Do you need a fast car in your sixties?

I have always considered what I do to be a young man’s game, inconvenient for me insofar as by the time you chance upon this column, you’ll be reading the words of a sexagenarian. Truly I am surprised I have lasted as long as I have, and while I’d like to put it down to a once-in-a-generation talent, the truth is I’m still here thanks not to my generation but the next one, which failed to turn up and sweep us away.

Distracted by too many other things and faced with the reality that cars in general, and driving in particular, are just not as much fun as they used to be, with certain notable exceptions those who would otherwise have written me into the history books simply decided to do something else instead. Which means that unless the editor has other ideas which are as yet strangers to me, in a few months’ time I’ll start my 30th year working for Motor Sport. And I cannot express how pleased and proud I am to be able to say it.

Even so, one day this business will have had enough of me and in my idler moments, I do wonder what I’ll end up driving when the time comes. Having spent half a lifetime being fed and largely ruined by a never-ending diet of other people’s cars to test, how will I cope when they’re finally taken away?

I always thought the answer was the best Porsche I could afford. Of course I did. But recently it’s a choice I have come to question, not because I have in any way fallen out of love with the world’s greatest sports car manufacturer, but because of the roads on which I’d use it.

I’ll share something with you: every time I have to test a fast car on public roads I now set an alarm clock. I get up, get out and get the job done before anyone else is awake because I know that if I wait until after breakfast, the roads will be so busy and me driving quickly so frowned upon that I’ll end up having a lot less fun and, more importantly, being far worse at my job. And I live not in the ‘burbs or Berkshire, but the comparatively dead quiet Lower Wye Valley. But I’m probably not going to be setting an alarm to go and drive a car I already know inside out, not least because for recreational purposes I’ll still have the slow and silly old cars already parked in my shed.

So I am starting to come around to the idea that what I need, in fact, is the complete opposite: a car I have no desire to drive fast at all. I have a plug-in hybrid Range Rover parked outside right now: it offers a beautiful ride, sumptuous interior, incredible music machine and less thrills behind the wheel than my ride-on mower. I just waft around trying to perfect not my line through a series of bends but the precise ratio of heating, ventilation and hot stone massage intensity gently manipulating my body. You’ll think I’ve got old but I haven’t: I love cars, love driving as much as ever and give me a racetrack and something fast and you’ll not see me for tyre smoke. I’ve just got real.

“I goggle at so many cars which once provided the wallpaper to our lives”

I was as delighted as ever to be asked to judge Hagerty’s Festival of the Unexceptional. I’m sure you all know what it is, but I still goggle at the sight of so many cars which once provided the wallpaper to our lives, yet which are now rarer than Ferrari 250 SWBs. Ignored when new, they draw crowds of thousands to Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire.

People come to laugh at the Marinas and Allegros they’ll find parked there, but I think also that they leave having been touched by something they didn’t expect. Just to see these cars after so long is to prick some emotion buried deep within the psyche, but to talk to those who own and love them as they were never loved when new? That’s the thing.

As a judge it’s what I spent all day doing, and found owners with as much passion for their cars as the average owner of a stable of multi-million-quid machinery. Possibly more. What I also found, which I’d not expected despite having been to the festival many times before, was a new constituency of young owners, mainly lads unable to afford or simply unwilling to buy something new, expensive and dull.

Take the winner, the Skoda Favorit Forum entered by 22-year-old Simon Packowski. The Forum was the base version of an already distinctly budget car, so instead of pasting a sheet in the window detailing all the equipment it possessed, he provided another, listing all it did not, including its radio, fag lighter, rear wash-wipe, seatbelt buzzer, sunroof and boot light. He bought it for £1400 just before it got crushed for nothing more than a blown head gasket, then drove it 1000 miles because it was missing its headrests and the only pair in Britain were in a breaker’s yard in Aberdeen. And he won not only first prize from the judges, but also the public who could vote for their favourites via a QR code next to each car.

This event has now gathered such a head of steam that people arrive from all over Europe to attend, including a pair of lunatics who this year drove their Talbot Solara from Poland to be there. But the most pleasing aspect of FOTU’s success is that people are also buying cheap old cars to have something to go there in, delaying indefinitely their appointment with the scrapheap in the sky.

You old stick in the mud
Pricey new Land Cruiser lacks luxury
I love a Land Cruiser. But I wonder if Toyota has gone too far. The four-cylinder diesel is an old-school rattler, the ride quality poor and at £77,845 it’s eye-wateringly expensive. I don’t mind that it handles like a barge in a breeze but even an Ineos Grenadier feels sophisticated next to it.
Verdict: Keep to UN peace-keeping duties.

Cut-price McLaren chaser
MG IM5 gives performance for under £50K
The new MG IM5 has 745bhp, a claimed range of 441 miles (so almost certainly 350 miles), a McLaren F1-equalling 0-62mph time of 3.2sec and, here’s the kicker, a list price of £48,495. I think it looks smart too. But the proper test will come on the road. The request is in, and I’ll let you know.

’Ring the changes
New Porsche 911 GT2 RS will be a track star
So it seems there will be a new Porsche 911 GT2 RS after all and I hear it will be in the mid-800bhp range… Who knows how close to that they’ll get in reality. But in any event and with an inevitable stack more downforce, the 6min 29.1sec Nürburgring production car lap record held by the Mercedes-AMG One looks under threat.