24 HOURS IN A McLAREN GT

He is Autocar associate editor Piers Ward, and this might be the longest day of his life

In a career that's hardly over-burdened with brilliant decisions, this is definitely one of my poorer ones.

It's 3.45am, I'm wide awake, my right bum cheek is so numb that it feels like I've had a local anaesthetic, my legs are bent at an awkward angle and there's a piece of seat digging into my ribs. I'm trying to sleep in our McLaren GT and it's not going well.

But before we go any further, I should answer the question my six-year-old incredulously posed when he was told that his halfwit of a father was going to sleep in the car: “Why?”

There is a semi-sensible reasoning behind my pain. McLaren: says this is the tourer of its range, the car that's most usable on a day-to-day basis the everyday supercar, basically. So what better way to test that than by literally spending 24 hours in it?

The rules of the game are simple. We're going to start in Lincolnshire and head across to North Wales, over a mixture of major and minor roads. I'm only allowed out to fuel the car or use the toilet. Save for a heart attack, there are no other valid reasons for getting out. Photographer Max Edleston is on hand to fetch all my food and will be my batman (if only every McLaren came with one).

One final thought, and it's a crucial one: I'm hoping that by combining excellent touring qualities with McLaren's well-known handling, the GT will actually be able to do the Jekyll and Hyde thing well.

I get in and buckle up at noon: 24 hours, here I come. My first task is to head up the A1 before I bear left across the A52 towards Derbyshire and the Cat and Fiddle road. Famous as a superb stretch of asphalt back in the day, threading its way over the Peak District, it's not quite the destination it once was, due to more traffic and average speed cameras.