Forza Horizon #EscapeTheGrid Day 3: driving a Forza supercar to Playground Games HQ

Hello! It's the end of the third day on our turbocharged road trip. In part one we talked about how our Nissan GT-R reduced me and Gavin to giggling creatures of the night, and in part two we found out how fast the GT-R could actually go. We then vowed to never do that EVER AGAIN*. Today? I just want to talk about the basic, day-to-day experience of driving an £80,000 supercar with 540 horsepower.

Our day began at 7:30am, in darkest Leamington Spa. Keen not to recreate the energy drink breakfast of yesterday which left us vibrating like two mobile phones, we made a furtive trip to the hotel buffet. There, I basically inhaled a danish pastry while Gav, OXM videographer and proud Welshman, demonstrated his party piece of drinking a scalding hot cup of tea by making a noise like a Dyson Airblade.

Supercars are sold on the promise of looking badass all the time, but I'm telling you that our cars never look more badass than on a cold morning. All their complex aluminium and carbon fibre is freezing to the touch. There's a brief clunking of expensive doors as we all climb inside, followed by an immediate blasting and burbling of engines. Ordinary cars? They're sleeping when we find them in the morning, then they wake up. Supercars are entirely dead, and then they gasp to life, their console lights blinking warily at you.

As of today, Gav and I know what we're doing. You should see us. We're like crap astronauts, thumbing our way around the buttons and irrelevancies of the GT-R's interior. Gav likes using the console to bring up data we don't need. I'm always reaching down with a cowboy's narrowed eyes to grab at an analog stick down the side of my chair, using it to warp my seat in eight different directions.

This morning, we hit a snag. It was raining this morning, and we didn't know how to turn on the rear windscreen wipers. It took the eight whole minutes of today's journey to realise the GT-R doesn't have any rear windscreen wipers. After another eight minutes, we'd agreed that rear windscreen wipers were probably a ridiculous concept altogether, and were definitely lame.

Honestly, we do a lot of chatting. You can put your foot down and the entire car catapults forward like a two ton Japanese moustrap, but there's something else that defines our car. It's almost embarrassingly easy to drive. The interesting part is, it's also where supercars are headed.

Ten years ago the stereotype was that if you owned a Lamborghini, you were agreeing to travel through a hedge at some point. There was no choice in the matter. These days, with ABS, traction control and other things where my knowledge stops immediately after the name, the cars are rendered infinitely more safe. You're always welcome to turn these features off and travel sideways into a hedge or fence or Burger King, but until you do, these cars are safer than they've ever been.

And then there's the Nissan GT-R. Our car, as I found out today via a Nissan press pack groped off our hotel's glutinous wifi, is advertised as "the definitive accessible supercar." I also found out that our engine is built by 12 "craftsmen" in a hermetically sealed room in Yokohama, and that we have a thermostatically controlled, pressurised lubrication system with magnesium oil sump pan (which is great, because I'm picky about my sump pans), but reading the bit with the manufacturers talking about how easy the GT-R is to drive made me understand the spirit behind it instantly.