I'd catch the 6.50 from Heathrow and be back for 9.00pm. Good. That'd give me seven hours with what's possibly the most exciting, and certainly the best looking road going Porsche of all time - the Carrera GT.

As planned, I rushed, panting heavily on to the old Russian air base, where the launch event was being held, bang on time. This place has the largest area of tarmac anywhere in Europe and, frankly, I was itching to see what 612bhp would feel like out there. But the man from Porsche whisked me past the car itself and into a hangar. "Look at that," he squeaked, pointing at an engine on a plinth. "Have you ever seen anything like it? The crank is only 98.5 millimetres from the floor of the car. Can you believe it?"

Obviously, I had to ask some sort of question but since I don't know what a crank is and would have believed it if he'd told me it was 98.5 yards from the floor of the car, all I could manage was, "Er, how fast is it". "It accelerates from 0-124mph in 9.9 seconds. That is 0.3 of a second slower than the Ferrari Enzo but we did our test on proper tyres." This was a new one on me. Talking about how fast a car accelerates from 0-124mph seemed a bit anal somehow. But then this was Germany, and they are.

Also, I had never really thought of the Carrera as a rival for Ferrari's Enzo, but when you look at the power, and the construction and the price, I suppose it is. Feeling that we'd covered all the bases, I was heading back outside for a drive but the man had other ideas. "Look at this clutch," he said, pointing to what could have been a clutch on a table. "The two plates, made from carbon fibre and silicone carbide have an exterior diameter of only 169 millimetres. This is the first ceramic clutch in the world and it's because of this we can have the crankshaft so low down." Oh, good.

Next, I was shown the tyres, which I could see were jolly wide. But there was more to it than that. The outer edge is hard and grippy while the rest of the tread and the inner edge is designed for longevity and wet weather handling. This was interesting, precisely because it wasn't in the slightest.