Ten years ago I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days in the company of a McLaren F1, and I discovered that driving it fast in public was, more than anything else, an exercise in restraint. Any attempt to unleash fully this £600,000, 627bhp monster anywhere other than on a private track liberated not the euphoria I had imagined but a cold, shivering sweat. Concerns about striking terror into the hearts of other road users or a career-ending encounter with the law soon restricted me to part-throttle.

Today the McLaren is still the fastest road car ever built but I have since encountered others capable of making even an experienced driver cross the line of prudent behaviour on quiet open roads. Until now, however, none has worn a Vauxhall badge.

But the simple and astounding truth is that on winding roads I would be as fast from one place to another in this 30-grand Vauxhall VXR220 as I would in a 600-grand McLaren F1.

When the VX220 first appeared four years ago the 220 was an oblique reference to its 2.2 litre engine capacity. Then the engine was reduced to just 2 litres but given a turbocharger to produce the 200bhp VX220 Turbo. For the VXR this turbo has been uprated, so that 220 now denotes its power output. In a car weighing a lot less than a ton, its performance is predictably explosive. Vauxhall says it will hit 60mph in 4.2sec with a top speed of 154mph. But that’s only the start.

The VXR also receives suspension so stiff that you’ll fear for the integrity of your fillings on a bumpy road, and massive brakes with super-sticky Yokohama tyres.

Yet despite its undoubted talent and my many days of driving it, I still struggled to have the kind of fun you would assume comes as standard in a car like this. The engine was atonal, the gearchange clunky and the quality of ride pretty terrible.

I hadn’t expected this last demerit, as one of the best drives of my life came courtesy of an original non-turbocharged VX220. Softer by far than this VXR and with skinny tyres limiting grip to the merely impressive, it was one of the most delicate and communicative devices I have encountered, every road-surface nuance being fed back to my fingers through its steering wheel.

For all its extra speed, the VXR seems blunt by comparison. The feel has been exorcised in the pursuit of raw grip, so that if — like me — you don’t much care how long it takes to get from one place to the next but concern yourself more with how much fun you have on the way, the result is disappointing.

Also, the faster a car goes the quicker it eats up the space between itself and the next car, and the VXR is so quick that you always seem to be in traffic.

Vauxhall may claim that the VXR is predominantly a track car, but cars like the similarly priced and equally fleet Caterham R400 prove you don’t need to sacrifice road fun for raw track speed.

Fortunately, while the VXR220 is a limited edition, the VX220 Turbo is with us for the foreseeable future. It will still hit 60mph in 4.7sec, which means it can cover the ground as fast as you could possibly want to go, and it is £3,500 cheaper. All it lacks are the go-faster bits that turn the VXR from a rewarding road car into a no-compromise track racer — and substantially spoil a hitherto exceptionally able and fun car.