MOTOR SPORT: Johnny Watterson fastens his fireproof, ankle-choking suit, dons a helmet so tight it burns his ears, and grits back for a drive to remember

Some people don't know what 300 brake horsepower is. That's neither here nor there. Three-hundred brake horsepower is energy. It is the ability to totally screw with you.

The matt aluminium trailer opens from a hinge like a giant pair of metal alligator jaws and the "wheels" roll down the ramp, arriving like a wildly coloured exotic fruit on to the gravel deep in the Wicklow Mountains. You climb in over the high ledge of the passenger bucket seat, under the low ledge of the roof. An all-fit size. That is, whatever size you are, you fit.

You push your hip lard up and around into the small of your back and dislocate some bones. You feel snug. Inside is a post-industrial landscape. Something you might enter for the Turner Prize with hopes of winning. Tubes. Wires. Display screens. A steering wheel. Pedals and a driver, Gareth MacHale.

The car, they say, is a Ford Focus. It could be a prop swiped from the glam-rock era. It is still undeniably masculine but has the exterior prettiness of a made-over transvestite with its heavily applied primary colours, sitting there incongruously among the wind-beaten hills and black plastic bags. With its in-feeds and out-feeds and glass and shiny white and blue and red skin reflecting light around the valley, it's very much testosterone-laden but dinky with it.

Thankfully, no go-faster stripes. No window puppets. It has the gaunt, anorexic look of the intensely trained and a mean, dispassionate temper.

If cars had character this one would tell you to hump off. This one would have been rioting in O'Connell Street last Saturday. It would have an electronic tag on its differential and a lot of form for social misbehaviour.

This car needs no encouragement to get saucy and abusive and if you disrespect it, it won't complain. It will get even. It will cause you 0-100 mph in four and a half seconds of harm.

This car has seen a bit, done a bit. It is not beef muscle in a tight T-shirt but by its posture, its malnourished interior, the botched sex change and its extreme up-for-it attitude, you know it is dangerously menacing. You would question its parentage, its legitimacy. This car is a Psycho.

Alan from the MacHale team arrives and hunkers by the passenger side of "The Psycho". He is efficient, in charge and, importantly, gentle. He tugs a buckle from between your legs and yanks hard and twice. This is six-point safety, he assures. You smile weakly, though a glimpse of your reflection tells a story of gormlessness and complete mind vacancy. In your fireproof, ankle-choking suit and helmet that is so tight your ears have been set on fire putting it on and your head has changed shape, you flick a look at 26-year-old MacHale, acutely aware he is someone younger and, significantly, more easily fixed when broken.

The tight-ankle fireproofs, you are later told, are to ensure dignity is preserved when fear takes a muscle-loosening grip tripping across the glen.

MacHale is polite and reassuring. He points out the levers and switches and the mother of all handbrakes, which is soon to hold a special, not-to-be-forgotten significance for the motorcycle cop who has, not unreasonably, closed off the road.

MacHale is so entirely in control of this demonstration that he could tell you the entire engine has been moulded from reworked Weetabix boxes and perimeter fencing and you would believe him.

"You in?" he asks.

We take off from the loose gravel in the trusting comfort of his breakneck ability.

First up. There is something deeply shocking about travelling so terrifically fast on a real road. At 130 mph there is also something deeply pleasant about skimming past the spent cartridge shells, the washing machines and car corpses at MacHale's chosen, too-fast speed. You tend not to see any rural vandalism. Subliminally, you also note in a positive way, the rubbish bags might just break the fall. Beautiful Glencree. Picturesque Aughavannagh.

"The Psycho" dives and stops in brief, seismic jerks and whirrs and a series of short bursts of what appear to be controlled seizures. The fact you cannot move around the car but move with it as one metal-and-flesh piece is testament to the earlier seat-belt bondage session with gentle Alan. There is no room for chance headbutting in rallying.

With clenched fists and unfeasibly rigid buttocks you watch MacHale kick his spurs into the flanks as we fizz off. Zigzagging like a firework fallen on its side, the mountains open up like a terrified gathering at a Halloween mishap. At this point and far beyond the anxiety and giddiness, your primary feeling is one of the erosion of personal well-being.

But you have given yourself over. By stepping in you have accepted that "The Psycho" will behave and respond under MacHale's command and ability. That way you don't freak. The freak point was getting in. The freak point was even before the hip dislocation and the six-point trussing.

But now your natural understanding of energies has become all warped. All of the perceptions with which you live and react have changed. The energy that moves objects towards you and you towards them, that allows you take some sort of control of movement, has been removed. Those perceptions you have about distances, speed, reaction and expectation have just exploded under the squeeze of MacHale's soft accelerator shoe. In the cockpit of the wantonly aggressive 0-60-mph-in-two-

seconds Psycho, time bends, physics flatline and the understood science of what keeps a car out of harm's way is extravagantly discarded.

These few kilometres of Wicklow road don't wait for us, they come to us. The bends rush you. The loose, grey tarmac and dry stone walls jump out in front like a succession of muggers. The utter certainty is that MacHale is driving too, too, too fast and that he really is slapping "The Psycho" around a little roughly. But his too-fast first couple of first runs are only looseners. They are the pre-match jog around the pitch.

