IF LAFERRARI IS THE BEST OF THE BREED, WHICH FERRARI IS NEXT IN LINE?

I have recently set myself the task of identifying any public negativity towards the Ferrari 458 Speciale. I didn’t drive the car when it was launched at the end of last year and, like many of you, sat back and read the eulogies as they were published. And I’m not trying to be arch here – Ferrari is in the rudest of health right now, pretty much anything it tries in the road car space is perfectly executed and class leading. If only its Formula One programme could say the same.

Despite much rummaging, I managed to locate zero hate for the Speciale.

Which makes sense. When Ferrari decides to make a lighter, faster version of the 458 – a car which four years after it was launched remains the finest mid-engined sports car on the planet – you reasonably expect something special. It’s taken me nearly a year to plonk my posterior into one – and I’ve found the experience enlightening on many levels.

Firstly, I cannot help but imagine how the 24-year old me would respond to this car – new to the job of testing cars, previous fastest ride: an early Lotus Elise. You see, the Speciale offers a turn of speed that is difficult to explain.

I used to sit and gawp at the Autocar performance figure for the McLaren F1 and assume that nothing would ever come close, but in real terms the Speciale is probably a bit quicker than the McLaren. This car would have terrified the 24 year old me, and I wouldn’t have had the nerve to reduce the intervention of the electronic chassis systems and see what lurked beneath because I’d have assumed that being mid-engined, Italian and molto-powerful, the Speciale would be looking to kill me at every opportunity.

But that’s what we do these days – we climb into 600hp mid-engined machinery and drive it like some £3,000 BMW drift car. Not because the few of us who choose to film cars in this manner are especially handy behind the wheel, or because we have any particular disregard for tyres, but because Ferrari’s chassis experts have taken the art to a new level; one that has left Porsche and Lamborghini scrabbling around for answers.

I never even dreamed you could play the fool with a car of this type. It is ludicrously competent, unfeasibly good fun; undeniably the best sports car I’ve driven this year. So why on earth do I think the Speciale is only the third-best car Ferrari currently makes?

We know it has the misfortune of being launched in the same model year as one of Maranello’s once-in-a-decade hypercars, the extraordinary hybrid LaFerrari, but that should only relegate it to the second step on the podium. But offer me the keys to the Speciale or an F12 and I wouldn’t look twice at the mid-engined car.

The F12 is, for me, the Ferrari road car. I was ready to accept that the new-kid-on-the-block would render my favourite Ferrari mostly obsolete, such is the way with the furious pace of this fast-car industry, but my time with the Speciale left me even more enamoured with the F12.

So here’s why I prefer the V12 – don’t you just love all this real-world car journalism?

There are elements of shape-shifter about the lightweight 458 – it isn’t always quite what it seems, or what you expect it to be. Initial contact doesn’t suggest this. The motor yelps on start-up and throttle response is synapse rapid – you think about flexing your achilles, it gains 4000revs. Then you sit and toe the heavily-sprung throttle just to take stock of the urgency. Angry -it all feels quite angry.

And it always feels unnervingly quick – it just pulls and pulls from very low engine speeds, which is the first unexpected action because a 4497cc V8 pushing 135 bhp per litre and revving to 9000rpm should be all peakiness and no guts. The torque is relentless, from 3500rpm, throttles wide open and exhaust valve set to ‘we’re laughing at the EU drive-by regulations’, the Speciale is turbodiesel flexible.

Perhaps too flexible. Because if the buxom mid-range is unexpected, it might also be a little surprising for even the best mid-engined chassis out there. Whisper it, but this car, even fitted with 305 section super-sticky Michelins, is traction limited in second gear on a dry circuit – in cold weather and with the odd damp patch it would spool-up in fourth.

Is this a problem? Not at all. It simply leads to the immediate exploitation of a truly wonderful chassis, instinctive steering and agility. And the driver is perfectly isolated from any extreme behavior by the best set of chassis electronics I’ve encountered – they blend brakes, throttle retardation and differential tweaks without the driver feeling any lurching or grabbing. But I just didn’t expect it to be quite so unruly with nanny state disengaged.

I did expect a little more music though. The Ferrari V8’s noise-classification has gradually crept from musical to plain noisy for some years now, and the Speciale marks a low point for me. It’s loud but nondescript – for evidence of this, stop reading this now and click ‘play’ on this video of a 355 wearing a naughty exhaust. That is music.

Back to the Speciale though, and the switch from closed valve EU-drive-by-cheat to open pipes is ludicrous and unnatural: you add 1mm of throttle, accrue 3 mph and the accompanying crazy bark suggests you’ve just broken the sound barrier. This encourages bystanders in villages to offer one-handed cocktail shaking impersonations. And that is neither good for the village population of the UK, nor the social acceptance of fast cars on this Island.

There are also question marks over how one might use a Speciale – it is so loud that it cannot be used on any normal UK track day, and yet its specification is pure circuit toy. The test car didn’t even have a radio.

Why am I picking so many holes? Because the F12 beats the Speciale in those specific areas. Don’t ask me how a front-engined 740hp Dobbin has more traction than a 600hp mid-engined example, but it does. By all means ask me why I think the abjectly perfect 6.3 litre V12 makes the V8 seem like a mere propulsion device: the evidence is undeniable. The F12’s motor is the best road car engine on sale – if anyone disagrees with that statement, they are sadly wrong.

And then there’s the styling – the F12 is the dignified GT – more upright and less assertive; the Speciale is all jutting chin and peacock plumage. Yes, the 458 carries a very big stick, but it also shouts very loudly about the size of said implement.

I suppose I just prefer the quieter life – haha!! – in a 740hp V12 Ferrari.

The lightweight 458 is one of the best cars I’ve driven in 2014. It lifts the mid-engined genre even further away from the competition and, as is always the case with the ‘latest thing’, is rightly basking in the glory of all those magazine end-of-year test victories.

