The Globe and Mail

In moonshine country, the preferred ride is a plain sedan with a hot-rod motor and race suspension – you might be able to outrun the sheriff, but Plan A is to slip past unnoticed.

Forget that. I arrived in north Georgia driving a car that looked like a supercharged fishing lure – an orange Lotus Exige with a wing on its tail.

Heads turned as my wife and I burbled through Trenton, a bible-thumping hamlet. Our tiny English speedster was an exotic minnow in a sea of Detroit sedans and jacked-up pickups with gun racks. We were in the heart of Dade County, where the church parking lots are packed each Sunday.

The Exige drew a congregation of onlookers at every gas stop. “What the hell is that?” one good old boy asked. “Looks fast.”

The local law enforcement apparently thought so, too. I kept it in second gear through town, but the sheriffs watched the Lotus like a shark appraising a seal – ticketing a Yankee speed merchant in a 270-km/h foreign hot rod would balance the police budget for years to come.

Never mind. I had come to play in one of America's greatest and least-known sports meccas. Winding through the mountains outside Trenton are a set of roads that were once a bootleggers playground, thundering with the late-night music of tricked-out Fords loaded with Mason jars.

My first trip to the area was back in 1986, when I decided to go flying at Lookout Mountain, hang gliding capital of the eastern United States. I've loved the place ever since.

On the droning boulevards of Toronto, my passion fades. But a trip to Lookout resurrects it every time. The roads are like a tarmac bobsled course – you careen through rock-walled valleys, soar past 1,000-foot drops and dive into canyons lined with hardwoods and kudzu vines. There are hairpin turns, high-speed sweepers and seductive straights that end in diminishing-radius curves that lay a trap for the unwary. Driving a car quickly here is like flying a hang glider – mistakes will cost you.

Now I was here in the Lotus, the perfect vehicle for a twisty road. My wife and I picked it up near Atlanta at Lotus USA, a concrete building filled with magical-looking parts – carbon wings, jewel-like V-8 engines, and forged suspension arms. Set to one side was an Exige chassis, a tiny aluminum concoction that looked a soapbox derby racer built by NASA. And there was our Exige.

“Is that a real car?” my wife asked. The cockpit had the austerity of a fighter plane: the padding on the seats was the thickness of a cocktail napkin, and the pedals were bare aluminum, shaving off a few grams. Heading into traffic, the Exige was a cheetah carving through a herd of hippos. Next to this, a Porsche 911 felt like a minivan.

My first run-in with the law took place within the hour, as we headed north through the hill country toward Lookout. Stuck behind a logging truck that was dropping branches and gravel chips, I decided to use the Lotus's spectacular acceleration to jet around it, and threw in a car or two for good measure.

A few minutes later, we were at a gas station, surrounded by a crowd of admirers. “God, what is that thang?” one woman asked. Then a white-haired gentleman appeared. “That's a fast little car,” he said. I agreed.

Then I noticed the gun on his hip – he was an off-duty sheriff I'd passed along with the logging truck. We weren't in his jurisdiction, but he got on his cellphone to call in a local officer.

“They're gittin' a ticket!” a local in a camouflage hunting jacket announced.