There is a moment about four minutes into a good road where you stop thinking about it; if it’s the right time of day, whether it’s been worth the journey, if the weather will hold. All of this melts away. You get to the point where you have rolled enough corners on it to know what the next one is going to do. Your hands have found the rhythm. You are not thinking about the drive anymore, you are just driving, and the road, the car and you are all just getting on famously together.
That’s it in a nutshell. That is what people are actually chasing when they get up at six on a Sunday and drive two hours to find ‘the road’. Not just speed, and not just scenery; that feeling of a road that lets everything come together in perfect sync.
The problem is that nobody can really describe it, and two completely different roads can reach it for different reasons. Ask ten drivers what makes a great road and you will get ten answers that are all correct and none of which help. Flow. Sight lines. Character. It just works. Everybody is pointing at the same thing from a different angle and nobody can hand you the thing itself. What we usually get are examples.
And this is why every list of Britain’s best driving roads is really a list of the roads that particular writer happened to be sent to, remembered fondly, and could get a photographer to. That is not necessarily a criticism, it is just what happens when the criterion is a feeling.
So we tried something else; instead of trying to define a great road, we started driving them and writing down what we actually experienced, and then worked backwards to ask what was physically happening on the road when we felt it.
That is the entire idea behind Cambr. It turns out the feeling is not mystical at all. It comes apart into about eight things, and every one of them is something you can measure across an entire country.
The feeling is not mystical. It comes apart into eight things, and every one of them can be measured across an entire country.
The corners have to arrive in a rhythm
This does not just mean lots of corners. Anyone can find lots of corners, and a road that turns constantly with no pattern or variety to it is exhausting rather than good. What you are actually feeling is cadence: corners arriving at a spacing your hands can settle into, so that the exit of one is already setting up the entry to the next.
This is the most obvious thing to count, and also the easiest one to get wrong. A road that averages a corner every two hundred metres might be beautifully even the whole way, or it might be twenty bends stacked into one mile and then five miles of nothing. Those are completely different roads to drive and they produce identical averages. How much a road turns matters. The flow of those turns matters just as much.
It needs elevation change
A flat road can be good, but a road that climbs, sweeps and drops is almost always better, and I do not think this always gets enough attention.
Partly it is the physical sensation, the compression at the bottom of a dip and the lightness over a crest. Partly it is that elevation changes what you can see, so the road keeps revealing itself instead of laying out flat in front of you. And partly it’s that undulations put the car under load in a way that flat corners do not, so you feel more of what it is doing.
The best roads in Britain are almost all mountain passes or moorland crossings, and this is why. Not the views, but the gradient, and how this translates to driving experience.
You have to be able to see
This sometimes flies under the radar, and it is one of the biggest dividers between a road you enjoy and a road you endure.
Commitment is a function of visibility. On a road where you can see through the corner you will carry pace naturally and never feel like you are taking a risk. On a road with the same corners and a hedge on the apex you will be on the brakes the whole way, and it will feel like work. The corners are identical. The experience is not.
This is also the thing we get at most indirectly. There is no national record of how far you can see through a given corner. What we do have, is everything that produces it: how wide the road is, what kind of road it is, and what sits beside it. A road across open moorland shows you the next half mile. A road between banked hedgerows shows you the next forty feet. We infer sight lines from those rather than measuring them directly, and it’s the part of this I would most like to improve.
You have to trust the surface
Surface is the thing that decides whether you can use everything else. A road can have perfect corners, perfect sight lines and perfect elevation, and if the tarmac is patched and scarred and you cannot predict what the front axle is going to do, you will back off exactly where the road is asking you to commit.
It is also the least romantic thing on this list and the one nobody puts in an article, because nobody photographs tarmac. But ask anyone who has driven the same road before and after it was resurfaced.
Surface condition is recorded patchily across the country, so it currently does less work than it deserves to. Where we have it, it counts. Where we do not, the road is judged on everything else.
You have to have it to yourself
This is the killer, and it is the reason so many famous roads disappoint people who drive them for the first time on a Bank Holiday.