But if there was an F12 at the other end of the car park, I’d walk straight past the V8 to drive it. I should duck when I say this, but it’s the best car Maranello has ever made.

PENDING THE PORSCHE 911 VS. MERCEDES-AMG GT TWIN TEST – THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

The ‘road impressions’ part of Merc-AMG’s GT launch didn’t last too long – but long enough to deduce that the GT will not disappoint.

First – on the spectrum of sporting GT to outright sportscar, I think the GT sits a little closer to the latter clarification than perhaps AMG claims. The ride is firm – even with the dampers set to their softest position – and the car feels taught and responsive. Not neurotic, but something you want to give ample concentration.

The steering is excellent, the driving position is stand-out and this would be the perfect place to view the road were it not for the same A-pillar problem that plagues the SLS: it creates a massive blind-spot when you pull out of junctions. And, just like the SLS, the passenger mirror wont adjust in-enough for short-***** like my good self; Affalterbach is clearly size-ist.

For quality of noise the GT is exceptional, but it does have some specific rear-tyre noise, and the boot space acts as a kind of speaker cabinet. On long trips it could be an issue. The again, the Porsche 911 has always had tyre rumble issues, so the AMG isn’t especially bad in this respect.

The cabin is wide and spacious. That great slab of centre console with its Fisher Price buttons works well, the only practical downside being the gear selector is a long way back. It’s not for me to tell you if something looks good or bad – overall I think it’s a great cabin, but there is an awful lot going on – especially with the clock faces which to my eyes lack the attractive simplicity that tends to mark out the most memorable dashboard design.

For response and quantity of performance the bi-turbo V8 is exceptional. It pulls from zip and keeps hauling to well beyond 6000rpm. The transmission is a big step over the SLS version of the Getrag dual-clutch and you won’t be having traction issues either – the new rear axle gives surprising traction, even on damp asphalt.

I’ll need to have a longer drive to discover any more, but for now what you need to know is this: if you’ve lived with a 911, then living with an AMG will be no more stressful. But it might be a little noisier.

Cricket is considered to be the most impenetrable game for non-Englishmen to comprehend. Being English I cannot understand why foreigners might struggle to grasp the appeal of sitting on a wooden bench and watching 22 men occasionally move on-and-off a large field for five days, but believe me when I tell you that a cogent explanation of the rules of cricket is the matter of a few moments compared to an understanding of Formula One.

So here, my American friends, is how Formula One works. Well, here’s how I see it working.

At the outset, we need to refine the nomenclature of F1 – Formula One is not a sport, it is a business. To be a sport it would need to be wholly owned by a business or parent company that existed purely, or at least in the most part to act in the interests of the sport itself and the teams themselves. That is not the case in Formula One. Formula One is owned by a company called CVC, a company that reports to shareholders and whose duty it is to return as much profit to those shareholders as possible.

Most sports are owned by some organisation or promoter, many have shareholders, and most retain a good percentage of the profits generated by the activities of the ‘sport’ they own, but few retain the same percentage of those profits as CVC.

CVC purchased the F1 business from a man called Bernie Ecclestone – you might have heard of him. He’s a small, approximately 300-year-old dude with deal-making skills that could have ended the Cold War in two hours and a dollop of Beef Stroganof. How did he manage to sell a sport? Because he had bought the rights to televise the sport – back then a very large percentage of the revenue the sport could generate – from motorsport’s global governing body, the FIA. The FIA has no jurisdiction in the USA, a fact that should make you ever prouder come the 4th July.

Now as luck would have it, back in 2000 the chap selling the TV rights to Formula One was one of Bernie’s good pals, Max Mosely, a man who, in 2008, perfectly defined the difference in meaning between the words famous and infamous. Bernie bought 100 years rights for about $300 million, which to build a simplistic corporate analogy is like walking into a Chevy showroom and not only offering $25 for a new Camaro Z28, but sealing the deal, too.

Given that he already owned Formula One Management, the company that negotiated the deals with all the circuits on the calendar, and the advertising real-estate and the ability to sell corporate hospitality, and the logistics business that ships all the F1 clutter around the globe, you can understand why he managed to accrue a few pennies.

He reached this unassailable position by manipulating and playing the characters and egos of the established team-leaders in the ‘sport’. As they failed to separate on-track rivalry with the collective need to protect the business of Formula One, and their ownership of it, Bernie ran rings around them. To read how, I suggest you buy a copy of "Bernie's Game" by Terry Lovell.

With the business now under his control, Bernie sold it to the highest bidder – CVC Partners in 2005. And Formula One was now owned by a bunch of bankers who needed to justify the purchase price, and who probably would have liked to sideline Bernie, but who realized that the benign dictatorship he presided over could only be run by one man, you guessed it – Bernie Ecclestone.

So Formula One is a business that operates a sporting activity that generates $1.8 billion of revenue, but which only redistributes abouf half back into the teams each year. It is wholly owned by shareholders who employ Bernie to do their bidding, only in reality they have as much control over him as the man who watches his young dog feverishy, deafly chasing sheep and implores him to stop: ‘Stop!! Bernie stop!! ****ING STOP!!”

The common presentation of this strange situation is one of the evil corporate colossus leeching Hemmingway’s ‘true sport’ of money, and leaving it in a parlous state. There’s some truth in that, but it neatly avoids the fact that for the best part of 30 years the team owners and principles have always been unable to agree on anything. As Bernie likes to say when the media collars him after another team bosses pow-wow and asks what was agreed “We didn’t manage to agree when to hold the next meeting” while normally suppressing an impish grin. Bernie has made billions feeding on instability.

So when Lewis Hamilton finishes fifth and still fails to win the 2014 World Championship because of a slow pit stop, despite being 17 points ahead going into the final round, that is the corporate background. That is why F1 is what it is.

