"What's the best car you've ever driven?" It's a loaded question and usually the second one I get asked once people find out what I do for a living. Usually it comes right after "I've got about €5,000 to spend and I really fancy a new Mercedes S-Class..." or some other impossible conundrum.
Let me say it now, folks - no, I can't get you a discount. No, I'm not a mechanic so I can't diagnose that rattling noise. No, Jeremy Clarkson isn't a close, personal friend. Thankfully.
But the best car I've ever driven? Ah now that I can answer, but it does involve a bit of heaving out the bedroom drawers of memory and giving them a good shake. The easy, glib answer would be to say "the next one..." It's kind of an expected answer and a bit of a paraphrased lift from none other than Enzo Ferrari. After all, as a professional critic, surely my attention should be on what's coming next, and not what's in the past?
Many would expect me to name one of Snr Ferrari's creations as my all-time best drive, but no - I've enjoyed driving some Ferraris, and think the current FF to be a truly striking, clever, remarkable car, but the whole Ferrari mythos has just never really 'done' it for me. I appreciate that they're fast, loud, exciting and sexy but I just think that me driving a Ferrari is like a middle aged dad trying to squeeze into skinny Superdry jeans. It just looks all wrong, and a tad pratt-ish.
Ah, so I'm an engineering kinda guy then, you might imagine. Not taken in by all that Italian arm waving and supposedly-F1-derived-tech? Must be a Porsche man, so. Now, there you'd have a point. I do like a nice Porsche and some of my most memorable drives have been in one. Finding out just how easy it was to power slide a PDK-equipped 997-era 911 at Porsche's own test track in the UK was pretty enjoyable. It was almost exactly like driving a warp-speed-fast, leather-lined, six-cylinder MkII Ford Escort, so hilariously easy and friendly it was to slip and shimmy around in. Loved it. Driving a Mk1 Cayenne Turbo around the Brands Hatch race track was rather good fun too. I thought I was going reasonably briskly, pulling 120 into the braking zone for the fearsome Paddock Hill corner. Then I remembered that the speedo was in mph, not km/h and a little bit of wee came out...
The sheer lunacy of driving a TVR Tuscan 4.0-litre has stayed with me all these years, even though that event predates my marriage. It was the realisation that 'wow this thing is fast, no this thing is really fast, no this thing is indecently fast' and then finding that there was another half-inch of throttle travel left to go. Pushing through that took the Tuscan into the realms of the truly insane, and I surmised that the passenger seat was not there for any partner or girlfriend (who would surely be too sensible to get into a car such as that), but purely to give the Grim Reaper somewhere comfy to wait before he got out his scythe. And his spatula. And his dustpan and brush.
And then there's the answer that I usually give - the Rolls-Royce Phantom. Well, it's a safe enough answer isn't it? After all, Rolls-Royce has long had the reputation of being the finest motor car in the world and since BMW started building the Phantom in 2003 that reputation has actually been deserved. And it is a remarkable car - smooth, utterly silent, built like a stately home and yet enjoyable and agile through corners. Plus it definitively silences the tiny critic in your head that claims no single car can truly be worth as much as the price of a nice four-bed house. Oh yes it can...
It's not the true answer though. For that, we have to wind back the clock ever farther, back to the long hot summer of 1997. I was working in London, in my first job out of uni, manning the Clubs News desk at the redoubtable Classic and Sports Car magazine. Office dogsbody that I was, I was often despatched out to various classic car dealers and specialists in the London area, insurance chit in hand, to collect something or other for a photo shoot. I didn't mind - it beat sitting in the office and I got to drive some interesting cars, albeit very slowly and carefully.
This day was a little different. Packed out the door early, I was to go and collect a car from a garage near Putney in south west London. It was just the other side of the Kingston bypass from the C&SC offices, and I was told to be back by no later than lunchtime so that the person writing up the article (I think it was then-editor Gavin Conway) would have time to take the car home and drive it a little before tomorrow's photo shoot.
The car? Oh, that was going to be a 1965 Mercedes-Benz 230 SL Pagoda Roof. It was silver. The seats were plain, unadorned black leather. The automatic gear shifter was topped by the most perfect little white cap of Bakelite. The dash was a riot of chrome, metal and big dials and the steering wheel was the size of a satellite dish from the 1990s. It was the hottest day of the year so far, mid-July, and the top was down.
Slipping behind the giant wheel, I pulled out and began to navigate my way back to the office, via that fearsome Kingston one-way system. This was in the days before satnav, but I knew that if I got lost, fixing my eyes on the back of a No. 87 bus would bring me back around the right way eventually. Besides, I had time on my hands and I was starting to notice things.
Things like the fact that, for a 30- year-old car, the SL I was driving felt genuinely brand new. Solid as a rock. Tight, even. It was such a joy to thread it through traffic, between hulking buses and around argumentative taxis. With the roof down and tucked underneath its seamless cover, and with those pencil-slim windscreen pillars, visibility was widescreen and the gentle tappet-tick-tock noise of the engine's valve gear (they all do that, sir) made for a perfect metronomic backdrop for my drive.
That wasn't what I noticed though. What I noticed was that attractive women were noticing me. I'm no oil painting now, and 20 years ago I was still hardly a Caravaggio (slimmer and hairier though I may have been). Lucky in cars, unlucky in love, in those days. And of course, those attractive Kingstonians weren't really being attracted to me, they were being attracted to the car, to those perfect Paul Bracq and Béla Barényi-penned lines and, presumably, to the notional bank balance that would be required to own and run such a machine. It was intoxicating, I won't lie - after all, we're all just monkeys at heart and what is the point of driving prestigious or sporting cars if not to advertise ourselves to the opposite sex? Isn't that the basic point of everything we do as humans?
Whatever the psychology of it all, I decided to take another lap of the bypass. That's how good a car the '65 Mercedes SL is. That's why it's still the best car I've ever driven. Now stop asking me.