Then there’s the steering wheel. It’s made from the cheapest plastic in the world and has a diameter exactly an eighth of an inch bigger than the outer ring round Saturn. You don’t steer this car. You flail.

And finally there’s the noise. Oh. My. God. There has never been a car that sounds like this. Not ever. Obviously the V8, lifted straight from the latest generation of Corvette, is quite a noisy thing, but when you accelerate you don’t hear it at all. What you hear is the supercharger. It’s not a whine or a whistle, as you might expect. It’s as though someone is feeding a million squirrels into an industrial wood chipper.

It is a deafening sound and it’s at a pitch that could shatter Katherine Jenkins’s hair. So after a while you can take no more and you lift off, whereupon you are treated to the sound of distant artillery fire as traces of unburnt fuel ignite in the exhaust’s tailpipe. It is the most glorious noise in the world.

So you find yourself gritting your teeth through the squirrel mincing phase and then sitting there, with your foot off the throttle, waiting for the revs to drop to 1800, when the sound of far-off warfare comes.

There are other good things too. For something that produces an almost insane 564 horsepower, it is surprisingly easy to drive. You put your foot down, the squirrels die, and you expect you’re going to spend the next five minutes wrestling with the ship’s wheel, trying to keep in a straight line.

But no. It just squats and goes. And it’s not like it’s being held in check by all sorts of clever stability controls. All you get is traction control that is on, or off. And that’s it.

Of course, it is a very big car. So massive, in fact, that very often those on the left-hand side are going through quite different weather from those on the right. And the people in the back are still in bed. But as a result of this vastness, there is room to lounge, and space in the boot for several grandfather clocks. It’s got a good ride too.

Equipment? Yes, it’s got some but not much, and the little there was didn’t work.

And you know what? I didn’t care. I’m ashamed to admit I loved this car. Yes, it’s vulgar and terrible but it’s almost ridiculously exciting and there is no other car that offers this much space and this much power for less.

So you go ahead. You buy yourself a BMW M3 instead. In the meantime, I’m going to join the Ray Winstone Appreciation Society. And go to its meetings, in Spain, in what can only be described as the real sexy beast. Ghastly but utterly, utterly lovable.

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Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst S

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