Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

And guess what. He was driving a 1.25-litre Ford Fiesta. The old model with the Yamaha engine and the silly oval grille. That was not an inspiring car when it was new, and now, more than fifteen years later, I bet it’s even worse. But I can report that with an Italian at the wheel it is still faster than a hot Jag.

And there’s more. It is a fact that on a twisting mountain road a car is always going to be faster than even the fastest superbike. A bike simply doesn’t have enough grip to corner anywhere near as quickly as a car… unless there’s an Italian on board, in which case it somehow has all the grip in the world.

I love driving in Italy, I truly do, because there the car has nothing to do with environmentalism or politics. And to describe it as a means of transport is the same as describing a fresh sardine that’s been grilled in a bit of butter and flour as a means of staying alive. To an Italian the car is an expression of your soul, your zest for life. Speed is not dangerous. It’s necessary.

You may know the coastal motorway that heads from France towards Genoa. For an hour or so you are either in a tunnel or on a viaduct or going round a hairpin bend with a 1,000-foot drop on either side. If this were anywhere else in the world there would be a 30-mph speed limit, enforced by helicopter gunships. But it’s Italy so it has the same 130-kph (81-mph) limit as all the other motorways.

And that, I presume, is a 130-kph minimum, because everyone – mums, nuns and the conker-brown, walnut-faced peasantry in their ancient Fiats – was doing more like 150 kph. Round blind bends where you could not possibly see if the road ahead was blocked. It was madness, and I loved it.

Twice, over the years, I have been pulled over by the Italian police while driving a Lamborghini. And on both occasions I was told very sternly that I wasn’t driving fast enough. You have to love that. And on my most recent trip I was getting much the same sort of treatment from everyone. I really did get the distinct impression that many people were extremely annoyed with the lumpen, badly dressed Englishman in his enormous, slow-moving Jaguar.

I, meanwhile, was having a ball, because the F-type is one of those cars, and Italy is one of those places, where you stomp about all morning thinking up excuses to go for a drive.

It’s actually quite a childish car. It makes a range of extremely childish noises, especially if you engage the Sports Exhaust setting, which makes the back end snort like a hippo when you change up, and bang and crackle when you lift off. I did this a lot in the tunnels.

The styling is quite childish as well. It’s pretty in the same way as a child’s fridge-door drawing of a princess is pretty. It’s simple and clean, and I stand by my earlier claim that it is one of the best-looking cars yet made. Precisely because it isn’t trying to be all grown-up and German.

But there are a lot of things that are not childish at all. The gearbox stands out. There are flappy paddles behind the wheel, but it isn’t a boy-racer double-clutch affair that works well on a racetrack but falls to pieces in town. It’s a conventional eight-speed automatic and it’s a delight.

The Sunday-evening crawl back into London is enough to make most sentient beings wonder if they should pull onto the hard shoulder and shoot themselves in the head. The weekend is over. There is nothing but drudgery ahead. The kids are tired and crotchety. And the traffic is dreadful.

It was always thus. But now, on the M1, the government has found a way to make everything much, much worse. Because every few hundred yards there is an overhead gantry that informs motorists the speed limit has been lowered to, say, 50 mph. And that speed cameras are on hand to catch those who think that’s stupid. This means that everyone drops down to the new limit. And there’s a word for this: communism.

I don’t doubt for a moment that many people with interesting hair and degrees in advanced mathematics have spent several weeks working with the principle of flow dynamics and have decided that when x number of cars are using the motorway, pi equals MC 2and that the speed limit should be lowered to ensure a smooth passage for everyone. Certainly we know their arguments took in the former transport secretary, John Prescott, who announced that the slower you go, the faster you’ll get there.

Unfortunately, human beings are not molecules. We cannot be likened to water flowing down a hosepipe, because we’re all different. Some people are pushy and dynamic. Some are mice. It is a fact that if you gave everyone in the country £100 today, tomorrow some people would have £1,000 and some would have nothing. And that’s what the mathematicians don’t seem to understand.

When Russia experimented with the idea of making everyone the same, it wasn’t long before it needed a secret police force to keep the system going. Gatso. KGB. Same thing, really.

I came down the M1 last Sunday evening, and I think I’m right in saying that I have never been in a situation on any road anywhere in the world that was quite so dangerous. Because all of a sudden the pushy, dynamic people were stuck, and the car in front could neither speed up, because it was being driven by a mouse, nor pull over, because everyone was doing 50, so all three lanes were clogged.

This sort of thing makes the alpha male mad, so he starts to tailgate and undertake, using gaps that aren’t really there. And that causes the mice to panic-brake. Then you’re in a world of squealing tyres and tortured metal, and pretty soon you have the headline: ‘Dozens die in juggernaut dance of death’.

I suppose I should explain that by far the worst offender that night was me. This is because I was in a rage at the politicians who allowed this system to be implemented. I was in a rage at the lightly dented Ford Galaxy in front that would not pull over, even when its driver had the chance. I was in a rage at the mathematicians who were responsible for the 50-mph limit. But most of all I was in a rage because I was in an Audi. A big, twin-turbo RS 6 that was the colour of a dog’s lipstick.

We all know that Audi drivers are by far the most aggressive you encounter, and I’ve often wondered which comes first: the temper or the car.

Well, now I have the answer. Most of the time I’m pretty calm behind the wheel. I occasionally mutter the odd profanity at another motorist’s idiocy, but I don’t tailgate, I don’t shake my fist and I don’t arrive at my destination with a face the colour of a plum and armpits like Lake Superior. And yet in that Audi I did all those things. I think the company put testosterone in the air-conditioning system.

Or maybe it’s the small-man syndrome at work. We all know that people who can’t reach things on high shelves (no names here, Richard) have a bad temper because they are not as tall as all their friends. Well, could it be that Audi drivers are in a permanent state of fury because they do not have a BMW or a Mercedes?

Either way, I was a menace that night, getting far too close to the car in front in a stupid and dangerous attempt to scare the f****** b****** into getting out of my f****** way.

And while engaging in this idiotic pursuit I noticed something strange. The Audi was fitted with a radar in its nose that warned you when you were travelling too close to the car in front. This is available in many cars these days, and normally it errs on the side of caution. Not in the Audi, it doesn’t. It issues a red alert only when you are precisely 1 inch from the car ahead. And even in my deranged state I thought that was a bit silly.