This is a business that for 2014 decided to award double points for the final round of the championship, either to keep matters spicy until the denouement, or to charge Abu Dhabi more cash to host a double-pointer, depending on your level of cynicism. None of us fans can understand why. Most of the people in F1 hate the idea. But it’s happening anyway.

This is a business that, against the will of the teams and many spectators decided to introduce small capacity turbocharged engines and hybridity to align itself more closely with the industry that supports it, and you know what, anyone that doesn’t like it can go **** themselves.

Formula One in 2014 rocks. Turbos, oversteer, technology, stunning driving talent.

So enough with the explanation already.

I love Formula One. I love that its ownership is utterly nonsensical and that pretty much everything it does defies logic and convention. I love that it is still bossed by an octogenarian dwarf who tinkers with it like an especially skanky model railway. Formula One – the concept of spending inordinate, deeply offensive amounts of money on crazy fast cars – is inherently the most ridiculous sport on the planet and it naturally attracts people whose ridiculousness defies even the skills of the greatest Hollywood scriptwriters, and as such it absolutely deserves – no, make that needs the most obviously ****ed-up, opaque, dodgy, mercenary, undemocratic bunch of rules and leaders imaginable. This is North Korea with 750hp.

Remember: if Bill Gates ran a brothel, it would be a **** brothel. We don’t need nice – nice doesn’t win. Ethics and motorsport don’t matter to each other; don’t exist to each other.

Do any of the vanilla media ****** who whinge about Bernie and his machinations ever stop to imagine how dull their column inches would be if Formula One was run by some ethical non-profit-making organization that reinvested the majority of revenues in the sport and the remainder in Eastern European orphanages? Nope. Do they hassle the main news desk with copy offers when it emerges that Bernie has effectively paid a bribe to buy his way out of a German bribery case? Guess the answer.

F1 is a villainous activity. It is the pinnacle of a pastime best defined by Mark Donohue as ‘the unfair advantage.’ Hemmingway was right to eulogise it as one of the few genuine sports, but was wrong to romanticize its nobility. For motorsport, and most notably F1, is the apotheosis of selfishness. It is a journey to win at all costs: to circumnavigate, obfuscate, deceive and ultimately prevail. Like the shrew-wife stuck with the bully husband, the rank venality of Formula One fully deserves the business that owns it. And it will always be a ****ed-up place.

The lesser teams will always have too little money. The wrong people will always be in power, the big-dogs will always threaten to leave and fail to do so, the naysayers will always wrongly assume the past was better and, until he casts off his mortal coil, Bernie will still rule the roost. And I will still be enthralled by the nonsense, the chutzpah, the precocious skills of the great drivers, the effrontery of the talentless berks in the paddock and the absurdity of the travelling circus that is Formula One.

Come to think of it, I can’t explain Formula One, what madness made me assume I could! I remain unconvinced it is unexplainable: F1 is part metaphor for the human condition; part theatre for yesterday’s capitalism. Lost in translation, lost in itself. Perfectly funked-up.

Watch the race this weekend and you’ll see why.

Postscript: In the game of cricket, a ball that moves from off to leg stump, that is left-to-right on the field of play, when delivered through the front of the hand is called an off-spinner. When delivered from the back of the hand, through a cocked-wrist, it is called a googly. As a batsman, spotting a googly should therefore be easy, but the best bowlers disguise it well.

Smaller and less funny than Clarkson - but I can drive okay!

Hello

These vids aren't cheap to produce, but they do seem pretty popular. The YT revenue model doesn't acknowledge the difference between proper films and very low-overhead content, but I don't really want to move to the 'other' platform: television. I like the way I work, the way me and cameraman Neil Carey shoot stuff. I fundamentally like the way YT broadcasts.

So I'll try this donation thing. There will be adverts too, and some sponsored content along the way.

I sincerely hope that the films are worth it for everyone.

Best

Chris

The fastest, most expensive Ferrari ever produced, driven on road and track.

An Angelsey track battle: two of the very best cars we'll drive this year. Contains numerous continuity issues with black and green T-shirts, but hey, it's a free film!

They named the class of car after it, so it should be quite good. Contains turbocharging, which some may find offensive.

Chris Bangle may be history's most infamous car designer, ridiculed for taking a visual language that BMW carefully developed over fifty years and gleefully drowning it in a bath tub. At the time I thought he was a madman, or maybe a moron. Maybe I was the moron.

There is a brilliant stand-up sketch by the British comedian Peter Kay in which he explores the young mind's propensity to mis-hear song lyrics.

I defy anyone to watch it and not nod in concurrence as S-Express repeats on your adult brain – were they really singing about Audi Quattros? Pre or post Torsen differential? 10 or 20 valve?

I am beginning to feel the way about car design and styling. I mention both criteria because I was once carefully lectured by someone very designer-like and much cleverer than me on the distinction between the two but can't for the life of me remember which was which. I think I asked if the car would slide.

My inner luddite likes to categorize both styling and design as 'how stuff looks.' The pertinence here is not one how one defines the meaning 'good looking,' but the tense in which it is used – I am increasingly looking at cars I once found repellent and thinking them attractive in 2014, and vice-versa. Did I just not see things properly back then? Please tell me the same is true for you?

And now this has happened: I am increasingly looking at the work of Chris Bangle, supposedly the slayer of attractive BMW's, and thinking he might have been a genius.

Before I became so drunk that the asparagus mouse exited the way it had entered, I once listened to Chris Bangle deliver an after-dinner speech about cars, and the industry that produces them. It was the most lucid, percipient talk of its type I've ever heard – well, at least I remember thinking that before I blew chunks. I also recall him repeatedly using the word 'paradigm' in the most unctuous way possible. A joyous kind of pre-orgasm holler of the lets-change-every-established-rule type.

