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I never saw Jeremy so happy to see me. Giddy as a schoolboy, with his overalls around his waist like a pro, he declared we were evenly matched. As his driver coach it was my duty to point out that the BMW could lap several seconds faster, that I’d simply caught terrible traffic.

‘So did I. Caught traffic at Priory on my best lap,’ he countered gleefully.

Behind the safety of my visor, I stuck my tongue out at him. ‘OK,’ I laughed. ‘Let’s see how we get on tonight.’

Night practice was another formal requirement for all drivers wishing to participate in a twenty-four-hour event. When the sun went down on the course, you lost all familiar visual references. No trees, no grass banks, no spectators, no sky. No track either; only the narrow yellow window twenty metres ahead provided by a set of notoriously unreliable headlights. One smash over a kerb, a bump with another racer or a flying stone could easily put an eye out, and then you played a high-speed memory game. Stir in a bunch of amateur drivers with a gutful of fear, sprinkle with gravel in the braking areas from their regular mishaps and add salt and lemon to your eyeballs for the perfect recipe du nuit.

We all got changed in a spare blue-carpeted room inside the race control building. If only the ladies could have tuned into my view of the boys squeezing into their tight-fitting Nomex underwear. It made the Top Gun shower scene look like a cold bath.

May was hopping around on one leg, trying not to fall over; Jeremy’s suit was four inches too short, and Hammo was turning blonder by the second.

Hammond was rightly concerned that he barely knew the track. ‘I can’t even remember which one is Hangar straight. I go past the pits, then it’s just … a blur …’

I handed him a circuit map with the gears, so he could memorise them and talk each lap through as he went.

‘Right. What do I do if someone wants to get past, move over?’

‘No. Hold your line and sod everyone else. They will find a way around you. Oh, and you must ditch your surfing necklace, and none of you should chew gum out there.’

‘All right, Daaad.’

Choking on gum was an unlikely cause of death, but mentioning it put them in the right frame of mind. Racing was real.

The night session was a wake-up call for them. Having fuelled their bodies with Walkers crisps and Diet Coke, they took turns to excavate Silverstone’s gravel traps.

Jeremy’s grin became a more poker-faced affair as he climbed into the BM and ran off a few night laps. I then slipped on my helmet, black visor and all, and, much to Jezza’s amazement, knocked three seconds off our time. We were now 42nd on the grid.

Race day brought the ultimate test of endurance and mind discipline: the driver’s briefing. The only useful information I ever received in one of these marathons was in Australia for the great race at Bathurst, where they explained the warning flags for the 180mph straight: ‘A single waved yellow flag means there is a kangaroo near the track. Two waved yellows means he’s on the track.’

Silverstone’s Clerk of the Course read the Motor Sports Association Book of Psalms to the 200 assembled drivers. Fortunately The Stig was able to sleep through the dull moments with no one the wiser. Whilst the cameras rolled on the presenters sitting next to me, I stole forty winks.

Steve’s mechanics had to whip out the engine after it had crapped itself when they warmed it up that morning. The clock was ticking. If we were too late joining, we would be barred from competing at all.

Contrived TV fakery? No, it was genuine twenty-four-carat chaos.

The boys slammed home a new unit in record time. A cloud of black diesel smoke belched from the exhaust; the beast was alive and kicking. With only twenty seconds to spare, I booted it out of the garage to start the race from the pit lane exit, dead last but one.

I managed to overtake a few people but it was hardly the stuff of Stig legend, until fate stepped in. The heavens opened. Some drivers came in for wet tyres and I smoked them by