We enlisted the services of Hyperion Motorsport and its top engineer, Jeremy Richardson, to optimise the chassis set-up for two-up track driving. Jeremy has been perfecting the handling on race and road cars for years, but until now he admitted that no-one has ever asked him to set a Seven up with two people onboard.

We met up at a bright and sunny Brands Hatch, and while Richardson readied Hyperion's 'flat-floor' kit in the pits, I busied myself with testing the standard factory set-up with and without passengers. On my own, BAD understeered gently through the quicker stuff, but could be persuaded to relinquish grip at the rear on tighter turns with a hefty whack of 200bhp. Add a chunky passenger and the understeer was very pronounced everywhere, which is unsurprising when you realise that a passenger adds around 15 per cent to the overall weight, all of it over the rear wheels.

Back in the pits with 80kg placed in both the driver and passenger seats, the rear of the car was found to be lower than the front, a stance Richardson refers to as 'powerboating'. By redressing this (the rear is now 15mm higher than the front, which allows the bottom wishbones to be parallel with the ground) and subtly altering the castor and camber angles to ensure that the shoulders of the CR500 Avons are square with the ground and the footprints of the front tyres are optimised for braking, BAD became much more positive and responsive in cornering to the throttle.

Of course, this means that if you run the car without the ballast provided by a passenger and a light fuel load, the tail is very lively indeed, but there will be very few occasions when we'll run it this way. However, as the car has been accurately measured for an 80kg passenger, petite ladies will get a more oversteery ride than six-foot-six rugby players. Which must explain why Simon Harrison is always keen to drive it on evoactive events when there are lots of girls around...

Richardson recommends we upgrade the road dampers for race items - they do without the damper extensions that limit bump travel. And as we always want to go quicker we may well move to an even more track-focused tyre. The current rears are almost worn out, but there will be more on that next month, by which time the car will also have had its first service.