Black Chili Driving Experience

There’s nothing quite like an exotic road trip. Imagine winding your way along the sweeping coastal autoroutes and twisty alpine roads of southern France, enjoying stunning scenery, great food, good company, and the thrill of driving the latest performance cars on the best driving roads and the very best performance tyres.

Best bits of the 2019 Continental Black Chili Driving Experience

The Black Chili Driving Experience has two components. First, we picked the 24 best applicants from the competition (above) to attend a qualifying day at Mercedes-Benz World at Brooklands on Saturday 25th May.

There, the lucky contestants got behind the wheel of performance Mercedes-Benz models on the dry handling track and off-road course to test their driving skills, as well as taking part in challenges to assess how well both act as a team. It’s was a jam-packed day of performance driving that is a pretty impressive prize in itself.

From this, we picked the best 12 duos for the Black Chili Driving Experience itself – which takes place between Sunday 30th June and Thursday 4th July.

We’ll fly from Heathrow to the south of France, where consumers will spend three days driving a range of performance cars on some of the most scenic and thrilling roads that the Mediterranean coast and southern French Alps can offer. They will also take part in some fun challenges on the way – with a prize for the best team.

It’s the perfect chance to try out Continental’s Black Chili performance tyres. Inspired by cycling technology – and named for chilli’s sticky and spicy nature on the tongue – the Black Chili compound is used in all of Continental’s high-performance tyres, delivering enhanced grip, response and stability.

We’re in southern France, following 24 Autocar readers in 12 amazing performance cars as they drive some of Europe’s best driving roads, in a quest to learn about Continental’s high-performance tyres and its Black Chili compound.

In the first of our three behind-the-scenes videos, we take an inside look at the stunning Mercedes-Benz C43 AMG and BMW M240i, as well as their ContiSportContact™ 5 tyres. We also tackle the iconic Route Napoleon and the astonishing Gorges du Verdon – a cliffside road that hangs 700 metres over the valley below.

In the second of our three behind-the-scenes videos, we get under the skin of the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE and the mighty Ford Mustang GT, examining the very different challenges that their Continental tyres are designed to conquer.

In the last of our three behind-the-scenes videos, we find out why the Audi RS3 is a perfect match for Continental’s ContiSportContact™ 5P, and why the Porsche Boxster – with its ultra-high-performance SportContact™ 6 tyres – is the perfect car in which to end our three-day trip.