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My 1975 Lamborghini Urraco, as featured in the Supercar Shitters piece on the TV show, was something similar. I had to shut the driver's door with one hand on the radio speaker, otherwise it would fly out and hit me in the face.

An elaborate double-declutch routine was necessary to get around the departed first-gear synchromesh. The alternator was ropy, so the battery wouldn't charge with the engine below 2,500rpm. In any case, it would stall at idle, and the starter motor was a bit erratic as well.

Coming to a halt in traffic involved keeping the engine speed up, and as there wasn't room in the footwell for any of that toe-and-heel malarkey, I had to slot it into neutral, brake with my left foot, blip the throttle and then turn on the auxiliary cooling fan with a free hand.

Other people were cruising around oblivious in automatic diesel hatchbacks, but in the Lambo it was like trying to nurse a stricken Lancaster bomber back to base. Oh, and the windscreen wipers only came on if you gave the stalk a bit of a wiggle.

That's the great thing about a crap old car. It requires a bespoke set of driving skills that only you have. My Urraco wasn't like any other car. It wasn't even like any other Lamborghini Urraco.

In fact, it wasn't even like that Lamborghini Urraco had been a day earlier, because a few more things had gone wrong since then. At that moment, in that traffic jam, in that rain-sodden town, I was the only person in the world who could drive it.

Compare this with the Bugatti Veyron I was testing a few weeks ago. There was another car on which everything worked perfectly.

The 1,001bhp engine was a triumph of engineering genius over the cussedness of physics, yet the interior was as logical and conventional as a Honda Civic's and the flappy paddle gearbox worked as flawlessly and intuitively as any I have ever encountered. In fact, any idiot could drive it.