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5. There was a loud crunch from beneath the right-hand front corner of the car. One of the exotic, lightweight wheels with magnesium spokes bolted to a carbon-fibre rim had completely shattered, almost certainly at this point.

6. The car span once, and suddenly. I still had time to ponder.

7. Our trajectory took us towards a ditch. I imagined my face being ripped right off if the front of the car dug in and we flipped over. This was the worst of several bad moments. Like the venturi, the roof had been removed earlier.

8. The car bounced against the edge of the ditch and back out into the middle of the road, spinning violently four times again before heading back for the same ditch only further up the road. It skidded along on its flat underbelly like a plastic sledge before coming to a stop with the wheels straddling the ditch, facing the right way, not having hit an oncoming car, not having turned over. The structure of its carbon-fibre chassis tub remained perfectly intact. Behind us were the longest tyre marks I have ever seen: 265 metres of pirouetting rubber.

9. The underside was a mess, all four corners were shattered and the wheel had long since fallen apart but really, the state of the car belied just what carnage could have resulted.

10. A muck-spreader had just passed through the field we landed in. As a result, and only because of this, we now smelled of shit.

Thus the Koenigsegg CCXR joins a roll call of the most infamous Top Gear crashes: the Ferrari Enzo that was hit by a bus en route to a cover feature two years ago; the Koenigsegg CCX that ploughed off our track with the Stig on board; and, of course, Richard's 288mph barrel roll in the Vampire jet car, the crash to top all crashes. If not to end them.

Read how the Stig helped Koenigsegg to tame the CCX