NEED for SPEED

Gear up for luxury, glamour and high-octane horsepower with these supercar tours that are revving it up in life's fast lane.

-  Michael Stahl

You’ve enjoyed lunch on a truly breathtaking terrace, the texture of creamy duck pâté lining your mouth as you contemplate the backdrop of the lake glistening far below. Between you and your luxury hotel lie some of the world’s most picturesque and entertaining roads, snaking through hairpin turns that cling to cliffsides, before flowing smoother and faster past lush green meadows nearer the lake shore.

With a mix of trepidation and disappointment, you look across the car park to your rented, dented Fiat…

If you’re truly serious about experiencing the best that our world has to offer, why should that not include the automotive masterworks of brands like Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini and Maserati?

Taking the high road For some travellers, the car is the journey – and even the destination. A couple of decades ago, the makers of performance and luxury cars began to recognise that over-trafficked, overpoliced and under-maintained roads were making it increasingly difficult for customers to justify owning such capable machines. These cars needed to be experienced in elevated settings.

This came to mean haute luxury tours in exotic destinations, high-performance driver training on famous racing circuits or on frozen lakes, and other brand experiences that brought together their like-minded customers to forge new friendships (and encourage yearning for the latest model).

We’ll look into some of those brand experiences shortly. But what of the traveller who’s just curious to augment their adventure with time at the wheel of a supercar – or, for that matter, a smorgasbord of them?