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Their attempt was blighted by appalling weather; as David writes, had it not been for a let-up in the rain on their final day, they would have returned to the UK as 'the most unhappy men ever to have driven a Lamborghini.'

Autocar history records, however, that their return was a triumphant success, and that, on their final run, master driver Lyon and the Diablo dismissed a kilometre of unrestricted autobahn in just 11.1 seconds; that was the rate which gave Vivian's write-up its unforgettable title. Enjoy.

The world’s fastest car, driven on public roads, at 201.4mph

David Vivian and John Lyon prove that it’s possible to drive a Diablo flat out on public roads – in complete safety

Contents: "200mph? On the public road? Not possible..."; our plan to blitz the autobahn; 160mph without trying; waiting for the rain to stop; building up to the final push; beyond the big two-oh-oh; John Lyon on driving at 200mph.

"200mph? On the public road? Not possible..."

It started, as some adventures do, with a letter to the editor. A whinging letter, to be precise, and a good one. Spiked with mock bemusement at High Performance Course boss John Lyon’s Open To Question comment that, where conditions permit, he drives to within 10 per cent of a car’s maximum speed, it contained a word we hadn’t expected to see but were glad that we did. “Diablo.”

The name of what many believe to be the world’s fastest production car was surrounded by other words that made it look even better. The ones that mattered were “speeds exceeding 186mph”. The unwritten postscript went something along the lines of “gotcha,” as in, “You’re not seriously suggesting that it’s possible to drive safely at close to 200mph on the public highway, are you?”

Inside HPC’s Caterham HQ, the hand that John Lyon usually waves benignly to thank other drivers for their co-operation broke the urban speed limit on the way to the phone. Reader David Johnson’s missive had ignited the blue touch paper. Now it couldn’t be stopped. We were closing in on the awesome possibilities held by a long road on a bright day in the last country on earth without a speed limit. The day of the Diablo was approaching.

A tabloid version of what was about to be attempted might, we speculated, read “Flat out in the world’s fastest car on the world’s fastest roads with the world’s safest driver”. Or, in the case of The Sun, “Devil seduces driving instructor at 200mph”. Neither would have been guilty of excessive presumption. Lyon was teaching the police how to outdrive the bad guys before I had to make a conscious decision not to shave in the mornings. He is not only one of Britain’s best master drivers but is also so cool under pressure that his eyelashes crystalise.

And the Diablo? The £156,000, 492bhp successor to the legendary Countach is probably the first Lamborghini is history more concerned with going fast than looking good. Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t look good; designer Gandini’s favourite *** packet doodle was always going to be a stunner in the metal. But park the Diablo next to the infamous Italian expletive – festooned with so many scoops, ducts, vents, slats, spoilers, wings and additional pieces of shaped plastic in its final Anniversary form that it looked like the aftermath of a crash between a giant bar of soap and RoboCop – and it all but disappears.

Put the two side by side on a long piece of tarmac, however, and it’s the Countach that disappears. Backwards. Until it’s nothing more than a speck in the Diablo’s rear-view mirror. Lamborghini’s shiny new big gun blows its punk car progenitor clean away and has starred in enough respected continental magazines’ “Nardo at dawn with Diablo and some very expensive timing equipment” features for us to not doubt its 200mph-plus potential. Neither was it our intention to find out, to three decimal places, just how much the ‘plus’ represented.

No, we just wanted to silence the sceptical Mr Johnson. A few seconds as 186mph or slightly more on a German autobahn in complete safety would be enough – a vindication, and it’s foolish to pretend that none is needed, of 200mph cars; a vital shred of admissible evidence that they are not the profligate irrelevance many would have them to be. If we couldn’t do that, we needn’t bother coming back. In truth, we wanted to do more than that. We wanted to dance with the devil at 200mph, wing a genuine Seiko crystal-locked sub-11secs flying kilometre. That, as football managers used to say before streetwise students of the vernacular hijacked the phrase, would be ‘a result’.

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Our plan to blitz the autobahn

So what was to stop us? The cogs were already in place. Portman, the importer of Lamborghini, had signed up the services of John Lyon and HPC as a compulsory aftermarket accessory for Diablo customers unsure whether 12 cylinders, 5.7-litres, 48 valves, 492bhp at 7000rpm and 428lb ft of torque at 5200rpm might damage their health beyond repair. For John, this would be the ultimate Diablo shakedown and the first time he’d driven at close to 200mph. That it would make him supremely qualified to teach people how to drive Diablos properly seemed beyond question. For us it was an opportunity at long last to get our hands on the ultimate Lambo and, moreover, to do something meaningful with it.

