One flight only

It happened in 2005 and was all the fault of a bloke called Graeme Fudge. Graeme was then as he remains today in charge of Mazda’s press relations in the UK. And like most good PR chiefs, he was always on the look-out for ways of spicing up his press events.

But instead of flying us to some sun-soaked location far, far away or anything conventional like that, he decided it would be fun if, for once, we could do the flying.

Which was interesting. A car launch that requires you to spend at least some of your time not driving the car, but flying an entirely unrelated aircraft seemed an imaginatively alternate way of doing things. And so it would have been had we just shown up at a local airfield and had a 40 minute lesson in a Piper Cherokee. But while turning up at an airfield was indeed on the itinerary, Graeme had a rather more ambitious plan for the rest of it.