It's a well known and proven fact that girls can't drive. A quick Google image search for 'women drivers' reveals the truth of it: photos of cars straddled between jetties and boats. SUVs on three wheels at filling stations and parked on rocks.

Stranded in mud, jammed between trucks, upside-down, fallen from bridges, half-mounted on fences and central reservations with two or three or sometimes four wheels high in the air. Driving along briskly with petrol hoses dangling from filler necks. It's irrefutably, unarguably and utterly true. Girls can't drive.

Why, though? Why? That's the question. Why? Why can't women drive? Why? Is it to do with hand-eye co-ordination? Does the art and skill of driving not matter enough to females? Can decent, attentive, precise driving not be part of the female psyche? Can it not occupy even the smallest corner of the female mind? Is it not something women can be interested enough in? Is it a spatial awareness issue? Possibly.

But the core of it is this: you need to be proud to be a good driver, you need to have a decent understanding of what the car is doing, how it works mechanically, you need to want to drive well. You need to be a man.

Clearly, womens' lack of driving skill makes them unsuitable for motor racing. That's why you don't see many women in race cars. It's the psychological make-up thing - no interest, no ability, no skill, slow. There aren't many females in racing because the ability to understand the car and drive it at the limit is simply not there.

It's not down to numbers or probabilities, no. It's skill deficiency, a simple lack of ability to drive any car fast. On 21 April 2008, Danica Patrick won a major international open-wheeler race at Motegi in Japan, a 200-lap Indy Racing League (IRL) race on an oval where the average speed was 164.258mph. The average. Danica Patrick is a girl.

This caused unrest at Top Gear magazine because we didn't understand it. At a planning meeting, we men - great drivers, all - sat down and tried to talk it through. Brows were creased. There were frowns. And more than a little angst. There was even a bit of nervous paper-shuffling and the occasional cough.

Some of us scurried around the place before we sat down, like chickens, not knowing which way to walk or look. We didn't know what the hell we were doing because we didn't know what the hell was going on.That figure again: 164.258mph.