Mark Hughes: Trackside View

The noise fills the void left by the off-season. It's muffled slightly by the rainwater, doesn't carry its usual piercing quality. The first car to take to the track in the new season is harrying its way around, a picture only imagined for the last four months.

Still you can only hear it, but within a few seconds you'll see it. Not on tv but real and raw, a bright-painted carbon missile riding rude through an overcast background, a cocooned vortex where reality is suspended, scything through that reality at 170mph and sealing it up again as it passes.

You'll smell the aroma of its burnt fuel after it goes, catch the identity of car and driver in the couple of seconds it will be in your view as you stand at the exit of the fast, kinking left that leads to the needle in the haystack that's the entry to turn 11.

It's getting closer now, four downshifts, a crack of backfire as the software allows unburned fuel into the exhaust and you picture the car squirming on brakes and tyres not yet hot across a surface not yet dry.

First lap out, wet track, but still the engine is super-aggressive as you hear it accelerate out of the chicane, the rain causing a traction control cough. Eyes peeled left, like they've been waiting there since the engines were shut off after Brazil last year.

The car's not here yet, but there's something chasing the noise. A huge monster of a spray cloud, a rooster tail 30ft tall, towering over the fences and coming towards you like some mad hurricane. The car's had its way with all that airflow, sucked out its nutrient and spat it out of the diffuser high into the air, just as surely as the engine is throwing out its vast heat energy from the pipes.

Imagine the exhaust gas wasn't invisible, like it was orange, and its arc would be at a smaller angle than the spray but with even more energy. Only a tiny proportion of the engine's thermal energy gets translated into motion. Most gets lost out of the pipes, out of that imaginary orange arc.

But now the dreaming stops: here it is. The epicentre. It's a white and blue explosion of drama; the noise resonates in your chest as it passes, a flash quickly engulfed in its own grey cloak. Zipping that suspended reality back up again. Gone. Noise fading now.

The first car of the season.