I WANTED MY OWN FIORANO'

Malcolm Wilson's M-Sport motorsport business now has the UK's newest racetrack at its Lake District base, plus a lot more besides. Matt Saunders is given a 100mph guided tour

- Matt Saunders

There’s a brand-new racetrack just outside the office window at the Dovenby Hall headquarters of British motorsport engineering business M-Sport in the Lake District.

Strangely, the boss says he hasn’t driven around it much. That’s hard to believe when the boss in question is former British rally champion Malcolm Wilson, who just happens to have a collection of cars that would thrive in regular track exercise. He’s currently more concerned with who else might like to come and use his 1.7-mile, £25 million investment than roaring around it himself, but he shouldn’t worry: I reckon plenty will.

Today, Wilson is taking a couple of hours out to give us the dime tour in a 632bhp Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT – this week’s road test subject (p34) – we’ve brought along. He’s not really a Porsche fan, he says, but his better half is – and funnily enough, she’s about to take delivery of a Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid. It will replace her Panamera, to make life ferrying around their grandchildren easier.

So what does a motorsport engineering company mostly concerned with rallying want with a race circuit?

“Seventy per cent of the rallying in which our cars now compete is on Tarmac,” explains Wilson. “We’ve developed racing cars as well over the years. So it’s a very useful thing.”

But the new track isn’t intended solely for M-Sport. It’s a key business asset being offered, along with M-Sport’s technical facilities, to the wider automotive and motorsport industries for vehicle engineering and development, as well as events.