Give in to your need for speed

After a bun and a briefing I slipped easily into the aerodynamic tube of fibreglass. The single-seater Formula One car - just like the little Scalextric models minus the plastic bit that holds it onto the metal track - did not have a steering wheel. It was only bolted on once I was strapped into the seat.

I was then wheeled out onto the track, the engine was started and an instructor leant over the cockpit and put the car into first gear. He stepped back. I accelerated (nought to 60 in less than four seconds). I was at the bend faster than, well, a Formula One car driven by a complete idiot.

My arms twisted like Popeye as I wrestled with the dinky steering wheel while trying to change gear. It was the saloon-car equivalent of negotiating Hyde Park Corner in the rush hour with the mobile ringing and a cigarette burning. I swung the car around the hairpin and that was when all four wheels left the track. I was spinning in slow motion, as slowly as the London Eye, before landing with a bump on the grass verge. Three rescue vehicles and a fire engine lumbered up and every man jack of them was wearing a stupid grin.

Burning rubber is the new game of choice for City slickers. Golf, paint-ball war games and getting well oiled in a hospitality tent are yesterday's toys for underachievers. This latest corporate kick is a sort of 'cars in your eyes' - today, Adam Edwards, you are Jenson Button.

City boys who cannot afford a split-second lack of concentration in the office, who work 14-hour lunch-free days and daily risk heart attacks and corporate knifings are relaxing by roaring around in replica Formula One Cars at 180mph on this Grand Prix circuit in Bedfordshire.

In a disused Second World War aerodrome, former Formula One racing driver Jonathan Palmer has set up a racing business for the stressed-out businessman. There you compete in genuine racing cars around a real racetrack, complete with red cone chicanes and hairpin bends.

Already, executives from Deutsche Bank, Chase Manhattan and ABN AMRO have slung themselves into the single-seat Formula Palmer Audis in the past few months. Employees from Hewlett Packard and Compaq have raced there as well, so too have City law firms, accountants and insurance companies. Celebrities as various as Rory Bremner, Rowan Atkinson, Noel Edmonds and the rock star Jay Kay from Jamiroquai have also jumped on the oily rag bandwagon.

Palmer opened the Bedford Autodrome track less than a year ago. It costs more than £450 a day for a grown-up executive to rocket around. Guests can also race Lotus Sports Cars, Toyota Land Cruisers and Caterham 7s. They can even drive a 38-ton truck.

According to Palmer, despite the speeds, spins and the occasional prangs, there have been no serious injuries since he opened the Autodrome. 'The fact is, it's safer driving on the track than it is on the ordinary road,' he says blithely as we speed past a fully equipped ambulance.

Most of the guests, he says, are modest when it comes to assessing their driving prowess and tend to take it slowly until they get the hang of the Meccano-like gearbox and the woolly driving gloves. Only a few attempt to be boy racers.