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The Ferrari was heading inexorably for the wall on the right, the same side as my seat. My mouth tightened and I made myself as small as possible, as if this would somehow prevent the sacrilege of smearing Ferrari red down the length of a grubby tyre wall. I pulled in my elbows, clenched my knees together and held my breath.

I caught the wall with the front right panel and rubbed it as far back as the rear wheel arch. In racing we call it a ‘sticker rub’ and it’s no big deal. Abusing a beautiful supercar, a Ferrari, was something else. But the lap wasn’t over yet.

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I jammed the car through the final two corners to clock a 1.22.9; a full second faster, but still short of the 360CS.

I prostrated myself before the Ferrari engineers and apologised profusely. Their young test driver was the first to greet me as I went to inspect the damage.

‘Stiiiga, donta worry, Stiiiga. You are a driver, you are pooshing. At Fiorano, we have many cars. We damage many cars; it’s OK.’

Top man.

Ferrari was no shop window, it was a stable of racers. Urban legend had it that if you returned a bag of wreckage bearing the prancing horse emblem to the factory gates at Maranello, red-suited worker bees would always gather to repair it. The spirit of competition was in their blood.

‘The car is fantastic, but it just won’t turn in like the 360. I don’t understand it.’

He scratched his chin in deep contemplation. ‘Before you hada Pirelli tyres, Stiiiga. That’s iit! Today you hava Bridgestone.’

Eureka. Pirelli tyres were two seconds a lap faster than Bridgestones back then.

I gave Wilman the good news. ‘We should do a feature on tyres, don’t you think? Look at the difference it makes …’

‘Not if you actually expect anyone to watch the programme,’ he said.

Chapter 24

Match of the Day

Going from a 200mph Ferrari one week to a diesel Golf the next was a major change of pace. Pushing small everyday motors to their limit felt cruel at first. Their front wheels begged for mercy and their underpowered engines strained through every gear with an asthmatic wheeze. But I got used to it. I took inspiration from another breed of racing driver. Men with no remorse or mechanical sympathy.

Touring car racing, I decided, was different from any other category. It permitted drivers to do to each other all the nasty things that were forbidden elsewhere. Touring cars were graced with minimal aerodynamic bodywork because they were loosely based on the small production road cars they resembled. As a result, they were employed more like a weapon than a surgical instrument.

If someone barged you out of the way to take the win, there was no headmaster to whinge to. You noted the name and number on the door and repaid the favour at the earliest opportunity. The drivers were … assertive.

‘Remember your idea about TG doing something with football?’ Wiseman said.

‘Absolutely. Which footballers are you talking to?’

‘Well, it’s not exactly what you suggested, but it does involve football… kind of. It should be really mega.’

Car football consisted of a giant ball, two teams of five cars liveried in red and blue and a bag of nuts behind the wheel, which included Matt Neal, Tim Harvey, Dan Eaves, Rob Huff, Tom Chilton, Russ Swift and me. Russ and I were the odd ones out, as pro drivers but not touring car racers. He looked docile enough, but was a legendary stunt driver who pulled twenty handbrake turns before breakfast and spun J turns through impossibly tight spaces for elevenses. I was keen to see his voodoo in action and take him on.

The venue needed to be big enough to host a bunch of speeding cars trying to outscore one another. We figured that if Bruntingthorpe airfield was long enough to land the Vulcan nuclear bomber, it would suffice.

James May captained one team and made his selections. The Stig couldn’t play in this game, he hates football, so I joined Hammond’s team as myself. Hammo and I were a little nervous about me being visible on TG again; we’d only just recorded another film together with a skateboarder against