No matter how careful you are when checking a used car’s history, it’s impossible to know exactly how difficult its life has been. For example, just because your car has been regularly serviced, it doesn’t mean it was never drifted around an airfield by a bloke who had literally no interest in being careful since he got to give the keys back at the end of the day. At least, that would be impossible to know, unless, say, it was drifted around an airfield by the bloke who hosts the world’s most watched television show.

Rob Willis, 27, encountered exactly this problem recently, after buying himself a lovely looking Yas Marina Blue BMW M3. The IT operations manager told The Sun:

“When I bought it, I was told it was an ex-demo which one of the managers had been driving. The brakes were constantly squeaking and the steering wheel made a clunking noise every time I came off the motorway.”

Then, about a month after picking up the car, Rob was watching an old episode of Top Gear, when his girlfriend spotted that the M3 being hooned by Clarkson was wearing the same number plate as the car he’d just bought. Obviously unimpressed by the fact he’d been sold a car that had been abused in such a way without disclosure of that fact, Willis took his M3 back to his local dealership: “The dealers told me it was a mistake and the car should never have been sold as it was unfit for the road.”