Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

It was a T-registered 528i Touring that had covered 150,000 miles, and there were a number of features that would cause a wary buyer to shy away. It had a manual gearbox, suggesting the original owner had been enthusiastic. It had mismatched tyres, indicating it had been run on a shoestring. And it had a towbar, implying it had been used to haul heavy stuff. It was, in other words, one breath away from the skip. And that’s why we were able to buy it for just shy of £1,500.

Yes, the throttle was calibrated all wrong and, yes, the electronic boot lid was broken, but mechanically it was in fine fettle. The gearbox was sweet, the engine was strong and even the air-conditioning still worked. And so, as I cruised across Uganda on smooth, Chinese-built roads, I found myself thinking: why would you not want this car?

Of course, it came from a time before satellite navigation, but that could be sorted with a TomTom. And, yes, it wasn’t equipped with other modern features such as parking sensors, but I solved that when manoeuvring by simply looking out of the windows.

Anyone who saw the show will have noticed that some of its underfloor wiring became damaged. That’s true. It did. But only because in one edited-out moment I decided to see if doughnuts went in different directions on either side of the equator. And hit a rock. Not the car’s fault. Mine. And it was the same story with the rear window.

When the tarmac ended and the road became a quagmire, logic dictated that I should simply give up. BMWs do not have the best reputation for longevity and I was asking it to climb a track that, half the time, was flummoxing the crew’s Toyota Land Cruisers. But even though that car had been owned by a penniless enthusiast with a trailer, nothing broke. Nothing.

It didn’t even suffer unduly when the going became extremely rough. Yes, two of the airbags deployed over one nasty jolt, but unlike the estate cars chosen by my colleagues – a Volvo 850 R and a Subaru Impreza WRX – it arrived at the finish line with all its wheels still attached.

For nearly two weeks it had been driven on washboard gravel, through mud and, some of the time, on no kind of track at all. And yet I could quite happily have driven it back to England afterwards. And, despite all the hardships and all the torture, it would have made it.

So bear that in mind if you are looking at your own car now. You may think it’s on its last legs, but I’d like to take a bet that it isn’t.

Jonathon Porritt, George Monbiot, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth will tell you that to save the planet you must dispose of your old car and use the bus or a bicycle instead.

But I’ve got a better idea. If you really want to save the planet, and a fortune too, do not buy a new car. Follow the teachings of Top Gear and simply carry on using the one you’ve got now.

Annoyingly, though, the start of the action was delayed because of rain. And then it was delayed some more, and then a lot more. And then it was abandoned. Various serious-faced men in short-sleeved shirts came on the television to explain that there was standing water on the track, and on Twitter all sorts of people were sympathizing with the decision because it’s dangerous to drive a car into a puddle at 160 mph. They’re right. It is.

But here’s the point that everyone missed. The drivers would not be forced to drive into a puddle at 160 mph. Some would, and of those, a few would spin and crash in an exciting explosion of noise and carbon fibre. Others would choose to slow down. So the puddles would, in fact, be a test of the driver’s bravery. And isn’t that why we watch?

Well, it was in the olden days, when the men who took part wanted to win at all costs because then they’d get more sex. They’d bash wheels and do four-wheel drifts, and as often as not they were still nursing a hangover from the night before. It was all very excellent.

Now, though, the sport is run by people who don’t really think it’s a sport at all. They think it’s a science. And they don’t want to run their aerodynamically honed, electronically measured instruments through a puddle any more than the boffins at Cern would want to study their Higgs boson in a children’s ball pool.

For these people the cars are not cars at all. They are carefully considered probes into the world of advanced maths and the laws of physics. And the drivers? Robots, really, programmed to do as they’re told. Sky Sports interviewed the five rookies who this year have joined what’s laughably called ‘the circus’. And they were like FIA puppets, saying exactly what they’d been programmed to say by someone in a branded shirt. Dead people would be more interesting.

I like to think that if I’d been one of them, sitting in my pit in Australia, and I’d been told that someone in the health-and-safety vehicle had abandoned the qualifying session, I’d have fired up my car and driven round the track in a roar of barely contained power-sliding fury to show that they were talking nonsense.

Occasionally you hear about a driver insisting a race should be stopped because of bad weather – Alain Prost in Monaco and Niki Lauda in Japan – but for the most part, and in private, they’d be happy to race even if it was snowing. Quite right too. It’s the men in the monogrammed headphones. The geeks with the laptops. And the finger-wagging stewards. They’re the killjoys who are turning F1 into a dreary blend of computer science, corporate public relations and cricket.

When we watch an F1 event, we crave the merest hint of humanity or passion or emotion. But instead it’s Martin Whitmarsh’s hair and those shudderingly awful branded shirts and all the lorries parked exactly in line. It’s a televised obsessive-compulsive disorder.

I wish I ran a team. I’d turn up late and a bit drunk. I’d park my lorry at an angle and send out a car with a giant cock and balls painted on the side. I’d goose the drivers’ girlfriends, over the radio, while they were racing, and if I won, I’d run up and down the pit lane making the loser sign at Christian Horner.

But that’s the trouble. I wouldn’t win. My cars would break down and explode and come last. And I’d be a laughing stock. And that, of course, brings me to the Toyota Corolla.

This has more in common with an F1 racer than any other car on the market because it too was built without emotion or passion. It was built only to be logical and ordered, and as a result it has been humongously successful.

Ford shifted more than 15 million Model Ts. Volkswagen smashed that record with its original Beetle, which sold more than 21 million. But those are Zager & Evans compared with Toyota, which, to date, has sold about 40 million Corollas. This means there are more of them in the world than there are Canadians.

Except, of course, there aren’t. Toyota makes Corollas that don’t last for ever. After a period of time – let’s say about eight years – they are likely to implode and their owners will have to buy a replacement.

I suppose I should point out that in Britain today the Corolla is actually sold as the Auris. No idea why. Seems to me like Apple changing its name to Pazizzle. But I was interested to find out what it might be like driving around in a car that was deliberately designed to be as uninteresting as possible.

It’s so uninteresting that on the whole of the worldwide web there is not a single review of this car. Not one. You can read about Koenigseggs and Gilbern Invaders and the Peel P50. But not a single journalist has thought, Hmmm. I wonder what the world’s bestselling car is like.