A Motorsport for Gentlemen

Remember the opening scenes of the legendary 1971 movie Le Mans? Steve McQueen, in his iconic role of American racer Michael Delaney, arrives to Le Mans, driving his sportscar. As always, he looks effortless and cool. Some may say that arriving to the races doesn’t look like this at all. Instead of stylish sportscar, you arrive in a racecar transporter and rather than looking at the empty racetrack, wind blowing in your hair, you run around the pits preparing stuff.

With our Arrive & Drive programme, you can arrive in style and we will help you drive with a proper pace.

As you know from previous pages, our line of Praga R1 racecars was engineered to be cheap to run and easy to maintain, allowing even small teams with little resources to race it. If you feel like it, you can do a racing weekend with just a driver and one mechanic, doing a lot of work yourself and keeping costs to the minimum.

Or you can go the exact opposite way and choose maximum comfort, leaving all the hard work to us. With our Arrive & Drive program, you just need to get yourself and your racing gear to the races and then do your best on the track. We will prepare the car, provide all the support including catering, and help you get the most of yourself.

You will also gain access to our works team and, most importantly, factory drivers. They will offer you advice and instructions, helping you to get the most of your potential. Especially if you’re a novice or a “gentleman racer”, going through telemetry data over and over, and having feedback from professionals, will help you improve your times really quick.

Want a taste of your future life as gentleman racer? We’ll give you a taste of what your racing weekend with Praga could look like!

Friday You arrive in the morning – just yourself and your racing gear (helmet, suit and HANS device). No need to drag yourself hundreds of kilometres in a truck or van, just pack for the weekend and drive whatever car you like. Arrive relaxed and in style!

After you had your morning coffee, it’s time for a track walk. We’ll walk (or bike, depending on its length) around the track and one of our works drivers will show you everything you need to know. The best line around the track, braking points, where you can jump the curb and where you’d better not. You’ll be handed all the knowledge our racers worked hard to collect.

Then, it’s time to get yourself comfortable in the car, especially if you’ve never driven a Praga before. We will try and adjust the fit of your racing seat and harness, set up the mirrors and then give you a run-down of the car’s controls. With most of the controls on the steering wheel, the R1 is easy to get used to even for a novice, but it still helps to have someone explain you everything thoroughly.

Before you return to the car and take it to the track for the first time, we’ll invite you for a team briefing. We’ll talk through the whole weekend – what happens when, who is responsible for what, what’s our strategy for the race. Only if all of us are on the same page, we can hope for the best results.

Then, it’s time for you to finally hit the track. In the first practice, there will be no timekeeping. We don’t want to distract you by chasing seconds. The first stint is for you to get comfortable with the car. If you’ve never driven a racing prototype before, it will take you a while – you sit low near the ground, like in a formula car, with the car’s carbon monocoque tight around you. No matter what kinds of sportscars or supercars you have driven in the past, this is a whole different game.

Don’t worry, though. From our experience, you’ll get used to it real quick – after ten laps, you’ll start to feel at home. Then, it’s time for you to get used to aerodynamics. Like many racecars, Praga R1 has an aero package that starts to really work at speeds over 130 km/h. You need to push the car to generate the downforce, essentially having to go faster for the car to turn better. It may sound counterintuitive now, but you’ll soon get a handle of it and start discovering the whole new world. Being able to achieve and keep the lateral acceleration of 2.5g, the R1 is miles beyond anything you can experience on the road.

In the second and third practice, you already know what the car can do and start working to get the most of it. At this point, we start talking about times and telemetry data. Our team engineer and works driver will point out the areas for improvement, allowing you to get faster and faster with each run.

When the practice time is up, you’re probably exhausted – but also happy. If this is your first time with us, you probably did more for your driving skills than on just about any other day of your life. You deserve some rest, so after a quick debrief, we’ll head to a nice dinner and maybe a drink or two. But we should probably remind you that you are not James Hunt, so let’s be careful. There will be time for celebrations after the race and driving with a hangover is no fun!

Now is your big day. You’re going racing, on a real circuit, in a real prototype racecar. It doesn’t matter how well you place – after today, you will be a real racer. Maybe not Steve McQueen or James Hunt, but closer to them than to rest of those who spend their

lives waiting. Because, as Steve McQueen said: “Racing is life. Everything before or after is just waiting.”

First, we need to make sure you’re primed for the best performance. Have a good breakfast with the team, and a little exercise to get your blood flowing. You will need it today. Then, it’s time for the final briefing. Once again, we will go through each person’s roles and responsibilities, making sure that everything goes smooth throughout the day, and making use of everything we learned in practice runs.

Then, you’re ready for qualifying laps. We did our best to prepare you and now, we can only help you with advice on the radio. Hopefully, you and Praga R1 now work as one and you’ll be able to secure a good starting position for the race.

Before you start, though, we’ll have one last talk, and one last look at the data. We want you to go into the race with as much chances as possible, making the best of your abilities and of the car’s performance. We will fine-tune the last details, work out the minutiae of the race strategy and get ready for the start.

After we did everything we could to prepare you for the race, your result is now in your hand. However, we are still there for you with everything we can offer. Two mechanics ready to change your tyres, refuel your car or do any repairs or adjustments you may need. A race engineer keeping an eye on telemetry, monitoring that everything works at its best, and giving you advice on the radio. Stocks of spare parts on hand in case anything happens.

And you, having the time of your life, finally becoming a true racecar driver. Maybe you win. Maybe you’ll end your weekend standing on the podium, splashing champagne around you. Maybe you’ll end somewhere in the middle, or even somewhere among the last. It may even happen that you don’t finish your first race, although we will do everything to prevent such outcome.

What is absolutely certain, though, is that this will be a weekend you will be telling about to your grandkids one day.

And, after the good results are celebrated, mistakes examined, telemetry data pored over and in-car videos watched, it’s time to go home. Next time with us, you will be a lot more experienced, more prepared to whatever may come your way, and certainly faster. And you will come back, because you already know that the rest is just waiting.