The plan had a pleasing simplicity to it. Four of us – John Lyon, Portman technical services manager and veteran Lambo troubleshooter Del Hopkins, photographer Stan Papior and myself – would pile into Portman’s nicely loosened up 16,000-mile Diablo demonstrator and my long-term Mitsubishi Sigma, heave across the Channel and take the autoroute/autobahn system from Veurne in Belgium to Bottrop in Germany, just north of Essen.

Yes, Bottrop. This small and little-known town is home to bespoke Mercedes modifier Brabus (for which Portman is an agent). And Brabus is good news. Its showroom, brutally but beautifully Bauhausean, has a permanently open coffee bar. Then there’s the excellent car wash, the terrific multi-bay service area (with heavy doors and big locks for overnight garaging) and, when you can find him, the enormously congenial and helpful Jurgen Munnich to fix hotels and translate weather forecasts.

Best of all though, Brabus is located next to the junction that connects the A2 with the southern end of the A31, one of Germany’s newest and, despite its two lanes and lack of long straights, fastest autobahns. Brabus regularly tests there at 186mph. It’s hard to know how this set-up could be more precisely tailored to our needs. But, first, we have to get there.

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160mph without trying

The 8am Sea Cat makes a meal of the force five blowing across the Channel and its multi-jointed loading ramp almost chews off the Diablo’s front spoiler, eventually clearing it by a nail-biting 3mm once two burly Hoverspeed car deck hands lift the wheelarches and a third jiggles judiciously with the ramp hydraulics.

Without taking too much time to adjust the Diablo’s seat against the throw of the clutch and of the reach rake of the simple, leather-skinned steering wheel, a comfortable position isn’t hard to find. At this stage, the wheel slices through my sight line to the outermost dials in the bottom row of the extraordinarily deep two-tier instrument binnacle, but it’s a minor problem and with the help of John, as I later discover, it can be fixed.

Eased into soft focus by continuous fine rain and smeared by the hopelessness of the Diablo’s single-blade wiper, the mossy, murky blur of passing arable countryside between Calais and Dunkirk looks marginally less grim than it might have done with merely grey skies. As we rumble irritably through the single-lane contraflows skirting the French coast, though, many of the tactile sensations seem faintly familiar. My first drive in a Countach had been in the wet and the feeling of vague intimidation and foreboding precipitated by its size and power and similar here. As are the nuggety ride, solid brakes and wrist-strainingly heavy, unassisted steering.

But the detail is very different and altogether more likeable. From past experience I can’t help thinking that firm, uncompromising inputs are best, but, intriguingly, they aren’t. Above 60mph, the steering sheds weight like a cloak; still meaty and well damped, it nevertheless discourages a knuckle-bleaching grip and responds smoothly to fingertip guidance.

Contrary to just about every preconception in the book, this is a beguilingly simple car to drive gently. It is easier to see out of than you’d ever guess from the outside, and has a far smoother throttle action than the stiction-plagued Countach, a less abrupt clutch, a lighter but still precise open-gate gearchange, better low-speed tractability with cleaner part-throttle response and a tauter driveline.

Imbued with the unnatural optimism of a man on a mission and beginning to feel more at home in the Lamborghini’s cream leather cabin, with its wafer-thin and leanly padded bucket seats, pommel-horse-sized transmission tunnel and huge instrument binnacle, I pick up the pace. Overtaking by ear – a passenger who can say “no” and “go” is essentially all you need in a right-hand-drive, two-metre-wide supercar that thumps you from nothing to 100mph in around 8secs – I grow in confidence as we motor through Holland.

It’s John, however, who kicks the Lambo’s 492 horses out of bed for the first time as we breach the German border 10 miles further on. I do the same to the Sigma’s 200bhp but by the time the Japanese front-driver kicks down, the Diablo is gone, its high-intensity foglight a twinkling red star pulling a huge ball of vapour into the air behind it. With due allowance for scale, the Lambo looks like a space shuttle spearing into the stratosphere.

In the sepulchral calm of the Sigma we can only watch with a swelling sense of wonder. And listen. Searing through the sonic hash of other traffic, we hear the wild 12-cylinder crescendo of the Diablo’s exhaust clearly punctuated by the stab of each gearchange as it stretches for the horizon.

