The week before last, during that mini heatwave, I left work at about eight o’clock and cruised, top down, up to the traffic lights under the A40 flyover in west London.

A right turn would take me back to my flat, a superheated box with neither garden nor air. Then I’d be forced to lie awake all night long, stuck fast to the sheets, listening to policemen tearing up and down Westbourne Grove while testing their sirens.

A left turn, however, would take me to the tranquillity of the Cotswolds and my family. Here I would be able to sleep with nothing to wake me save the shush-hush of the barley and the pitter-patter of tiny foxes nibbling at the chicken run. And that’s why I went left.

It was a good decision, too. Because after some 40 minutes I turned off the motorway and, with the sun a six-inch coin of brilliant scarlet light in an utterly clear, deep-blue sky, I mashed my foot into the SL’s thick, velvety carpet, and went absolutely barking mad. I braked hard into each corner, nudging the gear lever once, twice and sometimes three times to keep the revs right up, until I hit the apex of the corner, and buried the throttle once more.

The tarmac was hot and sticky, and it crackled slightly as the new Michelins cut through it like water skis on a windless lake. And rising above it all, as wave after wave of power and torque surged down the prop shaft, came the hard-edged, machinegun, staccato roar of that supercharged Mercedes V8 engine.

It was enough to make a man quite chubby with excitement. And with the sun beginning to kiss the western horizon I remember thinking, “Well, if I hit a tree now, I’ll at least be going out on a high.”

It was a wonderful drive home. Me and the machine, not just singing in perfect harmony but fused in a bout of gaily abandoned man-love. This was the raw, undiluted pleasure of driving almost for driving’s sake.

Except, of course, that’s rubbish, because it wasn’t raw or undiluted at all. The Mercedes puts up a firewall comprising about a million gigabytes of silicon between the driver and the business end of things. It’s got a braking assistance system and computer-controlled air suspension, along with traction control, power steering and a fly-by-wire throttle. I was driving a facsimile of a car, rather than the real thing: it moaned and groaned and twitched and flinched just like the true item, but in my heart of hearts I knew that I was making love to little more than a hologram.

All modern cars isolate you from the road, they cocoon you in a safe, quiet, world of velour and Radio 2 and air-conditioning. The wind that ruffles your hair in a modern convertible isn’t wind at all, rather a gentle breeze that has been massaged by an aerodynamics engineer somewhere in Frankfurt. And the nice rorty little rasp from your exhaust at 5000rpm was in fact put there by someone in an anechoic chamber in Stuttgart. So when you’re in a car, you’re really in the Matrix.

In the past I’ve never been able to get out, to smell real air and hear real engine noises. I was never able to do the Keanu Reeves thing because at 6ft 5in I’ve always been much too tall to fit into a Caterham Seven.

Now, though, there’s a longer, wider version available for the chap with the fuller, longer figure. And last weekend I gave it a whirl.

Bloody Hell Fire and Holy Mother of Christ: apart from being bigger, it was a whole lot more powerful to boot. In fact, it offers up 442bhp per ton, and nothing else on the road even gets close to doing that. A Ferrari 575, for instance, produces a figure of only 298bhp per ton, while the Lamborghini Murciélago manages 319bhp per ton.

At first you’ll wonder where the power has gone. But that’s because you’ll be changing up when the noise and the vibrations become intolerable. But don’t. In fact you change up when blood is spurting out of your ears and your right foot has been shaken clean off your ankle. Then you discover where the power is — hiding its massive bulk in the uppermost reaches of the rev band.

Go there and no matter what you happen to be driving right now, you’ll be surprised at the punch it delivers. I know I was.

What’s more, you can actually see the suspension working, and the brakes too, and when you turn the wheel the road wheels move, right in front of your eyes. You can place this car bang-on target every time. Not just near the white line, as you would in a painfully slow Lambo or a pedestrian Ferrari, but bang-on that line.

I’ve always assumed that a car like this would feel like an extension of your hands and feet, but it’s the other way round.

I felt like a part of it, an organic component but a component nevertheless.

You use a normal car to take you somewhere and it tries to make that journey as pleasant as possible. But you would never use a Caterham as a means of transport because this is driving for the buzz of it, and as a result you’re not a passenger. You are there to do a job, which means you are no more and no less important than one of the pistons or the windscreen wipers.

This is the real deal. Everything that happens happens because it happens. Not because some German in a white coat thinks it should happen. The marketing department has not created the noises, the jolts and the acceleration. They’re there because this is a light, powerful sports car and these are the characteristics you must expect of such a thing.

I didn’t like it. Partly because I still don’t fit properly — the steering wheel sits on my thighs, which means I simply could not apply any opposite-lock in an emergency. Also, while Caterham will build a car for you, it’s designed to be a kit that you build yourself. That’s why it bypasses regulations on noise, safety and emissions. Great, but I’d never fully trust anything I’d built myself: I’d always assume that a wheel was about to fall off.

Most of all, though, I didn’t like the Caterham because it was like camping. The roof looks so terrible that you can’t possibly drive around with it up. But then again, it’s so fiddly that you can’t possibly drive with it down either. Plainly it was designed by a man who likes to sleep out at night, possibly with some boy scouts, far from anywhere, with just a thin layer of canvas between him, the boys and the rain.

And then there’s the business of what you should wear when driving the Caterham.

This is the only car that demands a trip down to Millets before embarking on even the shortest journey.

You need a woolly bobble hat, an anorak and some Rohan trousers. There’s an almost wilful lack of style to this kind of motoring, you see. AA Gill described his run from the station in my wife’s Caterham last year as “the worst five minutes of my life”.

The problem here is that we are in the very furthest corner of motoring enthusiasm. And as is the way with all hobbies, things go off the rails when people start to take them too seriously.

Everyone likes to dangle a worm in the water from time to time. But the Caterham is the equivalent of getting up at three in the morning and sitting in the rain, on a canal bank, until it goes dark again.

Everyone looks up when Concorde flies over, but the Caterham is the equivalent of flying to Greece to see some Olympic 737s. Would you risk getting locked up for your love of this car? Man at Millets would.

I’m interested in motor racing but I don’t want to be a marshal. I find stamps pretty but I don’t want an album. I like music but I’m not going to build my own instruments. And I like driving but I’m far too old, rich, soft and poncey, and still slightly too big for what, without any doubt, is the ultimate driving machine.

VITAL STATISTICS
Model Caterham Seven Roadsport SV
Engine type Four-cylinder, 1798cc, 16-valve
Power 200bhp @ 7500rpm
Torque 150 lb ft @ 5750rpm
Transmission Five-speed manual Suspension (front) Adjustable double
wishbone with anti-roll bar (rear) De Dion axle
Dimensions 3,530mm length; 1,685mm width; 1,685mm height
Tyres 195/45 R15
Fuel n/a
Top speed 138mph
Acceleration 0 to 60mph: 3.95sec
Price £35,860
Verdict The ultimate driving machine, but too Milletts for me

Explore Driving

• Jeremy Clarkson

• New Car Reviews

• Used Car Reviews

• News

• Features

• In The Showroom

• Buying Guide

• Car Clinic