IT TOOK a while for the BBC’s senior management to understand what I was on about. They’d just canned Top Gear and couldn’t really understand my plans for bringing it back.

Eventually, though, I managed to get a bit of face time in Jack Barclay’s Bentley showroom in Mayfair with Jane Root, the controller of BBC2 at the time. Over a glass of wine I said that the show would have a studio, which would be in a hangar, and that outside there’d be a test track, where all the corners would be named after soft rock bands. “It’ll be a place,” I said, “where car things happen.” And the penny dropped.

With her backing, Andy Wilman, the producer, and I set out to find