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In a racing car the belts welded your body to the chassis, and you felt the reaction to every bump or force physically. A road car was more subtle. You hung loose like a surfer harnessing the power of a wave.

Whether I raced a car for years or drove it for a few minutes, I developed a connection with its soul. The secrets poured out once you knew how to listen. Some spoke softly, others shouted from the pulpit with a loudhailer.

There was only one Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Bugatti Veyron was just as extinct the moment it rolled out of the factory, a relic of our time. Future generations, driving small gas- and electric-powered cellophane composite cubes, will look at the Veyron in museums and say, ‘Wow, those guys in the Oil Age were cray-zee, but clever.’

For once, statistics really painted the picture with the Veyron.

Its heart was a mighty 16-cylinder engine. A normal car had four cylinders, so that was like having four engines under the bonnet. Four turbochargers spun maximum power instantly from the 8-litre motor, with ten radiators cooling all the systems.

It developed a gargantuan 1,001bhp and 1250 NM of torque at the stroke of the pedal, from any speed, to bend space-time and blur the road at 253mph. The engine didn’t propel the wheels as much as shove millions of cubic litres of the earth’s atmosphere out of the way at one third of the speed of sound.

The tyres were only rated to run at top speed for fifteen minutes, but at 250 you emptied the fuel tank in twelve minutes anyway. My favourite stat: the motor consumed an estimated 45,000 litres of air per hour.

Complicated physics and supercars normally equalled frequent and catastrophic mechanical failure. Volkswagen group, owner of Audi and Lamborghini, bought Bugatti and provided the Veyron with the metronomic reliability of a Swiss watch in a way that only German engineers could.

There will never be another production car so dedicated to the purity of speed, so perfectly delivered, and the economics of selling a car for £850,000 that costs more like £3m to produce are unlikely to return soon, unless the Pharaohs make a comeback.

In 2005 I knew none of this bar the price tag, which failed to impress me. Racing cars were far more valuable and were built to be thrashed, not worshipped. I had to get to the basement of the NatWest Tower, locate the car and drive it, fast, from London to Milan.

The three presenters had raced across Europe from Alba in Northern Italy to determine the fastest way of transporting a fresh truffle to England. Contrary to popular belief, the Top Gear races were for real. Hammond and May flew in a small Cessna and hitched a ride on the Eurostar; Clarkson drove the Bugatti over the Alps, crossing Italy, Switzerland and France.

A tracking crew had chased Jeremy across thousands of kilometres of countryside to record his journey. My job was to recreate the trip in reverse with another crew to capture the necessary pick-up shots.

The clock approached midnight as I headed through the giant glass doors that opened into the Tower foyer. The place was deserted apart from a uniformed guard on the front desk. It felt like Bruce Willis wandering around the Nakatomi building in Die Hard. I scaled a smart escalator and took a long ride in the main elevator to reach the Vertigo bar on the 42nd floor.

The lift doors opened into the dim blue lighting of the reception area. Camera kit was strewn across the carpet, surrounded by a throng of soundmen, cameramen, producers and directors.

Iain May, beer in hand, spotted me and began singing, ‘It’s only just begun – for you …’ His shift was over.

The first objective was to get the Bugatti keys off Clarkson and go film ‘some footage of London’. I wandered around the oval room and found the presenters steadying themselves with a few bevvies with Andy Wilman and Nigel Simpkiss.

Hammond and May looked relieved to be standing more than two inches apart, after thirty-six hours crammed into the tiny Cessna. They hadn’t