Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

I went out for dinner at a restaurant called Prime One Twelve. As this is regarded as the hottest place in town, getting in wasn’t easy. ‘Do you have a reservation?’ said the impossibly beautiful, stick-thin girl at the reception desk. Having established that I didn’t, she looked me up and down, saw that I was fat and that my teeth were the colour of a pub ceiling and decided that, contrary to all the evidence, the place was full.

Well, of course it wasn’t, so a few minutes later the waiter was running me through the menu. It was all about the size of the cut and the amount you got on the plate. The tomatoes were bigger than Richard Hammond’s head. My side order of spinach was delivered in a bathtub. And the steak? Holy mother of God. It was as though everything had been sourced in one of those Hollywood B-movie valleys where the ants are the size of men and the grapefruit are bigger than airliners.

However, I didn’t really notice the dead brontosaurus on my plate because I was way too captivated by the spectacle that was unfolding outside.

Prime One Twelve attracts the crème de la crème of show-offs. The cars in which they were arriving were mad. Jacked-up Camaro convertibles with spinners. Bentleys on 24-inch rims. One man arrived in a neon insect. Another in a lowered Rolls-Royce. I can only begin to imagine how terrible these cars must have been to drive – cars always are when you fit wheels that could roll a cricket pitch – but that doesn’t matter. In Miami cars are not for driving. They are for arriving.

I’m not making this next bit up. Couples were appearing in the lobby of the apartment block across the street from the restaurant. They would then wait five or 10 minutes for the porter to fetch their car from the underground car park. And then they’d drive it 50 yards to the valet at the restaurant.

So who cares that the ride of the Roller is ruined? Who cares that you need a step ladder to get out of the Camaro? And who cares that your Porsche’s modified exhaust system could make you deaf after five miles? You will never go that far.

Elsewhere in the world people buy cars for all sorts of reasons. Value. Economy. Speed. Space. Comfort. But in Miami people buy, or rent, cars for showing off; for demonstrating that back home in Philadelphia their shower curtain ring factory is doing pretty well.

The new Lamborghini Aventador would fit into the mix jolly well. Even before you add silly wheels and a custom paint job it’s £250,000, and people will certainly see it coming. It’s 2 inches wider than a Range Rover – or about the same width as a London bus. Plus it has a 6.5-litre V12. I doubt we will ever see a new engine such as this again. Today, thanks to Euro emissions regulations, turbocharging is the only realistic answer.

It’s a shame, because the immediacy of the thrust is intoxicating. The acceleration is as vivid as Miami’s sea front, and the top speed is about 212 mph greater than it would ever go there.

But what about here? In the civilized world of old money and taste?

Lamborghini is keen to stress that the engine is its first all-new V12 since that of the Miura, that the four-wheel-drive system is as advanced as technology allows, that it has carbon ceramic brakes and that Formula One-style pushrod suspension is also part of the recipe. Now the only reason you would fit this is to reduce unsprung weight. But I can’t see how that matters in a car that weighs about the same as the Empire State Building.

I suspect the real reason it’s fitted is so that owners can feel that behind the vastness and underneath the flamboyant, mad, brilliant show-off styling, there’s some Ferrari-style cred.

Honestly? There isn’t. This is a brute of a car. You don’t drive it. You wrestle with it. It’s more refined than Lambos of old and less inclined to want to kill you. But when you open the taps, you are no longer driving. You are hanging on.

I drove it very extensively across Italy, and although it’s quiet and surprisingly comfortable, and although it has an Audi sat nav and Audi controls, you are never allowed to forget that it’s a raging monster. And for that I absolutely loved it.

I loved the speed. I loved the styling – it’s probably the best-looking car ever made – and I loved the sheer stupidity and silliness of its dash and its face and its insane rear end.

I don’t want one. I’d rather have herpes. That said, I do want to live in a world where I can sit outside a restaurant in Miami and watch some poor girl trying to get out of the passenger seat without flashing her knickers.

It seems that a few years ago Prince Charles asked scientists to research the concept of alternative medicine to discover why acupuncture, holistic healing, leaves and sitting cross-legged on the floor can be used to cure hay fever, eczema and bowel disorders.

Well, a British science writer did just that and, after exhaustive research, he has published a book saying that alternative medicine mostly doesn’t work and that when it does, the results are ‘dismal’.

Naturally, you would assume that Prince Charles would read the carefully researched points and, with upturned palms, explain that, contrary to what he’s been saying for many years, the best cure for a headache is a couple of Nurofen, rather than a balm made from soil and bits of armpit hair.

However, he appears not to have done this. Despite all the scientific evidence, it seems he continues to believe in the power of humming and peace oils. We see this a lot. People use science when it agrees with their opinion but dismiss it as nonsense when it does not.

This is hardly surprising really since what we know as science fact today is almost always science fiction tomorrow. The earth was flat. And then it wasn’t. Matter cannot travel faster than light. And then it can. Well, maybe. Man is causing global warming… Watch this space.

I’m glad that there are scientists. I’m glad they go to work in their laboratories with their Bunsen burners and their tweezers. It’s important that mankind strives to understand where he came from and where he’s going. But scientists should not try to explain their findings to Prince Charles. Or me. Or you. Because we’re thick and we won’t understand what they are on about.

However, because we don’t know we are thick, we will listen to a bit of what they have to say, take away a nugget and, if we are a politician, or a prince, try to do something about it.

Not that long ago everyone was worried that particles and gases coming out of exhaust pipes were making people who lived near motorways very stupid. This was a big concern for the residents of Gravelly Hill, north of Birmingham. Ford’s scientists decided the answer was lean burn technology, engines that ran mostly on air, and their view was shared by Mrs Thatcher, then prime minister, who had a chemistry degree.

However, lean burn was a few years away from reality, and people who were thick demanded results immediately. So all car makers had to fit off-the-shelf catalytic converters instead.

Sadly, what catalytic converters do is turn all the gunk that was making people in Birmingham stupid into carbon dioxide, which science now says is turning polar bears into man-eating werewolves. So, to get round that, cars are now being fitted with electric power steering and flappy-paddle gearboxes – anything that cuts the amount of fuel used and therefore the amount of CO2 coming out of the tailpipe.

But it’s all hopeless because catalytic converters are made from platinum, which is fast running out. So then we will be back in 1985, in jerky cars with crappy steering, with people in Birmingham looking like jacket potatoes and Ford saying, ‘I told you so.’