Oddly enough it was exactly a year ago that I was showing off with the other members of Pink Floyd in front of what felt like a billion of my closest friends, playing Comfortably Numb at Live 8 in Hyde Park. Last week I found myself behind the wheel of a Nissan Micra coupé-cabriolet trying desperately to prevent anyone seeing me. Hey ho.

The joke was that the Micra was pink. I didn’t know this when The Sunday Times innocently asked me if I would like to stand in for Jeremy Clarkson and do a road test. Assuming I would be required to put the latest Ferrari through its paces I slipped into my race boots and jumped at the chance. The punishment for this presumptuousness was spending the next 36 hours looking even more of an idiot than usual.

For me, cars and rock’n’roll go way back. They are both enduring passions — and cars preceded music. My love affair began as a child. My father was a documentary maker and a car fanatic. He made a five-part history of motor racing, which gives some flavour of his interest. I was watching him race before rock music was invented.

My first car, a 1927 Austin Seven “Chummy”, led directly to my first contact with Roger Waters. We were both studying architecture in London. He was a brooding, slightly intimidating presence and had never bothered to speak to me. Then one day he came to my desk and asked if he could borrow my car. Diplomatically I maintained that it was off the road, but it was a first point of contact, and the rest as they say . . . As we headed up the M1 to seek our fortune as the Pink Floyd Sound, we wisely left the field of architecture open to our tutors: Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.

If you need to learn the genesis of the name Pink Floyd, by the way, please buy my book Inside Out, the one the BBC has still not forgiven Jeremy for flogging shopping-channel-style in return for borrowing a car.

Motor vehicles played an important part in band life because one of the biggest headaches was transport. I think the Small Faces did a deal with a local greengrocer to rent his van in return for 25% of their gig fees. A year later as their single climbed the charts this deal came back to haunt them.

We on the other hand invested 20 quid in an elderly Bedford van bought on a late Saturday afternoon off a forecourt. It must have been late because if we’d seen it in daylight the holes in the rusted bodywork would have made us think twice. To get some idea of how bad it was, I should say that the salesman felt moved to throw in “new boots and blood” — used-car speak for a new set of tyres and road tax. Even so, the van wasn’t suitable for any sort of distance. The M25 had yet to be built but we never ventured further from London than where the orbital is now.

Our next vehicle was the obligatory Ford Transit. In the 1960s every band had a Transit. They became a sort of status symbol for a professional band. Ours had the standard band spec: 3 litre engine, modified cabin with a bench seat behind the driver and passenger to allow the rest of the band plus the roadie to travel in relative discomfort, and twin rear wheels to take the weight of the instruments, amps and lights.

I have often wondered about the influence the Transit van had on popular music in the 1960s, and by definition all popular music that followed: the size of the van dictated the size of the band and probably put generations of brass players out of work. Bass, drums, guitar and maybe keyboards were simply the limit for the available space for crew and cast.

The back of the van was a return to childhood: “How much further is it? Are we nearly there yet? Can we stop for sausage, eggs and chips?” plus the more adult conversations regarding musical criticism: “You really screwed up Interstellar tonight didn’t you, you stupid git.” “Well it wasn’t my fault, you fell off the stage.”

By 1967 the Blue Boar services on the M1 at Watford Gap looked like a Transit van owners’ club at about 2am every Sunday as bands made their way back to London after playing in Birmingham or Manchester. The truckers were heavily outnumbered by the velvet trouser, snakeskin boot and frilly shirt (and frilly hair) brigade.

Once the band became a bit more successful the equipment went ahead of us, but we still needed to get the four of us to the gigs. For a while we used a Bentley. It looked terrific — just the ticket we thought for an ambitious band.

It’s just possible that the same man who’d sold us the Bedford was involved, as unfortunately it had no brakes. I remember quite vividly the succession of bumps (kerb, grass, kerb) as Roger discovered the best way to negotiate a roundabout without any brakes was to drive straight over it.

Being preoccupied with peace and love and what to do with all the leisure time we were going to have once computers had taken over the world, cars were the least of our worries. Global warming, emissions and congestion charges were the stuff of science fiction. If anyone had suggested the horrors to come we would have assumed it was another case of bad acid and consigned them to the first-aid tent at the back of the festival field.

The pink Nissan Micra convertible does have a whiff of flower power about it, but before I embark on my evaluation I should probably own up regarding the depth of my researches into this particular car. I know that Clarkson is a consummate professional and that he has spent serious time and given deep thought to every car that appears on these pages. I believe he drives them from Chipping Norton to London a dozen times, then thrashes them around the circuit at the Top Gear facility to check for anything that he might have missed. Hell, he probably even reads the press pack. And only then does he feel sufficiently briefed to judge them. I, on the other hand, spent roughly two hours behind the wheel, half of that in north London traffic.

My first reaction when I saw the car can probably best be described as shock and awe. It is simply impossible to road test this car because you can’t get past the colour. You get used to the white van man taunts, but not so the nods of approval from the nice young men. I drove the Sport model and although I managed to make the tyres squeal once, there is little in the way of performance about this car to justify the designation. Actually that’s not entirely true — I did notice the drilled lightweight pedals that looked as though they belonged to a Ferrari, but that’s where any sporting pretensions ended. Whoever was responsible for the pedals was clearly moved rapidly to another project.

I once drove my two sons to school in the Ferrari 250 GTO after my regular car wouldn’t start one morning. This time round, and to punish them for crimes not yet committed, I took them to school in this pink bouquet. They are both 6ft. One of them was squeezed sideways into the rear seat (the size of which, by the way, is another thing that the car has in common with a race car) and the other sat in the front, his knees around his ears, and constantly knocking the hazard warning lights on. So that is how we arrived outside the gates, hazards flashing, cramped into a pink sardine tin. Embarrassed is not the word. We could probably have made the journey a bit more comfortable if we had taken the roof down, but for once we agreed unanimously that none of us had the nerve.

The retracting roof is the best thing about the car. It is a bit like that advert for Citroëns where the car transforms into a robot. It was impressive. But not enough for me to get out the chequebook.

As I get older and more cowardly I have started pruning my car collection of some of the most alarming exhibits. I still seem to need the McLaren F1 and of course a Ferrari 250 GTO; and a 1901 Panhard seems absolutely necessary. I can’t tell if I need a Bugatti Veyron until I’ve driven one and reread the Sunday Times report (they tested it against my F1), but I’ve recently parted with my V16 BRM with a sigh of relief from both me and the bank manager.

I think it’s now with Bernie Ecclestone. I worked out how much it cost per metre travelled and found that I could have had the same distance covered in finest Wilton carpet. Serves Bernie right. Now there’s a man who could look cool in a pink Micra.