That mule kick of acceleration means that if you’re facing the right direction, no matter how much understeer you encounter (quite a lot, if you come in too hot) and how dubious your lines are (creative – I like to call them creative), you can fire out of corners like a marble from a catapult. But there are issues. The steering is without feedback and fast, like Ferrari 488 Pista fast, which gives that feeling of instant agility on road, but slight nervousness on track. Then there’s the weight: the centre of gravity is supercar-low, so stability is exceptional, but mass can only be masked, not hidden forever.

Once you have the measure of the handling, weight quickly becomes the limiting factor, the thing that stops it from ever feeling truly nimble. Drive an Alpine A110 and one of these back to back for a physics lesson through your fingers and butt cheeks. And then there’s the big fat elephant – you can only drive it for a handful of laps (three or four around this two-mile track) with full-fat performance before heat becomes an issue and the computer dial backs the power by what feels like 30 or 40 per cent. Not ideal.

From the first corner, the M3 feels less tied down, more up on its toes – unnerving at first, but then you realise you can lean on the front end harder, work the brakes later, and flick it around in places where the porky Tesla demands patience. Unfortunately, when you floor it, the throttle response is glacial by comparison, and the accompanying racket isn’t quite as glorious as you remember – more of a distraction from listening to what the tyres are doing and getting on with the business of going fast. I bang in a timed lap in each, neither is the tidiest, and given another few hours I could have gone faster in both, but the delta is plain to see: Tesla takes it by almost two seconds.

TESLA : 3 - 0 : BMW