Stunt double

I’ve spent half an hour on Rightmove and found two quite different ways to blow £2.9m on property. The first is a very grand five-bedroom detached house just outside Bristol. It comes with a couple of acres and an enormous driveway, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t have the drivetrain from an E46 BMW M3.

Or you could have a two-bedroom first-floor flat in London’s Knightsbridge. It’s beautifully decorated and very convenient for Harrods, but the listing makes no mention of hydraulic handbrakes or Öhlins rallycross dampers, which seems a shame. It all means that if I had the better part of £3m burning a hole in my Hermès manbag, I wouldn’t buy a house or a flat at all. I’d buy a stunt car – without question the most thrilling kind of car there is.

At a Christie’s auction in London this week a replica Aston Martin DB5 sold for £2,922,000, approximately five times what the real thing would be expected to fetch. This was a charity auction (in support of The Prince’s Trust and The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund), which skews things somewhat because charity lots often go for much more than their true market value. But three-mill for a replica Aston? I promise it’s worth every penny.