If I’m honest, it hasn’t been an entirely happy relationship. The seats are so hip-hugging that I am unable to offer lifts to fat girls. To make matters worse, I am also unable to explain why. “Because your arse is too big to fit in the seat” tends to make women cry.

It is also extremely difficult to fasten the seatbelts and impossible if you are wearing a coat. And then there’s the question of range. Like the standard CLK it has a 62-litre (13½-gallon) fuel tank, which is fine if the engine up front is a parsimonious diesel. But when it’s a massive V8, 62 litres does not get you to the end of the road.

Worse than this, though, was the ride. On a normal British road that has been dug up by slovenly apes and repaired by companies with both eyes fixed firmly on the bottom line, it was intolerable. I do mean that. Intolerable. So bad that I actually looked forward to it running out of fuel so I could get out and have a respite from the battering.

I knew what had happened, of course. I’d been so seduced by the power and the styling and the Grim Reaper handling that I’d overlooked the bad bits. Buying one had been a bit like choosing a wife based entirely on the size of her breasts.

Honestly, I was thinking of getting rid. But then I read something interesting. The Black comes with adjustable suspension. Lots of cars do, these days. And ordinarily my advice on this matter would be plain and simple. Leave it alone. A big car maker such as Mercedes-Benz knows an awful lot more about chassis dynamics than you do. If it thought the car could be improved by fiddling with the damper settings, it would have done so at the factory.

Adjustable suspension is nothing more than a sop to the ego of the terminally stupid. And something a salesman can talk about on a test drive: “Sir can tailor it to sir’s bespoke requirements, sir ...”

But I’m sorry, Mercedes has test tracks and millions of laptops. It employs thousands of doctors who have no sense of humour, just an insatiable thirst to do the best they can. So the notion that you, in a shed, can improve on their work with nothing but a screwdriver is as absurd as trying to improve on a Gordon Ramsay soufflé using nothing but what you have in your pocket.

I was chatting about this to a chap called Gavan Kershaw a few weeks ago. Gavan is the top chassis boffin at Lotus. He is responsible for the Elise, the extraordinarily balanced Evora and, I’m told, the marvellously supple new Jaguar XFR. Most of all, though, he is the chap who designed Top Gear’s test track.

He’s a very clever boy and I trust him, so when he said he would have a look at the Black, I agreed. Mainly because, no matter what he did, he couldn’t possibly make it worse.

He didn’t. It’s still not comfy. It’s not even halfway to a nod in the general direction of comfiness. The tyres are too low-profile and the chassis-strengthening beams too vigorous for that. But his twiddles do now mean that, for short periods behind the wheel, it is possible to think of something other than the pain.

And here’s the really good bit. By making it a bit softer, he has ensured it is now nearly two seconds faster on a lap round the Top Gear test track.

And the steering, already very good, is now sublime.

Explore Jeremy Clarkson

• Greatest Hits

• Good Car, Bad Car