At the time, or at least in the build-up to that evening, I thought Chris Bangle was at best a madman, at worst a criminal. He'd taken the finest mainstream design language of them all — the demure yet purposeful BMW saloon — and sodomized it with a special brutality. When we saw the E65 7 Series we could barely contain the contents of our stomachs. He parried the criticism by insisting that BMW needed a new direction and that only a complete schism with the past would provide suitable change. So he went bat-****-crazy with the Seven. Which looked terrible in 2001. And which now, especially the facelifted model, so-help-me-Lord, looks pretty damn good to my eyes.4

The Houdinery deepened with the 2003 E60 5-Series. Born with a face for radio, I thought it was a crime against Bavaria – gone was the Hoffmeister kink, gone was the driver-slanted centre console, gone was all the BMW DNA; incoming was 'flame surfacing.' I interviewed Burkhard Göschel just weeks before he left the company and he laughed demonically about the situation: "What do you think of our flame surfacing, hohoho-hahahahaHAHAHAHA." he asked, shaking his head in mock disapproval — his not knowing what to think confusing me into not knowing what to think either.

A BMW board member as perplexed by BMW's design language as the rest of the planet in 2004.

There are some brilliant stories about Bangle's legendary ability to create an evangelical following among his staff and team – perhaps even the board of BMW. Go and look at a first generation Bangle-BMW Z4, then spy the previous Z3 and tell me how the hell he managed to get that past the suits. He must have spiked a few drinks. Like so many Bangle shapes, it's looking really quite good now. My favourite completely non-verified tale involves the sign-off for the E63 6-Series. It is alleged that several different design proposals were considered and after some tantric downtime in a green spot, he randomly chose the one we have now. I have no idea if this is true or not, but I sincerely hope it is. Guess what? The E63 6-Series is looking very cool these days. Especially as an M6.

There's a black E61 550i Sport Touring that must live near me and with every passing week the creases in the flanks seem cleverer and the overall proportions quite perfect for a car of its type. The Sport moniker is important though – Bangle clearly wasn't a simple aesthete – I can't speak for BMW USA, but the model mix between SE and Sport on an E39 5 Series (the previous model) was nothing like what it became for the E60/61. He was clearly also a hard-nosed businessman. I like to think he deliberately made a whole generation of BMW's completely unpalatable to the human eye unless they were specified with expensive bodykits and alloy wheels.

He was a greedy, marketing-savvy aesthete; that's my kind of bounty-hunter.

And of course only now are people beginning to copy those Bangle tricks – the complicated, seemingly nonsensical shapes. The flame-surfacing, the abstraction – but most of all the sense that evolutionary styling changes over time might always leave a brand unable to progress.

This is why Chris Bangle was right and we were wrong: because his brand revolution now resonates outside the car-world, and that is unusual. Normally the car industry copies ideas from other, more radical corners of the industrial map, but in the paradigm shifts being undertaken by so many famous brands you see the Bangle effect.

The current BMW range looks superb, bar the frumpy Seven, but it does so because of the clever merging of a classic BMW-ness and some residual Bangle irregularity that catches the eye when you least expect it. And makes you grin. Perversely, BMW couldn't have found such comfort with its current styling if it hadn't let that Bangle-man loose with the crown jewels until 2009.

He was right, and we were wrong.

The Hoonicorn: Inside Ken Block's Gymkhana SEVEN AWD 1965 Mustang with Chris Harris.

First drive of AMG's exciting new 911-sized coupe. Filmed at Laguna Seca Raceway.

Neal Pollack's quite brilliant confession of near-Lexus-soilage prompted many colleagues who knew of a past struggle to urge me to tell my story publicly.

We arrived in Stuttgart on a sticky mid-summers' afternoon with a most splendid itinerary ahead of us. The year was 2000 and Porsche had celebrated the new millennium with a stunning turbocharged version of the 996. We were to collect a press loaner of this new 400hp, 4WD weapon and head to the German-Austrian border the following day for a rendez-vous with a Ferrari 360 and judge the ensuing tussle. Chasing these two would be our hire car, a dog-eared Mitsubishi Space Wagon purloined from one of the less glamorous rental shops.

These were some of the best days of my working life. The other parts of the first-person plural were Steve Sutcliffe, my partner-in-crime for several years and one of the few people who managed to get himself into as many scrapes as I did. And photographer Barry Hayden. Barry is quiet and kind and a great snapper; and a good man.

The Porsche was white, in an era when white was completely verboten on valuable European cars in Europe. It looked superb and in celebration we dawdled it into central Stuttgart for Barry to shoot some Swabian beauty shots for the Autocar Road Test that would accompany the Ferrari twin-test. Being British, we located a pretty town square, parked the car on the pedestrianized section secure in the knowledge that a local performance artifact would alleviate any legal issues, and Barry began creating his art. The Polizei never arrived.

Steven and myself were superfluous to this exercise, so we did what any Brit exposed to a brief glimpse of evening sunlight always does, and had ourselves a beer in the bar on the square. And another beer. And another beer.

Barry's sacrifice for his art went through the gloaming and into darkness until he was happy with the results, at which point Steve and myself were prompted to action our usual highly organized travel plans for such jobs. We asked the landlord of the bar if he knew of any rooms in town.

We stressed that accommodation close-by would be ideal on account of us being a bit tipsy, and he replied with genial German-ness that he knew of safe shelter, but winced a little when we suggested that we were too drunk to move the Porsche from the pedestrian area. The morning should be fine, he conceded.

Not driving when inebriated is a very good thing. This was proved a few minutes later when the Mitsubishi, ably piloted by one of us, and being shifted from one part of the small square we weren't supposed to be parked on to another part we weren't supposed to be parked on, reversed with impressive urgency – given the lack of run-up available – into a large lamp post thereby causing this 50ft steel prong to sag at forty-five degrees. We then stood around and nodded with admiration at the subtle, intelligent deformation of the Space Wagon's rear bumper, not to mention the typically impressive German engineering of the floodlight foundations – which hadn't budged and inch – before agreeing that Barry should probably move the Japanese dodgem somewhere where the authorities wouldn't find it. We also agreed that he probably should have been the one to undertake the maneuver that resulted in the lamp-post being semi-felled in the first place, being, as he was, completely sober. But these trips were the kindergarten of life for us, and we learned in future to let the non-drunk person do the close-quarters away-from-public-highway driving.

