Almost Great: Renault 16

100 mph. Doing the ton. Ton-up. Still has a slightly naughty, forbidden-fruit ring to it, does it not?

I distinctly remember the first time I experienced the thrill of seeing the needle of a speedometer creep past that increment with the magic three digits. I was not driving – I was only about eight, I reckon. My Dad was at the wheel, on one of our annual summer holiday trips to the UK. Like everyone else in Ireland, I had an auntie in London, and almost every year my Mum and Dad would load their five kids into whatever big old saloon car my Dad had (we are well before the days of MPVs and their ilk here), take the ferry from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, then drive down the M4 to spend a week or two with my aunt and our cousins.

It was a cheap way to take a literal handful of kids on holidays, I suppose. So, once a year, we got to drive on this mythical thing called a ‘motorway’. Believe it or not, these three-lane, well-lit, well-surfaced roads with their incredibly glamorous Little Chefs were like something out of another planet to kids born in Cork, where the good roads were the ones that did not have too much grass growing up the middle.