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He remained as cool as a cucumber, arms folded and a serene smile on his face. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t. I fired the car across the bump at the tyre wall corner at 135mph and, when his panel judge composure didn’t flinch, I drove back to the pits to drop him off.

Wilman reappeared. ‘Could you just give Simon a go now?’

Nightmare. Had I known that he’d be driving, I’d never have shown him the machine’s full potential. He was too good a mimic.

I kept my belts loose so that I could reach the steering wheel from the passenger seat if I had to. Simon dumped the clutch, just like I’d taught him in the gutless Suzuki. The twin turbos went ‘whooooshhhhh’ and the car was tearing down the track at 100mph eight seconds later.

He started trying to copy the fast power slides I’d been doing. We were so close to losing it that I didn’t dare distract him by speaking. We approached the super-fast tyre wall corner. I told him to back off where I hadn’t.

Simon took an apocalyptic amount of speed in and I knew we were going off big time.

The car spun at 120mph and I leapt across to fling the steering hard over into opposite lock. That sent us down the tarmac, bought a little time and shed some speed.

I was keen to avoid the grass because the car might roll. Once we started going backwards I yanked the handbrake and hollered at him to stand on the anchors. Cowell hit the pins and grinned. I think it meant we were even.

We’d come to a rest on the grass after narrowly missing two landing lights that could have ripped the bloody doors off.

‘Now, really, what happened there?’ Simon cackled with laughter. ‘You went in too fast is what happened. Please, let’s go back in so I can collect my P45.’

We bumbled back on to the track and returned the car to its owner. Simon had really enjoyed himself, which meant the crew did too. I’d never seen someone with no experience adapt so quickly to a supercar and wring its neck.

Jim pulled in his footage and I went to the Outside Broadcast truck. Brian Klein, the Studio Director, was sitting in front of a raft of TV screens and waving his hairy arms about. He was wearing a typically garish outfit that comprised a vertically striped T-shirt, knee-length white trousers and leather shoes.

Brian controlled the crowd via his production assistants. They scurried around the floor, moving any gargantuan men out of the way of camera and bringing forward the pretty girls, whilst juggling the three presenters to make sure they were saying the right things at the right time, cueing the pre-recorded footage and keeping an eye on the unedited stuff streaming in hot from the track. All these inputs were performed live to the assembled audience whilst being time coded for packaging into a one-hour show for broadcast four days later.

After a well-executed interview in which Jeremy opined that bus lanes should be banned and traffic wardens exiled, they ran Simon’s lap. They stitched on some loony driving from his early runs, but the finishing time was what counted: 1.47.1, nearly a second faster than the track record. Simon double punched the air and Brian smiled at me, raising the little black carpets above his eyes before he settled back to his control panel.

With Cowell at the top of the leaderboard, only one other marker needed setting straight. Black Stig held the Top Gear track record on a 1.23.7 power lap, courtesy of the mighty Lambo Murcielago. To beat that, I needed some serious kit.

Porsche kindly delivered an appropriate weapon with their Carrera GT, a quantum leap in design and performance from their standard line of midlife crisis cures. The GT was panned by limp-wristed critics because the ceramic clutch was too aggressive for pulling away at traffic lights, making it prone to stalling. Driven right, it launched like a scalded cat.

It had a belting 5.7-litre V10 lump in its core, fat tyres and enough front grip to strip the surface off the tarmac. The shrill V10 strafed the ears like a Le Manster. It drove like one too. The GT was light on aerodynamic grip, making it delicate