Those following the plot closely will be wondering why Barry couldn't have moved the 911 too. Well Barry didn't really want to pilot a left-hand-drive, very powerful Porsche around cobbled streets, and we fully sympathized with that view. Because we were a team and we loved him.

So much of a team that he only left us several hours later as we exited some bar in the small hours of the morning, insisting that we shouldn't be too late. "'Course we won't be Barry", we assured him with stoical Britishness – words that repeated on us as we staggered back to the rooms we'd rented, confused by the sight of a large orange orb in the sky and traffic not using headlights. Red Bull doesn't give you wings, it steals the nighttime.

Back at base, with the sun near vertical in the sky, Barry was now growing frantic. Steve and I were enjoying the trappings of our accommodation and so firmly in the land of nod that we couldn't hear the stones pinging against the window. Sorry Barry. We were sharing the spare room in the flat of a heroin user with such intense OCD that he reapplied – with that perfect upturned point I only thought possible in commercials- the toothpaste to his brush so that it was ready for the next scrub. But we were running late for the Austro-German border meeting with the Fandango, so we bid our friendly dragon chaser farewell, gave him his Marks and headed off into the Swabian hills.

We met the great Peter Robinson on those lower Alpine roads that are so good, so surrounded by perfect landscapes that they could never now be used in a movie for fear of being labeled computer generated. The Ferrari made Ferrari noises and the Porsche gathered the asphalt around it and scrapped between corners with a ****ing-try-and-cover-ground-faster mentality that shocked us all. It was even fun to drive. These were the best of days: driving fast cars on great roads, taking great pictures, not being hurried by web stories and videos and sundry nonsense.

We broke for a late lunch. The others ordered generic dishes – hamburgers and spaghetti Bolognese – whereas I let my inner-Teuton run free and plumped for the white offal sausage and sauerkraut. Keen followers of plot may have spotted that this marks a significant point in the narrative.

The sausage was terribly good. I remember the taste even now – potent and well-seasoned. The texture was good too – just the right level of resistance from the outer skin to the human jaw, but then a sudden PING of submission as the exterior membrane broke and the cooked, minced entrails were freed. Aren't sausages just the best food? Especially when washed down with some heavily spiced and vinegared cabbage. I love sauerkraut. I loved sauerkraut.12

I see no reason for selfishly hoarding the gift that is human wind on a truly dramatic scale, so when the sausage and cabbage began to coax some humor from my colon, I made sure to share its magnificence with my co-workers. I am a giving person. The lovely Barry managed a concerned smile, Peter, then in his late 50s chuckled guardedly and Steve I could tell was mightily impressed with my bottom burps. In my mind, and my mind alone, I was for those few hours, the funniest man in the Northern hemisphere – perhaps the entire world.3

Do you have any idea where this story is headed? I thought you might.

The colonic cyclone grew ever more impressive and I continued to selflessly share its gift among my friends. Peter and Steve were now shooting details or driving or somehow separated from myself and Barry – we were in the Mitsubiushi and I was trumpeting with joy – both legs on the dashboard, funnier than Louis CK on speed. I have - I mean I had always behaved like this with supreme confidence because back then, at the tender age of 26 years, I had never followed-through. Please note the tense of that verb.

If Barry noticed the altered tone of the latest bottom outburst, he didn't let on. That's what I told myself anyway – I had to assume he was oblivious to the fact that I had not only deposited a remarkable quantity of effluent into my undercrackers, but had propelled it with the maximum force available from my pelvic wall. I was completely desolate at my predicament.

I clung to the one positive: Barry's idle banter hadn't changed, so I could assume he didn't yet know. Quite how, given I was wearing shorts, I will never be sure.

Now the devious part of my brain sprung into action. Aware that a sudden change in my perky demeanor would arouse suspicion in my Nikon wielding pal, I asked if he might wander the Mitsubishi close to a corner I thought might make for a decent photo-op, and continued chatting as if nothing had happened. You know when your own subterfuge skills actually begin to scare you? That's the one.

This corner I knew to be near a service station – if Barry could be persuaded to scout the location, I might just have enough time to scuttle around, open the trunk, grab a new pair of shorts from my bag, run knock-kneed to the service station, effect a quick change of garments and some manner of a clean-up operation and return as if nothing had happened. The chances of me escaping un-discovered were so slim I thought there was nothing to lose.

And yet the plan had begun perfectly – as if scripted. We parked, Barry wandered off, I grabbed the chance to move and immediately wished I hadn't – the stark terror of the situation dawned as my legs dropped from the vertical, through the horizontal and then towards the ground. You know you are in trouble when fluid courses down the back of your legs and meets the heel of your shoes. The sense of shame is overpowering – me a sentient adult, capable of ****ting myself in public? How so?

And then the human mind proved just how ****ed up it could be by playing the most terrible tricks on me – Barry was away now, I had a clear 100 yard run to the fuel station and was locked in some tragic internal debate as to how I should complete that journey. Go slow and controlled: retain dignity and confidence? Madness, even my swarthy, summer skin wouldn't be hiding the twin chocolate rivers of shame – so why not just run – run the way I used to when I was young and desperate, run so the wind cooled my ears, like my life depended on it? The result was the worst of both worlds, part attempted, dignified stroll interspersed with desperate lunges – all the while resisting the temptation to look at the collateral damage. I couldn't bring myself to look down, to swivel and observe the mayhem – the way I can never watch Gloucester's eyes being gouged in King Lear. There's a comparison I never thought I'd make.

