THE 1,200-HORSEPOWER PUSSYCAT

DRAKO’S GTE LOOKS TO REVOLUTIONIZE PERFORMANCE DRIVING AS WE KNOW IT

- St. Antoine

ANDY PILGRIM, Automobile’s resident professional racer, hurtles the two of us around WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, the speedo climbing past 125 mph on the track’s main straight before he knifes the camouflaged prototype through the quick Turn 1 kink and brakes hard for the tight Turn 2 hairpin. Despite a damp track surface from a recent rain, as we exit the 180-degree left-hander, Pilgrim is quickly back on full throttle, and we gun hard toward Turn 3. The lap continues like this—we’re making some serious speed—but everything feels weird.

For one thing, Pilgrim seems to be driving not a 10/10ths hot lap but instead a relaxed Sunday afternoon cruise; he barely moves the steering wheel as we dive down the tricky Corkscrew, the car tracking through the apex with zero countersteer or other corrective inputs as he hammers on toward hairy, off-camber Turn 9. Also, it’s eerily quiet in here. Instead of an internal combustion scream, the audio is a muted mixture of turbinelike whoosh and the moans of g-loaded tires tasked with performing improbable feats.

“You can see that I really just need to turn into the corner, and the car does the rest,” Pilgrim says as we flash through Turn 10, his voice hushed as if the two of us were conversing in a library. And then he late-brakes into the final, hard-left Turn 11, mashes the throttle, and once again we’re pinned back in a gently furious blur of straightaway speed.

“Geez,” I think to myself as we leap flat-out over the main-straight hill, Pilgrim looking every bit as tranquil as a koala after a eucalyptus bender. “This almost doesn’t seem fair.”