At the next noodle soup and coffee stop, John discloses that the exultant, explosive blast peaked at around 160mph – fast enough, he was delighted to discover, to blow most of the moisture off the windscreen as soon as it lands, this relieving the flapping windscreen wiper of a chore clearly beyond it, but almost too fast for the gigantic tyres (335/35 ZR17 Pirelli P-Zeros on the back, 245/40 ZR17s at the front) to fling all the water from in front of the Diablo into a small cloud behind it. Any faster and the Lamborghini would start to aquaplane. But although it had been just a tentative toe-dipper of a blat, there’s no doubt that John is high from the experience. “Fantastic,” he says. “Just fantastic.”

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Waiting for the rain to stop

We reach Brabus at 4pm and drink coffee. Over the next 24 hours no one can keep track of how much. The rain – occasionally torrential but more often an all-permeating mist – simply doesn’t let up and the sky is greyer than a battleship’s paint job. If we’d taken Jurgen’s relaying of the local weather forecast for the next day to heart, we’d have packed our bags there and then and gone home. Instead, we cross our fingers and stick around.

There are a few jobs to do, anyway. All aboard the Sigma, we check out the 43-mile long and gently snaking A31. Unrestricted from end to end, it’s clearly a fast road. In the rain and mid-morning rush we see an indicated 140mph a few times, but not regularly enough to persuade us that venturing out in the Diablo would be a good move. Not in these conditions.

So it’s back to Bottrop to give the Diablo the once over one more time. Del and John drop to their hands and knees – not in the act of Lambo worship but to roll the big car slowly backwards and forewards, pain-stakingly inspecting the tyres for the smallest of lesions.

Then the driving positions get systematically and methodically sorted by John: his with the steering wheel low and the seat near to the end of its runners, mine with the wheel higher and the seat a couple of notches closer. The major relationships are crucial and worth taking time over. It ends up with both of us being able to see all the instruments – the major ones above the rim, the minor gauges beneath it – while still being able to grasp the top of the wheel comfortably and depress the clutch beyond its biting point.

Perhaps more pertinently, I position the passenger seat for a clear view of the oil temperature and pressure gauges on the lower deck of the binnacle: if anything mechanical is going to kill our fun in the sun (if it ever stops raining), advance warning is likely to come via these dinky VDO dials.

But not today. There’s nothing left but to thank Jurgen, devise a way to steal the keys to the bad, black 600SEL 6.9 parked so temptingly outside the showroom – this is Brabus’ modestly conceived 507bhp interpretation of the best saloon in the world – and repair to the hotel.

Next morning I can hardly bring myself to part the curtains. If it’s still wet we’re looking at abject defeat and the most miserable journey from Bottrop to Calais ever undertaken by two men in a Lamborghini Diablo. It isn’t raining (thank God), but neither is it the crisp, bright dawn of the original script breaking over Bottrop’s low-rise apartments. By now, though, it’s too late to be fussy; damp-going-on-dry autobahn, virtuoso driver with something to prove, intravenous optimism and two brave pills under the tongue will have to suffice.

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Building up to the final push

As the Diablo grumbles out of the petrol station, its liquorice-profile tyres thumping unapologetically over the shallow kerbs, there’s no disguising the tension in the air, a faint whiff of doubt that gags small talk and concentrates the mind. Trying to reign in the jitters, I run through a checklist as we get underway, but so close is the start of the A31 and so swift the car’s progress that events overtake my mental drill. The 20-gallon tank has been brimmed, the Seiko stopwatch and printer primed, the bulkhead wide-angle camera secured and the fastidiously checked tyres inflated to 46psi all round. But second gear was through at 98mph, third has just finished at 136mph and I’m pinned to my seat, the ferocious quad-cam V12 howling its hair-raising tune just inches from my head.

It doesn’t require the microsplit digital testimony of a stopwatch to know that here is a Lamborghini that simply goes harder. Off the leash, the Diablo’s performance sends the senses reeling, and once it starts it charge you don’t recover. Whereas Ferrari’s flat 12 in the 512 TR seemingly starts to deliver substantial torque before the end of its first engine revolution, the Diablo’s thrust is concentrated between 4000rpm and 7000rpm. John’s gearchanges are slow, smooth and deliberate but he wrings the engine out in each gear, and the pulses of acceleration squirt us past slower traffic like a scarlet shockwave.