But I made the fuel station. And I found the outside toilet, and it was empty. For all the inner-turmoil, this couldn't have been going better. I will spare you intimate details of the de-robing and genius use of the meager cleaning resources available to me – save to say that the process was adequate and far, far better than expected. The only quandary was the disposal of the soiled garments. Unable to pop the lid on the cistern, I was left with the option of carrying them outside and finding a trash receptacle, or stashing them behind the vast radiator which looked like a prop from Downton Abbey. To come this far and then be spotted marching across a fuel forecourt carrying soiled undercrackers was too much to countenance – I stashed them behind the radiator. Aristotle would have found significance in this choice.

I arrived back at the Mitsubishi wearing different shorts, but Barry didn't notice. He had decided the location was nothing special. He drove us back to meet the others. We wrapped for the day, went to a hotel and talked Porsches and Ferraris and as the minutes passed it dawned on me that I might well, against all odds, have escaped from certain humiliation. I grew confident. I had channeled a mental strength and dexterity I never knew existed within me and somehow come away unscathed. I slept the sleep of the man granted prolonged life. Phil Collins rang inside my head.

A fine Austrian morning greeted us and the two supercars – so fine that breakfast table discussions swiftly moved from the possibility of grabbing a few more shots, to the certainty of at least an hour's shooting before splitting to Modena and Stuttgart. I resisted, suggested that we didn't need the extra shots and generally dismissed the idea because the narrowness of my escape the day before still weighed heavily and I just wanted to be away from that place. Away from the German-Austrian border and my follow-through of doom. But I was the junior voice and overruled. But so what? I mean a few photos wouldn't change things.

"We can go and wash the cars down at the fuel station" proffered someone.

Sweet Jesus, no.

But again, did I really have anything to worry about? Yesterday was yesterday; today was another day. I calmed myself and followed the others to the fuel station, carrying a light air of confidence and pliability - I would do as my superiors bade me because I had nothing to hide.

Steve wandered off to the toilet. The same toilet that less than twenty-four hours earlier had appeared to me as if in a dream, the most perfect room on the planet; my savior. Steve returned, grinning. I couldn't understand why. "What have you done?", he asked bearing a huge smile. How could he possibly know? Yes, he might have seen some boxer shorts poorly hidden behind a radiator, but there was nothing else incriminating. They could be anyone's. Truckers are known to do odd things.4

Only there was evidence.

There was a name-tag neatly sticking out from that poorly stashed undergarment, and it read: C. Harris.5

I am and have always been so sartorially uninterested that I was still wearing clothes from my school days. I had been undone by one of my mother's name-tags – no doubt lovingly sewn into the garment as she watched Inspector Morse one Sunday evening. Little did she know the damage those stitches would wreak ten years later.

I couldn't deny the truth. There is no way of constructing a false narrative to explain the presence of soiled underwear, bearing your name, behind a radiator in a fuel station in the foothills of the Austrian Alps. You just have to smile, tell the lads what really happened and then watch their faces shift color and expression like human-octopi until all of you are reduced to tears. We laughed for a long time.

I tried so hard. I thought I had it sorted. I was undone by cruel fate.

And I will never allow my children's clothes to carry name-tabs, to save them should they ever find themselves in a similar situation.

There are few things I approach with same abject disgust I reserve for association football, but the shrunken ‘performance’ SUV wearing a Porsche badge is one of them. In the past I have justified the Cayenne on grounds of the profits it generates funding Stuttgart’s proper sports cars. I can also say from a year and 20,000 miles in the saddle that the Panamera Diesel is a fabulous machine. So I don’t share the purist-mantra which dictates that Porsche should only build rear-engined, fan-cooled Beetle clones – the world doesn’t work like that. But even with my most democratic, libertarian, meritocratic hat on, the concept of the Macan makes me shudder.

What specifically? The fact it’s a pimped VW Tiguan; the fact it belongs to a genre of machinery that I think fills a void no-one really needs to fill; the fact that Porsche’s people will correct you if you pronounce its name as you see it (think Minder, as in Terrence Macan) and insist it should be Macaaan, as in Tehran. Not that many will be sold there.

Porsche’s accountants need the Macan to satisfy the demands of big-daddy VW; its brand image needs the Macan like Rosberg needed an ERS failure on Sunday – I think Porsche is getting very close to becoming mass-market. A dangerous place to be.

And it was with this baby-Porsche-SUV positivity swirling around my mind that the white Macan Turbo arrived – with enough frontal air-intake to ingest, well, a small rear-engined, fan-cooled sports car. Really, take a look at the Macan’s facial expression, concentrate on the separation between what your eyes determine as being a point of ingestion and what looks like coachwork. It’s weird – not unattractive, but quite strange.

The footprint is small, and this manifests itself not in terms of front cabin space – where the Macan feels very much an only slightly smaller Cayenne – but in the rear seats. I’m a very short man, and I like to sit close to the wheel, and still my four-year-old was still gleefully and successfully kicking the back of my seat as he ignored my repeated threats of violence if he did it again. This is not a substitute for a small estate car.

It is of course a lifestyle statement – but I am not entirely sure what type of lifestyle statement. Within the brand hierarchy, I suppose if the Cayenne tends to shout ‘I’m quite a bit richer than you and I partly redeem my tastelessness with an underlying appreciation of chassis dynamics’, then the Macan says much the same. Or maybe it just says ‘All my friends have Evoques’.

The mistake most people will make with the Macan, and it’s one I made for much of the time I spent with it, is to ponder what the thing is for and what the hell people might want with one. This is a waste of time because the second part of the question is adequately answered by the order books being completely rammed, and dwelling on the first part is probably a mind-trick designed to avoid acceptance of the painful truth – the Macan Turbo is a staggeringly capable fast car in its own right.

Forget class classification, forget the usual motoring-media qualifications for an SUV it is very talented etc, the Macan Turbo, on a damp, twisty A-road is an outright weapon that will stay with pretty much anything on four wheels.

