I am from time to time asked to name the maddest thing I’ve done while plying this trade. And it’s a difficult question to answer because the simple truth is doing mad things in cars makes good copy, so anyone who professes to be half decent at this racket tends to spend quite a lot of time doing unusual things and not thinking too much about it.
In my time I have saluted a camera while standing upright out of the side window of a Mini while it was balanced on two wheels at 45 degrees. I’ve driven a turbo-era Formula 1 car, and done over 2300 miles in 24 hours on public roads in a 1.6-litre Ford Mondeo. I have broken a Guinness World Record I alone had created and, quite recently, gone to the pub in an Alfa once driven by Nuvolari on the Mille Miglia. There’s plenty more.
But actually, not much of it is genuinely dangerous if you have any survival instinct and some awareness of your own limitations, and I have plenty of both. But just occasionally you do find yourself in a situation thinking, ‘I am sure we’re going to get out of this, it’s just that right now I can’t quite see how.’
I remember a Land Rover trip in Morocco where we drove through the desert to the coast, the plan being then to escape up the beach back to civilisation. Except we’d been delayed because I’d crashed a car (another story for another time) and when we crested the final dune and at last glimpsed the Atlantic, it was hard not to notice that the tide had come in.