The Ferrari’s sonic signature is an enthrallingly multi-layered affair, a full-spectrum scream of high-pitched cam whine set against a back beat of metallic valvegear thrash, hollow induction growl and thunderous, stereophonic exhaust bellow. The Diablo’s sound is simpler and purer. It howls – a deep, guttural, blood-spitting howl.

It’s howling now as John takes fifth at 160mph. And still we’re pushed back in our seats. A Countach would be within 20mph of throwing in the towel at this point. Its sleek successor, however, seems to be settling itself for the final push, sucking itself onto the tarmac, writhing slowly to the rhythm of the road’s really long-amplitude undulations, tracking truer and straighter than it had at 100mph.

That push doesn’t come for another 100 miles and two legs of the A31. John knows better than anyone that all the elements have to be right before he goes for it: vision, road surface, other traffic, his own reflexes. He knows that I’m watching, too: the gauges, his actions, the road. Rather like the blokes sitting beside the button in a bunker waiting for the nuclear war, we both have to be satisfied that it’s the right thing to do.

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Beyond the big two-oh-oh

The statistics that have brought us to this point are mind-blowing: we just covered the last 50 miles at an average of 153mph, hitting 185mph twice, burning unleaded at the rate of 8.4mpg and heating the Diablo’s exhaust cataysts to an incredible 430deg C. Hot enough for their warning lights to flash on sporadically.

With 20 miles to go before the autobahn runs out, we’re cruising at a steady 175mph, looking for that elusive combination of conditions. The road ahead, although curving smoothly to the left, is dry and even. By concentrating on far-horizon activity, the sensation of speed is diluted. The view from the side window, however, is registered as a colourless, fluid blur. We can see far enough ahead to clock to progress of a car in the inside lane doing about 60mph.

There’s nothing in front of it and nothing behind but us, now closing at 190mph. If John lifts we’ve blown our best chance, but he doesn’t even blink. Satisfied that what’s now clearly visible as a Golf is stable and aware of our presence, his foot remains clamped to the floor. High-intensity driving lights ablaze, we pass the cantering Volkswagen with the speedo showing a fraction over 200mph. From inside the Diablo – eerily quiet now that the engine noise is being swept into the slipstream, and with the smoothest ride imaginable – the effect is like watching a dinky toy being propelled backwards past John’s head by an immensely strong rubber band. What the effect is from inside the Golf I wouldn’t even like to speculate.

Locking onto the next kilometre post, I fire the stopwatch for what I hope will be the last time, gesturing to John that this is most definitely it; 11.1secs later I freeze the readout. As John eases up for a pocket of traffic I do the calculations: 324kmh, 201.4mph. QED.

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John Lyon on driving at 200mph

“At this speed, concentration – to the complete exclusion of everything irrelevant – is vital. The whole application of mind and body must go to applying the speed safely.

The car is no problem. It feels totally natural but so alive and tactile; smooth, yet with the intense feeling that the engine, transmission, driveline and wheels are spinning at enormous speed. The stability is astonishing and the steering so accurate; amazingly precise.

Between 160- and 180mph I can sense the front becoming ever-so-slightly light. Then, approaching 200mph, it settles down hard on the front suspension, with slightly improved directional stability. The downforce of the Gandini body shape is acting like a water ‘vacuum cleaner’, dumping great quantities of moisture into the atmosphere behind. Only once does the front offside tyre skip slightly as it crosses a white line. Used to high-speed motorcycling in the wet, I expect the problem but still hold the speed steady for a moment to analyse the cause.

Although the mind is alert, your body must be relaxed, applying minimum effort. I measured my reaction to the brakes recently on a test machine in a condition of total concentration and it was 0.19secs – long enough, because at 200mph the Diablo covers 17 metres in that time. The car feels secure, but to drive it safely you must concentrate totally on your control, judgement of stopping distance, vision and grip. A vital concern must be other road users and debris.

The only two instruments to monitor are the oil temperature and the revcounter needle, now climbing to 6900rpm. Forget everything else. Your focal point should be almost constantly on the limit of vision, always looking for potential danger far ahead.

I know where the straights are now and I ‘read’ the surface, waiting for the right view in front of us and 6200rpm in fifth, 195mph. And here it is! One car all alone, steady and slow in the inside lane. It takes just an instant to sense that the driver is safe and I keep my foot hard down on the power. I use a long lights warning to attract the driver’s attention and watch him like a hawk. Then we’re past in an instant and he disappears in the mirror. A few seconds later we’re travelling at 201.4mph.”

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