James May has a theory on the Nürburgring, that sinewy 14-mile race track in Germany where car makers from all over the world go to hone a new car's handling.

He says that they're not really honing the handling at all, just going all-out to set the fastest possible lap time. And that a car set up to get round the 'Ring in under than eight minutes is going to be complete rubbish on the A38 just outside Burton Upon Trent.

Of course, it's my job to pooh-pooh the ramblings of Captain Slow. But this is a tricky one because he's sort of right. Certainly, I was alarmed when I saw an early spy photograph of Aston Martin's new V8 Vantage hurtling round one of the 147 corners with one of its front wheels a full two inches in the air.

Captain Slow saw it too and pointed out, quite rightly, that any chassis stiff enough to stick a front wheel in the air is going to have the give and suppleness of a grandfather clock.

"They're just trying to make it go round the bloody place faster than a Porsche 911", grumbled Her Majesty's Daily Telegraph's motoring correspondent, in that deep, manly baritone of his.

"And that'll make all their suspension engineers feel all warm and gooey but it's completely irrelevant because..."

Fortunately, the rest of the sentence was so low and so deep that only dogs within a five-mile radius could hear what he was on about. But the essence is that he wants to see the Nürburgring closed down.

I'll leave you to reflect on that notion while we move on to discuss the car that raised his ire. The Vantage. The most eagerly awaited Aston Martin since, well, er... the last one.

I'll admit I was nervous about what the ride might be like but felt, in a car such as this, that's a bit like worrying about pricking yourself on a needle in a haystack. Or turning down the opportunity for an evening out with Uma Thurman because, as my wife keeps pointing out, she has 'big hands'.

The Vantage, after all, is supposed to be a sports car; a small, tight, pointy, revvy thing and anyone who didn't like having their spleen shaken into its component molecules could always go and buy a DB9 instead. Make no mistake, I was gagging for a go in the Vantage. I was desperate.

And then my back decided to explode. One night, while I was asleep, all the oil in my spine decided to become infected and seep into my central nervous system. Put in plain English, I slipped a disc, and the super-potent painkillers supplied by my GP meant driving would be a big no-no for the next six months.