"I've got them in the old memory bank now," he says of the bends and cambers and humps of road. "We'll see if we can get a little lift this time."

The gear change is a long, flat plate where the indicator is normally located. MacHale hits down gear with the back of his fingers towards the windscreen as if flicking dandruff off a sports administrator's shoulder. The car protests, bang, bang, bang and the gears fall away in loud clunks as we decelerate from 100mph to nothing and then oomph from nothing to 80mph, his fingers now flicking like he's strumming a double bass and racing up the gears.

On the horizon the bike cop's yellow reflective vest can be seen, his bike parked near the side of the road at one end of the run. He has pulled his helmet half up over his face as cops do when they are talking, drinking coffee or berating motorists. You can see his eyes but also his chin and mouth.

MacHale is charging "The Psycho" at a monstrous speed into a large puddle of car-swept gravel by the junction. In an area the size of an average kitchen and with a motorbike parked on one side, the cop, too, realises the physics are all wrong for a happy ending here. He steps back, not quite terrified but fearfully concerned as MacHale deploys the broomhandle-sized steel handbrake with a squirt of accelerator and swivels the car in its own area, feet from the cop, inches from the bike.

There must have been a stopping point somewhere as we are now forcing "The Psycho" towards other feats of road mastery. Somewhere between the cop's desperate fears and heartfelt relief we are travelling, breakneck, in the complete opposite direction.

"When you go into a corner you look at the road conditions, the type of tar it is, the speed you're coming in," says the Rathcoole driver.

"You have to trust yourself more than the car. The car will do whatever you ask it to do. But the car is mechanical. Things can happen."

Things happened last year and MacHale crashed in Scotland at the British Championships. In third place overall, he was firing over the top of a mountain in sixth gear and a wheel failed.

He sailed off the right-hand side of the road, somersaulted and did "a bit of a barrel roll".

But now in the final run we scatter sheep, and MacHale, devoid of irony, talks of car safety. "The Psycho" is eager to please. MacHale is pushing it 70 per cent, only 70 per cent. He's fearful of mechanical injury and possibly, you consider, even a barrel roll.

We are, however, once again feverishly thrusting and strafing the kloofs and gullies of the Wicklow Way with head-wrecking noise.

As the boxer's brain sloshes inside his cranial box and becomes bruised and torn from the jabs and uppercuts, so, too, are we taking some hits unknown to conventional sports medicine. And the gut is now taking issue with it all.

A duodenal slide, some intestinal surge, acute bladder squeeze and a little liver concussion for starters.

Overall it's the ebb and flow of the innards that's causing the problem, the intestinal tsunami and its childhood pal, open-mouthed queasiness.

Approaching a benign-looking ramp McHale, perhaps erroneously believing 70 per cent is not quite enough, repeats his desire for "a little lift".

Soon €600,000 worth of Psycho and one useless, but still functional, body will take off into the thin, Wicklow air. For such reasons mechanics have to rebuild cars after every two World Rally Championship events and sometimes the machine will survive only one wrecking drive on the rougher tracks of Greece, Turkey or Cyprus.

At the end all you see is the white light of the Irish winter sky above the horizon. All the indicators that would reinforce your idea of driving in a car in the Wicklow Mountains have disappeared. The trees, gorse, broken TVs and road have vanished. There is no reference point, only sky as the four wheels leave the tarmac.

Airborne and briefly weightless, we hit the ground, twisting with the sudden grab of rubber on the surface, the engine giving way to paroxysms of whinnying.

The hairpin and dropping gears hurt more, three clunks and a moan, the back disobediently slides out.

For McHale that's neither here nor there. The 300 brake horsepower pulls "The Psycho" back to heel and to a lurching halt, prevents it from totally screwing with you.

Why are people racing around Wicklow?

Because Rally Ireland is making a bid to host a round of the World Rally Championship (WRC) on an annual basis from 2007.

What is the World Rally Championship?

The WRC series is run on five continents over a range of surfaces, including snow, tarmac and gravel. There are 16 rounds and it attracts an annual TV audience of more than 770 million.

What are the benefits?

It is a North-South event that would generate 15,000 bed nights and attract more than 150,000, mostly male, spectators, from the 18-to-30 age group.

It is also of high value to corporate interests. In 2004 Peugeot chartered two Airbus jets to bring 350 car dealers and guests to the Cyprus Rally, and in 2003 Suzuki chartered a Boeing 747 to transport 300 media people to the Japan Rally.

How realistic is the Irish bid?

With support Rally Ireland is confident we will qualify for WRC status, although there is serious competition from other countries, notably Jordan, South Africa, Portugal, Poland, the Czech Republic and Norway.

What happens next?

Rally Ireland 2006, which takes place in the North West this month, and afterwards Ireland will be assessed by the Federation International de L'Automobile, the sport's governing body.

What's it worth?

The Wales Rally in 2004 generated £7 million for the local economy and between 2000 and 2005 is estimated to have contributed at least £28 million.

It will be worth a projected £40 million to the Welsh economy over the next five years.

Is Ireland interested in this event?

Ireland, with about 70 cars, has more World Rally Championship machines per capita than any other country.

- Johnny Watterson