My Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder is many things. It is a beautiful piece of design. It is a snarling beast. It is an exquisite piece of engineering. And it is covered in dead leaves. But most of all, it is a magnet for twats.

I cannot remember the last journey I made where, at some point, the rear view mirror didn't fill with some oik in a Nova, desperately trying to operate the steering wheel with one hand and a camera phone with the other.

Last night, on the way to London, I was assaulted by someone in an early M3 who thought that by driving one inch from my rear end, he'd provoke me into some kind of race. What would be the point? I'd lose my licence. He'd lose his dignity and then, probably, he'd lose his legs in a huge and messy fireball.

Sometimes though, I have no choice but to floor it. On the A34 near Newbury, I was being trailed by a 5.0-litre Mercedes full of morons. You know the type. Half a ton of "product" in their hair, idiotic Oakley sunglasses, short-sleeved white shirts, big tie knots and fewer brain cells than you'd find in a lobster pot.

The driver was so hopeless and so dangerous that I slowed right down, but this made him drive even worse. So I speeded up. But the problem is that to leave a 5.0-litre Mercedes behind, you have to be doing 165. That's fine for a Gallardo, but with the best will in the world, you can't do 165 on the A34. On a Tuesday afternoon.

It's never-ending, this. I trail a column of rats like the Pied Piper wherever I go. But that's not my complaint. My complaint is that all of these people have one thing in common: you wouldn't want them in your house. More than that, I wouldn't want them in my address book. I don't even want them in my sight.

The trouble is that the people I'm talking about here have come out from the gentlemen's lavatories and declared themselves to be genuine gearheads, people who, if you cut them, would bleed super unleaded and Castrol R. And they're all horrible. I can think of no worse group, apart from the freemasons.

And here's my beef: with their silly haircuts and their nasty complexions, and their fondness for wearing track suits, they give the whole world of motoring a bad name. They make 'liking cars' uncool.

When I sit down at a dinner party, I can always see the colour drain from the faces of those around me as they imagine I'm going to talk torque and carve race tracks in my gravy all night long. They all think I'm going to be a woollier, fatter version of Ron Dennis.

When they meet a chef, or a painter or an author, they have some common ground because they cook, they have paintings and they read books. But when they see me coming, they think they have to say something interesting about cars. And as far as they're concerned, cars cannot be interesting.

They are just a dangerous and disgusting diversion for twats and show-offs. The only time they ever see them is whizzing round and round in circles on a Sunday afternoon. And that's less interesting than an afternoon doing pre-flight checks with James May.

James is a classic case in point. He can talk at you for a considerable length about complex maths, radio etiquette, World War One poetry and cats. But when anyone sees him coming, they think he's going to talk about track rod ends, and they run before he has a chance to do a handbrake turn on their hydrangeas.