PCOTY 2016: DECA

Imagine if you could take your favourite road, snip out 1.4km of the best bit and join the ends together in a paddock somewhere.

If you did that, depending on what your favourite road looks like, you might get something like DECA, the Driver Education Centre of Australia, on the outskirts of Shepparton, itself about three quarters the way to the NSW border north-ish of Melbourne.

The facility itself has skid pans and training circuits and everything necessary to train learner truckies during the week, but we’re most interested in the circuit out the back, 1.4km of wide-enough bitumen, bent in eight places to form a quasi-circuit.

The purpose for our visit is this: no cops, no kids, no well-meaning old folks giving you dirty looks as you drive past their house. And something becoming increasingly an attraction, at least in Victoria, no cyclists riding in the middle of the road around blind corners. Not that they’re not entitled to do so.

As DECA is more a closed road than racetrack, the stopwatches are left alone; so, too, helmets. It’s the perfect place where, for day one, judges can break ice with our 11 go-fast contenders.

In the F-Type you slink into a low, pillbox cockpit, peering over a long bonnet and almost feeling to sit over the rear axle. I pull the little drive mode switch backwards to engage the Dynamic program, knock the shift lever into manual mode. Double checking the active exhaust button is pressed is as much a part of the routine with this car as the ol’ click-clack.

I turn on to the track from the infield bitumen car park, straighten the wheel and boot it down towards the first right-hander. The rear-drive version would be either strobing the traction light or slewing sideways in a spike of revs right now, but the all-wheel drive version just sinks claws into bitumen and converts 404kW into forward momentum with an efficiency the rear-drive version could only dream of.

And I feel almost guilty given DECA shares its back fence with some bloke’s backyard. Make that many blokes’ – brand new-looking tiled roofs and the tops of clotheslines peek over shamrock-coloured Colorbond fences. Yep, suburban encroachment of our beloved racetracks isn’t limited to capital cities. I just hope they like cars.

The F-Type does an outstanding job of making the DECA circuit feel like a go kart track, giving 200km/h a nudge along the 600-odd-metre main ‘straight’, where you can hold it flat through its right-hand kink, braking for the fast-incoming right-hander.

Down into turn one, long, aggressive undulations live in the braking zone and can unsettle even the most planted car. It’s here the 208 GTi 30th first reveals to the judges an ever-so-slightly nervous rear end under brakes, while here and elsewhere, cars like the 911 GT3 and Commodore don’t break a sweat.

And while it is busy blowing away the judges with its grunt and mid corner, Cup tyre-enhanced grip, over these bumps it’s best to either keep out of the C63’s super-stiff RACE setting, or take it very easy.

It was here the ballistic AMG GT S, in particular, turns the mouth to cotton with incredible mid-corner speed, while the 911 GT3 encourages you to commit, and cars like the F-Type simply frighten you witless.

This is the last corner you properly learn at this place – and up until, and even beyond that point, it demands maximum respect. Not least because an enormous eucalypt lives on its outside.

With the trees watching from a distance on the outside, this corner is Drift City. And it’s here among the rear-drivers the XR8 excels, showing off a talent for sideways action. Like every other time we’ve tested it, it feels more comfortable sideways than driven in any manner you might call behaved.

Having tidied up any slides you’re unleashed back on the 600m straight, taking a breather, eyeballs widening in the Jag, AMG GT S and 911, as you catapult through the kink. Or check your watch if you’re in the MX-5.

Being just day one at PCOTY, this was not the place for ten-tenths, entire-lap commitment in any of the cars, let alone the fast stuff. For the Jag, AMG GT S and 911 GT3, half the gearbox’s cogs weren’t getting used. DECA, instead, was the PCOTY Warm-Up.

And so the slower of the bunch seemed to revel around the tighter track, like the 208 GTi, Megane Trophy R and even, to an extent, the i8, with its stiff-as-a-board chassis and razor-sharp front end.

Merc fitted its PCOTY C63 with Michelin Pilot Sport Cup2 tyres – the same as that on the 911 GT3 and a 458 Speciale. Overkill? On paper, perhaps. But around DECA, with great, satisfying reserves of mid-corner grip to lean into, the C63 felt awesome.

We cruised to our Wangaratta hotel as the night rolled in, the judges all at work in their minds developing theories. For more answers it was time to climb the alps.