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‘Triple … layer …’ Grant dutifully took notes. That was the last I heard of it until I was dispatched to a goose-infested farmyard the day before the shoot, to inspect the car and meet Hammond. I’m cool with ducks, but not geese. I hate geese. They’re evil.

Colin Fallows had built Vampire and set the British land speed record. He emerged from a metal cargo container wearing a boiler suit and thick round glasses. He was very amenable, more of a Penfold character than a speed freak. We had tea.

Colin had no idea who I was, and I used that to my advantage to quiz him about the project. I needed to know that he wasn’t some bipolar lunatic looking to win a Darwin Award.

Legend had it that a dude once drove into the Arizona desert in an old Chevy Impala. Nothing unusual there, except that he’d strapped a solid fuel rocket with comparable thrust to an F-16 fighter plane to the roof. Forensic evidence subsequently revealed that Impala man made it up to 50mph using conventional means before he lit the candle. The Chevy then accelerated past 250.

He realised almost immediately that this was not good, slammed the brakes, melting them instantly and blowing the tyres before the car became airborne. The incinerated remains of car and driver were found three miles away, three feet deep in the side of a cliff, 125 feet from the ground. That was the funny thing about solid fuel rockets. Once you pressed go, you kept going until they ran out of fuel.

Vampire on afterburner would behave much the same, except that you could shut off the thrust controls, killing the propulsion and popping the parachute air brake. Assuming the parachute opened, you slowed down.

Colin swung open the corrugated steel doors to reveal his modest workshop. Vampire was smaller than I imagined but still 30 feet long.

I gazed into the gaping chasm of the metal turbine. It had more steel veins, couplings and rivets than Michael McIntyre’s Man Drawer. It looked like a NASA experiment crossed with something out of Thunder-birds. I pelted Colin with questions about every aspect of the build and preparation. What kept the car on the ground rather than turning it into a missile? What did he know about jet engines? How was it fitted to the car, where was the fuel, would it blow up and kill everyone? He answered each question in detail, and with extreme patience.

He’d spent twenty years as an engineer in the Royal Air force – twelve of them on the Rolls-Royce powerplant that would be sending Richard and me down the road at 300mph.

The engine installation was angled so that the faster it went, the more it pressed the middle of the chassis into the road. Colin picked the engine up ‘cheap’ when it was retired from the RAF, describing it as ‘thirty years young’. The propulsion system was fuelled by heating oil, of all things.

The tubular frame chassis completely encased the cockpit and was similar to NASCAR racers I had driven. Simple technology – wheels, springs, dampers and metal suspension attached to a metal frame that supported the whopping engine.

No stone was left unturned. What would stop the engine flying out of the frame? Had the suspension ever broken? What problems had he encountered thus far?

Colin admitted that Vampire did have a tendency to attract wildlife, having recently spilt the blood of an eight-pound rabbit. It also emerged that there had been a problem with the rear suspension in the past. A joint had shown signs of damage and might have caused an incident involving Vampire’s sister vehicle, Hellbender.

I scribbled away furiously. ‘But no one was hurt?’

‘Well, yes …’

Mark Woodley had been at the helm of Hellbender when it veered off course during a high-speed run at Santa Pod. It struck the barriers, killing him instantly.

Colin showed me the modifications to the suspension which seemed to have fixed the problem. I was no engineer, but the joints looked thick and solid.

Elvington was a big open airfield without walls, so at least there was less to hit if it did break. The downside there was the curvature of the runway. The driver