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You may as well park up and go round it with a mallet, just to get it over with.

Jeremy was in the Ford GT, and to make matters worse for him, it was his own car, and he was in the position of being asked to scrap it already.

Meanwhile, Hammond was in a Pagani Zonda that he had on loan from a man we knew simply as 'Mr Corleone', so you can imagine how jittery he was.

And yet, after a few laps of the famous monument to Europe's second-best General, we emerged from one of its 12 exits completely unscathed.

A man in a Renault Megane actually stopped at one point and gestured to me to go before him. I immediately concluded that this must be some British bloke in a hire car.

But then again, on one of the few occasions when I got out of the Fezza, I found myself standing at a zebra crossing, and a woman in a Citroen Xantia stopped and beckoned me across.

In the good old days, a French zebra crossing meant 'cross if you dare', but now it seems to work just like one of ours.

And she was definitely French; she was wearing difficult spectacles with ludicrous pointy bits, and only French women do that.

Something strange has happened. I've actually been to France several times over the past month, and on each visit I've been struck not, for once, by a car, but by how politely the French are driving these days. Imagine my frustration.