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If so, weren’t you totally knocked sideways by how comfortable, refined, well-equipped, well-mannered, easy-to-drive and actually-remarkably-fast it was?

A couple of house moves recently gave me cause to become acquainted with the rarefied delights of the modern commercial vehicle market. In the space of two months, I had weekends in the latest Renault Master and Mercedes Sprinter panel vans. I did more than 400 miles in both, to-ing and fro-ing from old gaff to new. And not once did I consider myself unlucky to be doing so: it was great fun.

I drove our long-term Subaru Impreza STi home yesterday evening and was impressed by how much smoother and less twitchy it was than its predecessor. What didn't impress me, however, was the central locking. I left my house this morning with two bags...

Last time I posted a story about the Trifuel Lotus Exige I found myself being accused of acting like some kind of motor industry propagandist for bio-fuels.

But, after talking through some of the comments I fielded with Lotus, I’ve come back to have another go at setting the record straight.

Methanol certainly isn’t a perfect fuel – but it is a viable CO2-neutral, non-fossil source of power. Short of shifting the entire motoring population to battery power, or waiting for the hydrogen economy to get started, it’s as good an alternative as any at present.

Without putting too fine a point on it, thirty years ago we would already have published Heikki Kovalainen's obituary had he been involved in the sort of accident which befell his McLaren-Mercedes MP4-23 in the recent Spanish GP.  In fact, the car would most likely have exploded like a fire bomb and you'd have swept it all up into a black bin liner once the debris was cool enough to touch.

Okay, this is my final blog from the Nissan 360 – I promise. This morning I dug up a current Japanese-spec version of the Nissan Bluebird – or Bluebird Sylphy as it’s now named.

Britain hasn’t had a Bluebird since 1990, when the Primera arrived. But it’s a car that many of us will remember as the ubiquitous ‘90s minicab: for about five years it felt that every private hire trip I took was in the back of a blue-smoking 2.0D version.

Anyway, I digress – but not by as much as you might suspect. Because somehow during the last 18 years and however many subsequent iterations, the Japanese-spec Bluebird still shares some recognisable characteristics with the ones I remember: this must be the last car in the world to feature velour panels on the insides of its doors.

On this day, 22 years ago, world rallying lost its top driver of the time, and I lost my childhood hero. Henri Toivonen crashed on the Tour de Corse, his Lancia Delta S4 caught fire, and he and his co-driver Sergio Cresto were both killed. He was just 29 years of age; I was 12.

Toivonen, the son of Monte Carlo Rally winner Pauli, was a flawed genius. His spectacular driving style meant that he was often able to score victories in two-wheel-drive machinery, even in an era of Audi Quattros, but it also meant that he was prone to scrapes and incidents.