The motor, a twin-turbo V6 petrol pushing 400hp, makes suspiciously light work of a claimed 1925kg – the 405lb ft probably means more in the context of its hilarious, for a small SUV, mid-range shove. And it wants to rev-out too: from 5000 to 6000rpm it makes a cracking noise and just keeps going.

And wouldn’t you just know it, the chassis is even better. The driving position is very clever, with legs more horizontal than rival machines and a feeling of not sitting too high. Beyond detailed technical descriptions of how a car behaves over specific road surfaces one subjective behavioural trait matters far more: how confident a driver feels and how quickly that confidence manifests itself. The Macan Turbo is freakish in this respect: you turn the wheel and you have a sixth sense of where the car will be placed on the road. Not many sports cars can manage that.

The ride is adequate in the softest damper setting, disastrous in the firmer ones. Fuel economy hovered in the mid-20s and crept into the early 30s on a light foot and tyre noise wasn’t too bad given the hey-look-at-me 21in 295 section rubber.

Boot space is limited by the sloping tailgate to the extent that it’s not a 2x large hound machine and I thought the leather coverings on the front seats were especially good quality, but the exposed plastic sections of the dashboard were unacceptable on a machine worth, as tested, £67,000.

You could easily make a case for the Macan Turbo instead of an RS4, or a C63, or any other relatively small performance machine if you had scant need for space, but I would rather not. If I were to be lobotomised and wake-up with a new set of rather uncouth priorities then the Macan would be the only car in its class I would chose. It is very, very talented.

But I remain mostly in charge of my faculties and prefer proper estate cars, and I always will.

The first time I rode in an American car I didn't know it was an American car, but I did know it seemed very different to my daddy's car. And my mummy's car. It was huge, and it sounded angry, and it didn't have a gearlever on the floor – in fact the gearlever didn't seem to be used much at all – and it felt kind of wobbly. From the great squeaky, bouncy rear bench seat, I formed the impression that we weren't quite connected to the road surface, but that my legs were stuck to the vinyl seat covering. 2

The generic disposition for us Yoooropeans towards American cars is most often painted as one of gentle, patronizing mockery. And I suppose it's true that the lump of asthmatic mid-70s junk I was rolling in that day sometime in 1983, was quite a long way behind a Mercedes or BMW from the same period, but to me it carried with it the fascination of the new; the entirely foreign. And I don't think that fascination has ever subsided in me.

Deep down, I think I really like American cars, and I'm not saying that because I want to curry favor on an American website, I just quite like the way you people do things. I like the simplicity and the honesty.

Earlier this year I had a Camaro Z/28 for the day. Not your ordinary blue-collar American machine, but certainly a car whose roots lurk in the affordable category. I cannot tell you how enjoyable it was – a vast lump of metal which some lunatic had decided to turn into a track car, an on-paper eventuality about as sensible as fashioning a ballerina from a football player.

The methodology seems to have been so hilariously simple – the planning meeting must have lasted all of ten minutes. "Throw a massive engine at it, new diff, some suspension, make it ****ing fast and keep putting wider front rubber on it until it stops understeering: yeeeee-haaa!!"You have to allow me just one slice of rank jingoism in here.456

As a rule of thumb, in modern automobiles simplicity breeds character, complication often forces a reaction couched in respect – this means, if it doesn't stretch the anthropomorphic link too far, that the majority of American cars have a more light-hearted personality. They have a more obvious character: Mustang, Challenger, Suburban - they all benefit from a more direct emotional projection than European equivalents.

And it also means that when you do bad cars they are spectacularly amusing. I don't think that any European car company could have produced the Aztec, it's just too perfectly bad – actually, maybe Fiat in the early 2000s might just have been capable of such ****ness, but only at a stretch.

And that whole period in the '70s and '80s when you were forced to make 7 litre V8s produce 200hp – it's hard to imagine that happening anywhere else on the planet.10111213

The enduring fascination with American cars, proper Americana - notwithstanding the death of the Crown Vic and so many other US staples - is that I don't understand how the consumers of two such similar continents on either side of the Atlantic have ended up being offered cars with such different dynamic priorities. Yes, generally speaking you have a reduced need to tackle winding bumpy roads, so softer and faster in a straight line is a sensible move. 14

And of course the cost of fuel forced us to embrace smaller, more efficient solutions, but I still find it both strange and fascinating that the DNA splice in the '60s, '70s and '80s was so profound, and only now is the globalization of the car industry making us all share more similar vehicle designs. Hell, you're even going to get the new Focus RS.

Still, within those weird parallel realities either side of the pond some truly curious traits have emerged – the most amusing of which for me is that the land which embraced the automatic transmission, and which is seen by Europeans as being the land of elbow-on-the-window-frame, two-pedal driving has in certain cases become the only market certain makes will provide certain cars with a stick and three-pedals. I know you all want the fast Audi station wagons we have over here, but I'm massively jealous of the three-pedal F10 M M5 you get to buy over there.

And to further bust-apart the generic assumptions, over here in the UK a Crown Vic fitted with a massive turbo-diesel motor would be ideal. Massive, strong chassis, squidgy sidewalls and loads of space. Oh the irony.

Altering your frame of reference is the most rewarding part of a Limey understanding US metal. I've spent plenty of time on your shores in the past two years and have agonized at length over what I would own were I to live there, and I now know my two-car garage would be a Z28 and a twin-cab Ford Raptor. Two of the most American machines imaginable. I have never driven a Raptor, but I don't need to do so to confirm how much I'd want one. I picture myself heading off into the desert with a dirt bike on the back. 1617

That is my current viewpoint. I think the US car industry is replete with fun and dynamism and, at the enthusiast level, making cars people desperately want to own. But it wasn't always that way.

