Riding shotgun on the less interesting side of a car can create lifelong memories For obvious reasons, the concept of a ‘passenger ride’ doesn’t light the fires of sweaty-palmed anticipation in most road testers. Car maker A will put you on a pre-dawn flight to Helsinki, whence you’ll board an internal connection up to Rovaniemi, followed by an hour or two’s transit and plenty of hanging around, only to sit on the less interesting side of some compact crossover prototype, staring at an entirely disguised dash while being driven around a frozen lake for 15 minutes. Then home you trot, too little the wiser. For Car maker A, this is a fabulously effective method of stringing out the coverage. It gets the new product’s existence out there long before the project leaders are confident enough to let an outsider with a critical arse have a proper go. We normally play along because, ultimately, on these trips there is still news to be broken: there are insights to be made and engineers to be quizzed. But we’d rather be driving, seeing as we’ve often travelled far, as has the damned car. Alas, so fruitful and risk-free is the passenger-ride approach from a PR standpoint that it is not unknown for car makers to tempt us out to drive a prototype, only for that drive to quietly morph into a ride after the travel has been arranged. One German OEM particularly loves this stunt. But there’s another side to the passenger ride, and it’s among the very sweetest parts of this job, depending on the equation of vehicle, driver and environment. It’s also something I’m sure we’re going to see more of, as European marques frantically seek to underscore their heritage as a differentiating factor against Chinese brands. Occasionally, for a tangential activity on a launch event, a car maker will wheel out one of its racing cars for us to have a ride in. Or it might get a superstar driver to take us for a hot lap or three in the road car being launched. Hitting the jackpot would be getting an extraordinary car and the superstar driver together on a world-class circuit. The launch of the latest Porsche 911 GT3 RS comes to mind: Jörg Bergmeister at Silverstone, smashing the car’s brake pedal at about the point even experienced journalists were rolling off it. After the disclaimers have been signed, and the HANS is hooked up to your lid, and the car’s door clicks shut, the next few dizzying minutes as a passenger can generate lifelong memories. I bring this up because Skoda recently launched the new Enyaq and Elroq vRS models. They’re comfy and capable but prosaic EVs . A nice home-counties venue for the launch event seemed likely, but instead the invite said we have to get ourselves out to Sweet Lamb. Ah, yes, that famous den of rally-based antics in mid-Wales. The link between the new EVs and the R5 Fabia that Skoda laid on to give rides was utterly tenuous, but who cared? They were both Skodas, which was excuse enough to plaster a smile on everybody’s faces on a sunny Tuesday morn. Bob Morgan bounced us around Ceredigion’s valleys, which reverberated to the rasp of a straight-piped 1.6 (assembled in Shanghai, as it happens). It was a cool thing for Skoda’s comms people to tee up, but perhaps also a rather savvy PR move. The release of feelgood endorphins must have lasted long into the day. For me, rally cars are perhaps at the top of the ride hierarchy (and handily they always have a passenger seat). They move with an almost incomprehensible three-dimensionality if you’re accustomed to circuit metal. Extreme levels of pitch and roll combine with mid-scrambling braking performance on loose surfaces, while yaw and power are used to rotate the car in a way that would get you killed or at least black-flagged anywhere else. They’re just such a joyful, thrilling expression of what it is to go fast in a car. And they’re surprisingly comfortable, because pliancy is paramount. I can remember charging around the Montserrat mountains with Dakar-winning Nasser Al-Attiyah on especially impish form at the wheel of his T1+ Hilux, gobsmacked at how this battle-truck rode like a Phantom. So what’s the ultimate combination of car, driver and environment? The answer will be different for everyone, and that’s part of the beauty of it. For the purposes of pub banter you might take an interdisciplinary, time-travelling approach. Max Verstappen in a Jag XJR-9 on his beloved Nordschleife. Cor. Sébastien Loeb in Bill Elliott’s Nascar Ford Thunderbird at Mount Panorama. Keeping it real, a go in any current Rally1 car, driven close to flat out, would take the biscuit for me, ideally at Ouninpohja. Driver? Wouldn’t mind; they’re all the best type of mad.