The sweepers come like giant slalom gates. At this speed you have a quarter of a second or so to establish the turn in and clipping points, judge the exit shape of the bend, take into account the surface, camber and the changing vectors of the traffic and execute your turn. I've never driven a road quite like this. Left, right, left; this four lane autoroute is climbing the Massif Central in huge, lazily looping switchbacks.

Some bends tighten their radius and the concrete walls bear testament to other players who didn't bring their A game. Don't get late on the gate. The car feels as if it's carving a line, the Continental sports tyres keying beautifully into the dry tarmac. On-ramp ahead and a Porsche Cayman joins the game, accelerating up and slipstreaming the BMW M3 that's been trying to hang onto the tail of the car I'm driving. The Porsche driver knows his stuff and blazes past my car. The Skoda.

Press launches tend to follow a set plan. Flight to somewhere sunny, drive car to lunch stop, swap cars for a different trim level and go to hotel. At 7:30pm there will be an opportunity for cliques to form under the banner of cocktails. 8:00pm dinner and then as much drinking as you can manage. Where this trip diverges from the normal junket is that instead of returning to Barcelona airport, I'm getting the car and driving it back to the UK. Solo. I'm at the Parador de Cardona north of Barcelona. From my window I can see the snow-capped foothills of the Pyrenees and hear goats bleating below.

Skoda is trying to establish a sporting sub-brand, vRS, and I'm in Spain to drive the flagship sports model, the Octavia vRS, a front-wheel drive five-door hatch that runs on the VW Golf chassis. It uses the engine from the latest Golf GTI and Audi A4 DTM, a 197bhp turbocharged four with FSI. It's one of the best engines sensible money can buy. The press pack sitting next to me reckons this thing will do 149mph and I don't doubt it.

After an early start, it doesn't take long before I hit the Pyrenees. Like the western side of the Sierra Nevada, these mountains don't go in for too much preamble, soaring out of a flat fluvial plain. The Spanish side of the range is rain shadow, with scrubby bush clinging to the scree slopes. Even the Andorran border is snowless, the traffic-choked armpit of Andorra La Vella passing by, Bentley dealers cheek-by-jowl with duty-free booze supermarkets. The snow starts at Soldeu and the climb up to the Col d'Envalira is stunning, the sun basting the ski slopes of Pas de la Casa. It's weird, blazing past all this skiing but I've got a target. I need to be in Clermont Ferrand by nightfall and I've got a good 350 miles left to go.

"The press pack sitting next to me reckons this thing will do 149mph and I don't doubt it."

The unmanned French frontier registers a black blur as the Skoda bangs through the empty husk of the inspections hut. Check the rear view for testy guards emerging from the office building. All clear. Reel off a series of downhill switchbacks into a part of France that's not so much off the popular radar as located on the dark side of the moon. From here the road opens up by the mile. The Octavia feels slightly weighty through the tight switchbacks, the front suspension having an anti roll bar that could use a couple of millimetres more heft. The faster the corner, the better the car feels. With slightly softer springs and less aggro damping than the Golf GTi, its secondary ride is perfect for these corrugated French Route Nationals. The land goes billiard table flat after Foix, with only the odd village perched atop occasional volcanic plugs. Averaging a respectable click is easy on these roads with long sightlines and few junctions. Dispatching dawdling semi agricultural Renaults and Citroens is huge fun, but it's probably not doing Anglo French (or Franco Czech) relations a big favour.

Foix, Carcassonne, Narbonne, Beziers. Glimpse blue Mediterranean through silver Armco. Turn north, direction Millau, taking in the Greatest Motorway Section Ever. The high plateau of the Massif Central is, in turn, jaw droppingly bleak moonscape and then spectacular gorges and limestone escarpments, the geomorphology never settling on one dominant landform. The road crests snowy moorlands and dives into deep cuttings that plough through pine plantations before rounding a bend and, without warning, spitting you onto one of the architectural wonders of the modern world.

From the top of its supports to the Tarn valley floor below is 1,118 feet, making this the tallest road bridge on earth. Blue lights strobe across its span to warn aircraft of its presence. Unlike most other bridges of its size and contrary to what I was expecting, it's not flat. We're nosing downhill quite sharply as punchy crosswinds pummel the bluff flanks of the car, sending the nose thudding over cat's eyes. Despite its size, the bridge feels gossamer thin, threaded across this giant cleft in the high country, the seven white fans of white cabling looking for all the world like a spider's web sparkling in the dewfall.

Between here to Clermont Ferrand lies 140 miles of the emptiest autoroute in southern France. The drop down into the Auvergne region is memorable. The sun is low on my left and in front of the car as it reaches the edge of another karst is a low, rolling landscape punctuated by long extinct volcanoes stretching to the horizon. Distant volcanoes merge into a sky that's turning pink and purple and hazy. Clermont Ferrand nestles in valley near the largest of them, Le Puy de Sancy. A full moon rises as I find my bed for the evening on the outskirts of town.

As I get back to the hotel, the low fuel light pings on. The next morning sees me on a deserted, pitch black autoroute in sixth gear, 2,000rpm showing on the clock. I've switched the air conditioning off and I'm freewheeling down all the inclines, fixated on the range indicator ping down in increments of five miles. It's on ten, then settles on five miles to empty. This could get embarrassing. After a mere three more miles, it hits zero. I wait for the stutter and coughing to begin but like a vision, an autoroute services sign appears. I roll in on fumes, fill up on fuel and Haribo and perform a full throttle exit. Half an hour later, I still haven't seen another vehicle.

Another day, another dawn in the rear view mirror. The miles roll by. I've demolished the Haribo, a pack of sandwiches and three cans off 'Dark Dog', France's equivalent to Red Bull. A mound of road trip detritus is insidiously growing in the passenger footwell, the car's navel lint. Skyrock FM accompanies me with some track after track of great French hip hop by artists I've never heard of. I'm in Paris by 9:30.

The sprint up to Calais is pretty straightforward. I manage to blat a crow outside Vernon, exploding it with my front bumper as it pecked at road kill. Its head is lodged in the grille of the Skoda, beak agape in an expression of profound and indignant surprise. I stop for lunch at a Buffalo Grill, curious as to what French Tex Mex is like. It's as bad as you'd expect. I roll through the formalities at the French side of the Channel Tunnel and the journey is over. 1,200 miles in a Skoda? I'd do it again in a blink.