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The message was don't crash. "Don't crash," said the PR guy. "Don't crash," said the team boss. "Don't crash," said the first mechanic. "Don't crash," said the second mechanic. "Don't crash," said the test driver.

"I won't crash," I said, then touched a block of wood on the Silverstone garage floor.

Earlier in the week, I was driving a car with wood on the dash and talking to someone at Aston Martin and made a joke about crashing the V8 N24, then had to touch the wood on the dash. I heard the guy at Aston tapping his wooden desk with the telephone handset. "Don't crash," he said.

"There are a lot of fast cars out there at the moment, so watch your mirrors," said Aston Racing's chief engineer Graham Humphrys from the other side of the safety webbing over the driver's door.

I was sitting in the Silverstone pits, the V8 N24 still and silent, other cars roaring past on the pit lane and out on the track at this open test day. There is only one N24 in the world, I was the first journo to drive it.

In two days' time it would be shipped to Bahrain for an important race, I was on slicks and it had just started to rain. "Anything else I should know?" I asked. "Don't crash," he said.

A flick of the ignition switch, a thumb of the starter button and we were off. For the first time in over a week, I was not in a position for anyone to tell me not to crash the Aston Martin V8 Vantage N24 - I was just in a position to crash it.

So I crashed at Copse on the first lap...

Joke. Five pussyfooting laps of Silverstone's National Circuit were enough to confirm that a stripped-out V8 Vantage makes a great GT racing car.