My second exposure to an American car was in 1986. My father had asked the rental company for something "bit like my 323i". He was an old-school Brit my father, and unlike his youngest offspring never tempted to make dramatic attention-seeking outbursts, but after a few hours lolloping along in the Buick we'd been handed he turned to my mother and casually observed "This is the most unpleasant car I have ever driven."18192021

Hell, your car industry has come a long way since then.

The world's fastest pick-up? Nearly 600hp and a flat-bed out back. This must be the greatest Aussie car ever.

Chris Harris is an automotive enthusiast. He "writes and does low-rent videos about cars" that are available on YouTube.

"You've just hit another car. Stop talking – I have no interest in your home life. Concentrate on driving. I just want to live." And so began another ride with one of the UK's crack motoring journalists.

From the moment I passed my driving test I had always hated sitting in the front seat without use of a steering wheel, but working as a junior ashtray for a car magazine many years ago quickly turned that hatred into a pathological fear. I have become a truly terrible passenger.12

And this is not borne of some misplaced sense of my own superiority behind the wheel. I have no doubt a roadcraft expert would pull my driving to pieces and proclaim me to be a complete ****, but I'd like to think that on a basic level I at least take enough pride in what I'm doing to at have a vague clue about it.

This brings me neatly to the first point – one which exists outside of my professional life – riding with people who neither care about cars or driving. These tend to be some of the most terrifying experiences. The core problem with being forced to travel like this, and it is always under duress because people like you and me always drive unless thwarted by social or legal limitations, is that you realise that most people take no pride in their driving and have no interest whatsoever in what is happening around them.3

The great thing about you peering in your rear-view mirror to see if those are the wider front fenders of a 500E W124 Mercedes following is that in doing so you are displaying an interest in the surrounding environment and are therefore able to read the traffic around you. It allows you to interpret the language of a car much earlier than the layperson. It means you will avoid other road cretins before they do.

More often than not the fear in this case lies in the lack of skill, the clumsy inputs, the fascinating array of seating positions and steering methods. If you can't reach the wheel with both hands, when the time comes to avoid the shunt, you won't avoid the shunt. And why must you apply extra braking just as the car is about to reach a stop and force our heads to do the nodding-dog?

Misplaced confidence is dangerous in any walk of life, but in the motor car, in the context of a press launch full of people desperate to prove something, it is often terrifying. I rarely sit next to anyone these days, and on the few occasions I have to the list of trusted chauffeurs is short. For a profession that contains many thousand people who probably think they're a bit handy behind the wheel, the general standard of driving is best described as '****ing catastrophic'.

And the modern motor car is both very fast and very good at stopping itself without crashing, further adding to the completely misplaced assumption by many of these lunatics that they can really drive. I remember thinking, as I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable crunch and shrieking pain to envelop my body that the only possible reasons the bloke driving me on a Porsche 911 launch hadn't already thrown us off the road were luck and some genius engineer from the wider Stuttgart area.

And the driver was a pretty well-known journalist. I'd never sit next to him on a bus again, let alone a 180mph car. Of course the awkward thing is, I actually like him and will happily share a beer with him.

My brain reverts to a kind of ECU limp-home mode in these situations. I sit motionless, I try to brace myself against the door and the footwell and I keep telling myself over-and-over "It's going to be okay" – a bleating, pleading wail of helplessness. Because being a bad passenger is of course all about being a control-freak denied control.5

I certainly couldn't have handled sitting next to the late, great LJK Setright. His driving on press drive events is the stuff of legend – careering about the place at vast speed, pulling on a cheroot and opining on the relative excellence of anything Honda. Mates who worked with him said they'd hide in the toilet when the driving pairs were being sorted, to avoid the certain terror the remainder of the day would bring if paired with him. He was arguably the greatest motoring writer of us all, but those who rode with him say they often entered the car agnostic and exited hours later having found something spiritual.

I used to deploy similar bathroom tactics a few years back and then after one especially terrifying ride in a Carrera GT (they're not supposed to do 120mph through villages) I asked for a list of attendees for an upcoming event and emailed the only sane human I could identify and asked if he'd share with me. He said yes. The first stop-over on the driving route was thirty miles up the side of a hill. Of the eight cars that left the hotel, two arrived damaged, one didn't arrive at all.6

The deliberately lively passenger ride with the professional hand doesn't appeal to me that much either. In the name of art I've sat next to some of the very best drivers on the planet and witnessed skills you wouldn't think possible. On some Porsche launch years ago Walter Rohrl was careering up and down a closed Spanish road giving rides – and being Walter and therefore incapable of doing anything at less than 110% commitment - the speeds were difficult to comprehend. It was only a five minute blat, but after about thirty seconds I just looked at the floor and sweated. 7

There is plenty of evidence of my passenger ride face on video: the grimace of terror. Two are standouts: the hour I spent with Francois Delecour in a 997 GT3 RS was absurd in every way. And riding with Paulo Andreucci in a Lancia 037 left me unable to speak for quite a while afterwards. Was either pleasurable? Not really – they created memorable content, but pushed me well beyond my fear threshold.8

It's a pathetic display of hypocrisy really, I've given thousands of passenger rides under the same circumstances and no doubt scared the **** out of many people, but that's different you see. I'm in control, so everything will be fine. Unless I crash, which of course occasionally I do.

Typical male self-unawareness on the subject of one's own driving means that many colleagues probably still run to the gents at the prospect of sitting next to me, but I suspect that has more to do with my personality than the way I conduct myself on the road.

As you can imagine, this means I have fairly strident views on autonomous cars. Humans are bad enough, but the thought of sitting in the back of something pre-programmed by a human lunatic, with the added potential ****wittery of an electronic brain is enough for me to forgive some of my colleagues' shortcomings.

And we really had just hit another car. The speed was low, but the crunch was very real and instead of stopping, the bloke kept talking about is bloody girlfriend.

I couldn't afford a new FF and I couldn't afford a used FF, but I borrowed far too much money and bought the latter anyway. What a brilliant car.