I wouldn't make any great claims to being a hotshoe – though, like my very limited schoolboy rugby career, the extent and quality of my youthful competition driving seems to get ever more impressive with age and alcohol – but like all classic petrolheads, my every journey becomes about plotting venues for races, sprints or hillclimbs.
On the family's annual holiday in Corsica, as mentioned in a previous blog, I spend most of my time on the balcony planning the hillclimb I will run up the sinuous mountain road in the distance. Actually, it isn't that sinuous, unlike every other road on the island; it's more like a giant Shelsley and I long to one-day see Simon Taylor's Stovebolt Special roaring up it.
And that is just one of thousands of examples of my mentally trying to turn every stretch of road in the world into a speed venue. And especially urban ones, where the challenge is even greater.
Even on my commute there is the 150 yards of hill that I have inappropriately dubbed the Richmond Hillclimb. The one-way Nightingale Lane, though, would be fraught with logistical issues… and cresting the brow and braking, before you hit something very hard, would be as treacherous as the Brooklands Test Hill.
That didn't make it any less fun to drive, of course, until I discovered several times on the blind, sharp left-hander that taxis and cyclists don't think that the one-way signs apply to them. The St Margarets Esses, as I like to call them, have similar issues.
No visit to Crystal Palace (above, Rindt at the wheel) or Brooklands (below, Birkin giving it his all) is complete without contemplating the feasibility of rebuilding the circuits, though both those cases are tempered with the stark reality that it would be impossible.
The one that always gets me more than any other, though, is Richmond Park. Let's ignore some of the more fundamental issues: that the surface isn't really wide enough to run an Olympic cycle race, let alone a motor race, or that the park is awash with more than 500 deer (and we all know what happens when they start wandering around on F1 tracks), or simply that the Queen might not like it.
For those that don't know it, Richmond Park is about 2500 acres of land in South West London that borders Richmond, Kingston, Roehampton and Sheen.
