consider Caparo’s marketing literature touts it can generate up to 3g of cornering force when even the best road cars, like the Nissan GT-R, give up at around 1g. So with these figures in mind, we extrapolated it’d be about three times as brutal as a road car.

The reality though, is that it’s closer to a hundred and nothing, apart from perhaps sticking yourself into a really powerful washing machine, can prepare you for the multi-sensory assault delivered by the Caparo.

The T1 doesn’t so much accelerate as it does tear rifts in space and time, teleporting bodies some distance ahead of our brains.

We thought we’d been in fast cars before, but the T1’s acceleration made our breaths catch in our throats. Literally.

There’s an old saying that the most astonishing thing about a Formula One car is its brakes, and the same holds true for the T1 with a sensation very much akin to hitting a brick wall.

How late and hard it can brake into corners beggars belief. Just ask our sore necks if you don’t believe us.

We had to extricate ourselves far too soon, being careful again not to hit the Finnish retiree and wondering how much begging it’d take to let us take it over for just one run.