A great road with a motorhome on it is not a great driving experience. It is a queue with a nice view. Everything above depends on being able to use the road, and being able to use the road depends on there being space to use it in.
What is interesting is that this is measurable in a way that surprised us. The speed limit on a road tells you almost nothing, because a rural lane is legally sixty whether or not you could ever do sixty on it. What tells you something is how fast traffic actually moves along it in reality. That number also encodes width, traffic, junctions, surface and how many tourists stop halfway up to take a picture, all at once.
It also cuts both ways, which took us a while to accept. Some of the best roads in Britain are slow, but that is another article.
Nobody watching
Speed cameras suck, and we can all agree on that.
But it’s not about wanting to speed, it is about mental load. A road with a camera every mile changes how you drive even when you are nowhere near the limit, because part of your attention is permanently on the speedometer instead of on the road. The road might be superb and you will still spend big chunks of it distracted.
Some genuinely great roads are heavily enforced, usually for reasons that are entirely justified by their casualty records. That does not make them worse roads but it does change what driving them is like, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Somewhere worth being
Roads do not exist in isolation. The A82 through Glencoe would be a good road anywhere. Through Glencoe it is something else, and anybody who says landscape does not matter has not driven a truly great one; the setting is what separates great from breathtaking.
The trick is not letting this dominate, because scenery is exactly what makes people overrate roads. It should be the thing that lifts a good road into a memorable one, not the thing that gets a mediocre road onto a list of the best of all time.
That point around isolation carries something else significant as well; roads in epic locations tend to be surrounded by other great roads, and linking them together turns a singular stretch of tarmac into a proper driving experience. At its core, that is a big part of why Cambr exists.
Enough of it to get stuck into
Back to the four minutes. There is a length below which a road cannot be great, no matter how good it is, because you do not have time to stop thinking about it.
A mile of perfect road is a nice mile, but it’s not a proper drive. You arrive at the good bits already braking for the end, and you never reach the point where the road lets you in. The time spent enjoying something directly correlates to how much you enjoy it, and that’s why we aim to link together sections of road into something that makes sense to actually drive.
What we cannot measure
Plenty, and it is worth saying so.
We cannot measure whether you were in the right car, and the right car changes everything. We cannot measure the light, and a road at seven in the morning in November is a different road to the same tarmac at two in the afternoon in July. We cannot measure whether you had somewhere to be, or who was in the passenger seat, or whether you had been looking forward to it for a month.
Those things are most of why anybody remembers a drive. They are also completely personal, which is precisely why they are not the job. What we can do is tell you, before you set off, which roads are really worth pointing the car at, and then navigate you through all of them. What happens after that is yours.
The hardest part
Britain is covered in narrow single-track lanes that are twisty, hilly, quiet and national speed limited. On paper alone, many of them could be mistaken for a driving road. In reality the majority are poorly surfaced, barely wide enough for one car, have grass down the middle and a tractor coming the other way.
Telling those apart from a genuinely great narrow mountain pass is the hardest problem in this whole thing, and it is the one that has taken by far the most work. The national mapping data models a farm track and a mountain pass at roughly the same width, so width on its own was never going to tell the full story. It takes several measures working together, tested against roads we have actually driven, and the map cuts out the worst offenders very effectively now, but there’s always improvement to make.
If Cambr ever sends you down something that turns out to be somebody’s driveway, tell us and we will take it off. That feedback loop is a real part of how this gets better, not a line in a press release.
Why are we here?
This has become my obsession. It is something the car community has been crying out for for years, myself included; not just a navigation tool for people like us, but a proper community hub to swap insights, organise drives together and share the experience of our cars. The alternative is what we have now, which are systems not fit for purpose and the same forty roads that get written about repeatedly whilst everything else stays invisible. Measuring all of them rather than just a shortlist is the only way to find the ones nobody was sent to.
The best thing that has come out of doing it this way is not the ranking of the famous roads, which mostly confirms what the motoring press already worked out over thirty years. It is the empty B-road in County Durham that nobody has ever written about and that turns out to be one of the best roads in England.
That is the bit that a list of somebody’s favourites can never give you.