Are you a gentleman of a certain age, looking to spoil yourself with a once-in-a-lifetime car? Your local Porsche dealer will show you the 532-horsepower 911 GTS, priced at $164,900 and up. This will impress your neighbors, local teenagers, and even your valet. Unfortunately, it will also earn you some gently dismissive smirks from the thousands of amateur race drivers in this country, all of whom know that the Porsche is a paper tiger, a soft and feckless luxury sled suited for nothing more rigorous or sporting than the Saturday morning coffee-shop parking-lot car shows. Faced with this reality, you have two choices. The first is to buy a Porsche anyway and accept whatever derision comes your way from the weekend warriors in their Miatas and McLarens. The second: to leave them all gasping in your wake, courtesy of the Sebeco SPX.

You’ve never heard of Sebeco, which is fine with them. The Georgia-based firm builds nothing but diminutive race cars of extraordinary capability and relatively modest price. They’re not street-legal, and there’s room for just one person in their fishbowl-style cockpits. Their top-of-the-line SPX has air conditioning and a radio, although not as you probably know them. The AC sends cold water through a series of tubes in a special shirt that you wear, and the radio can only be tuned to the channel of your pit-side race crew. The engine sits inches from the back of your head, making an absolutely infernal amount of noise. Your 6-foot-2-inch, 250-pound author had no trouble fitting into the car, but it would be claustrophobic for anyone more than a little bit taller or wider. Entry and exit is via a flimsy flip-up fiberglass door of a type familiar to anyone who has raced the prototype class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.