Other than deciding to rescue an awkward first date by, say, plumping for a televised big-screen marriage proposal, I can't imagine many better opportunities for instant humiliation, and a guaranteed slot on YouTube's next #fail compilation.

I am being unceremoniously belted into Citroen's championship-winning C-Elysee WTCC car, HANS device jamming my head upright. I am wearing an ill-fitting, borrowed race suit, canvas trainers, some sort of hairnet contraption under a borrowed helmet, and a very concerned expression.

The C-Elysee is sat in what passes for the pit lane of France's twisty Ecuyers circuit. It's icy-cold and lightly drizzling. The Citroen is wearing very slick tyres. A championship-winning pit crew surround the car, checking tyre pressures and data read-outs, and looking rather uneasy. Not so uneasy as me.

Wedged down in the racing bucket seat, testicles jammed somewhere up around my right kidney, it's clear the seating position is meant for someone rather taller than my five-foot-not-so-much. My view out the letterbox windscreen is of grey sky. I have no idea how wide the car might be. Wide, I know that much.

Yvan Muller perches down on the Citroen's wide, wide sill. Muller is a four-time WTCC champion, BTCC winner, and widely regarded as one of the fastest tin-top racing drivers in the world.

'So you've driven racing cars before?' he asks, in a tone that suggests I'd be an utter idiot to find myself in this position if I hadn't driven race cars before.

'Not really,' I admit. 'I mean, I've driven cars before. Citroens, too. Quite a few Citroens.'

The faint flicker of a Muller eyebrow. 'But not slicks?'

'No.'

'Aero cars?'

'Not really.'

Muller slowly absorbs this information. 'You know how to left-foot brake?'

'I could give it a go.'

'Don't give it a go.'

Muller runs through the Citroen's salient controls at a speed I'm sure would be plodding for anyone who knows their way around a race car. For me, it's like being given a one-minute crash course in string theory. In Russian.

I grasp that there's a sequential gearbox ' no column-mounted flappy paddles, though ' through which passes around 380bhp to the front wheels.

Now, 380bhp may not sound too much in an era of 345bhp Ford Focuses and 500bhp C-Classes, but consider the C-Elysee has no traction control nor ABS. It's on slicks.

Though it shares the vague resemblance of a silhouette with Citroen's C4-based saloon, the C-Elysee is no race-prepped road car. No, like every car on the WTCC grid, this is a bespoke racer, sharing approximately as much DNA with your neighbour's C4 as you do with a tapeworm.

It won 14 of the 15 WTCC races in 2014, and, in the hands of drivers Muller, Seb Loeb and Jose Maria Lopez, ran away with the championship again this year.

It's all but impossible to put a price tag on this car, but if you guessed at something in the half-million-quid range, you'd likely not be far off.

It is, in other words, very fast, very expensive, and very much not-idiot-proof.

'Any tips?' I ask Muller. I suspect 'Tip number one: please get out of my nice car' may cross his mind.

'Be progressive,' he says. 'It's very slippery, and you probably won't get much heat in the tyres.'

Fair.

'Use the clutch to engage first, but after that, flat-shift. No clutch.'

He pauses for a second. 'And don't crash.'

In the event of an off, I suspect the recommended procedure is to exit the car and run swiftly in the direction of Reims before a very angry pit crew realises what I've done.

'OK, you go now.'

Race engineer David Ladouce's voice crackles through my helmet's earpiece. A dozen Citroen race staff look on as if I've just nicked their newborn child for a spot of baby-juggling. As experiences go, this isn't so much outside my comfort zone as at the opposite end of a long-haul flight from that particular location.

The C-Elysee is dropped on its hydraulic jacks, thudding down onto the tarmac. Prod the big button in the middle of the steering wheel and the 1.6 starts first time, settling into an easy mechanical idle.

Get out, get round, get back in without crashing.

Tap gearlever into first, ease out the clutch. The C-Elysee judders on its way. Hey, at least I haven't stalled. If you need a driver for next year, Christian or Ron, you know where to find me.

There's a chicane of cones at the pit exit, then ' for some reason ' a metal football-goal of a frame that, from where I'm sitting, looks barely wider than the Citroen itself. Ripping one side from the car before getting out onto the track proper would, I reckon, be regarded as something of a faux pas.

Breathe in, safely through the goalposts, out onto the circuit.

Right then. Gently up through first, bang the gear selector back to get second, squeeze the throttle and'jeeeeeeeez that's a lot of wheelspin.

The gentlest feather of the accelerator sees the Citroen's front tyres skitter maniacally, cold slick rubber failing to gain any purchase on the wet tarmac. The C-Elysee and I slither up the main straight like a fat lad on ice, me chasing the manic front wheels, the Citroen trying and failing to hold something resembling a straight line.

The first corner is an off-camber right-hander. Hard on the brake pedal (with my right foot). Not much happens. No super-servoed road set-up here: the Citroen's brakes require a proper stamp. I brace my left foot against a lump of roll cage and stamp again.

The C-Elysee slows. I turn in, neatly feather the apex' and discover I have absolutely no idea where the track goes next.

Before heading out, I'd been given a couple of sighter laps of Ecuyers, from the passenger seat of a C4 Picasso with Muller at the wheel. It's a twisty, buckled little git of a circuit, halfway between the tarmac section of a rallycross route, and a go-kart track.

Blithely I'd assumed the many corners of the track would somehow sear themselves onto my memory. They haven't. Not only am I driving a wriggling bugger of a race car, I'm doing so effectively blind.

In the absence of any idea what might lurk round the next bend, I resort to my tried-and-tested track method: slow in, spot the exit of the corner, stuff the throttle. But stuffing the throttle sends the front wheels spinning furiously, the nose pushing wildly wide.

The trick, it takes me too long to twig, is to be super-precise with the throttle and, if possible, trail-brake into the corners, keeping the weight on the nose. The only trouble with this theory is that it requires knowledge of how to trail-brake.

But it doesn't half tell you what's going on, the C-Elysee.

You're sat right in the middle of the chassis (OK, a bit to the left, but dead-centre front-to-back), your bum the pivot around which the entire car moves.

The steering is almost weepingly wonderful. Even though they're tasked with shoving all that power to the track, you can feel precisely what the front wheels are up to (spinning furiously, mostly), exactly when you're running out of grip (very early, mostly). So communicative is the chassis that even I, a butter-fingered race novice, can sense where the Citroen's losing grip.

At least when I inevitably crash, I'll know exactly what went wrong.

After a handful of laps, Ladouce calls me back into the pits. I have no idea where the pit entrance might be.

'How's it going?' asks Muller, once I've eventually negotiated my way back down the pitlane and brought the car to a halt. I make a noise like a punctured bagpipe and attempt a thumbs-up. My hands are shaking.

'When you're out on track, what are you looking at?' asks Muller.

'That dash display, quite a lot,' I admit. 'Keeping forgetting what gear I'm in. That, and the trees.'

'Why the trees?'

'So I can avoid crashing into them.'

'If you look at the trees, you will hit the trees,' says my Obi-Wan. 'Don't look at the corner you're in. Look a corner ahead. Two corners ahead. Then it will flow.'

I decide not to admit that, most of the time, I'm not sure where the corner I'm in is heading, let alone the one after that.

'So you want the full experience now?' asks Muller, grinning. He leans into the cockpit and twists a knob on the steering wheel. The dash display screen flicks from red to black. 'Now you have all the power. Full boost.'

'That wasn't the full experience before?' I squeak.

'You'll be fine,' says Muller. 'But' this is the time everyone crashes. When they get confident. Don't crash.'

Safely through the goalposts and out onto track again. Whatever knob Muller just twisted, it's treated the C-Elysee to a quadruple espresso. Throttle response is even sharper, the engine more alive, noisier, fizzier.

And you know what? I've been lucky enough to have a go in some of the greatest road cars of the last decade or so. But honestly, nothing I've driven compares to those next few laps of the greasy, twisty little Ecuyers circuit in the Citroen C-Elyssee WTCC car.

It is ' how to describe it? ' like the best hot hatch you've ever driven, triple distilled, all the fluffy road bits filtered out. The Citroen's steering tingles under your fingers, the accelerator all but wired into the nerve endings of your right foot. Gearshifts are without a hiccup, a deluge of glorious, shimmering power.

This is feel, this is feedback. Under my borrowed helmet and hairnet, I'm gurning like a chimp.

OK, I continue to have no idea where the track goes. OK, I never get within even sighting distance of a competitive lap time. OK, I continue to totally overcook tight corners, and tiptoe round bends that should be taken flat.

But hey, I don't crash it, or stall it, or take a wrong turn and end up in a ravine. I even manage to string a few bends together, clipping apices (or an approximation thereof), whooping with involuntary delight when I exit a corner just so, hooking up the power and balancing oversteer and understeer. Or, to give it its technical racing description, 'driving'.

When Ladouce calls me back into the pits, I spend 20 seconds begging him for another lap. There's no reply. I remember I haven't been pressing the comms button, so he hasn't heard a word I've said.

Off the track and into what I believe racing types call 'parc ferme', and the rest of us call 'the car park'. Bring the Citroen to a halt. Avoid stalling. Again. Hero.

Muller opens the door with a grin that I'd love to think signifies 'discovery of previously unknown racing talent' but more likely represents 'blessed relief at car returned in one piece'.

'You did OK,' says Muller. 'Not so bad. You didn't crash.'

'Can I have another go?' I ask.

'No,' he says firmly. 'Time to get out.'

Ah well. Still, #fail avoided. Expensive WTCC car not binned. Manfruits still attached, albeit loosely. Good day, all things considered.