Some readers may remember an encounter I had with Jeremy Clarkson during an episode of Top Gear. He was in a lift with me at the BBC and was sitting in a very small car. Before we started filming, he said: “All you have to do is stand there and ignore me”, which is quite hard when you’re standing next to a grown man in a tiny car in a lift.

And then he started muttering to himself. “The last time I was in a lift with Fiona Bruce she put chewing gum in my hair,” he said. This is absolutely not true.

After I helped him out in his car, he said: “She does have quite a nice bottom.” Out loud, to the camera. I suppose it’s better than saying it was a horrible one, but it was pretty embarrassing even so.

I got my own back when I appeared on Top Gear as the “star in a reasonably priced car” and mentioned in passing that his bottom could do with a bit of work. I don’t think he really cared but now I think I’ve managed to do something that will really get to him: perch my bottom — nice or otherwise — on his patch.

I know what he would say: “Bruce is currently third from last in the ‘star in a reasonably priced car’ league table, and even then she managed to burn out the clutch halfway around one of the laps and had to walk the rest of the circuit.” So how can I be qualified to test any car, let alone a Ferrari 430 Scuderia, which costs more than many people’s houses, is billed as a race-bred beast best suited for a day at the track and has an engine so loud that when I first switched it on I jumped out of my skin and my children started to cry?

Well, let me put it this way. I have to walk through the Top Gear office at the BBC quite often to get to one of the editing suites. And the atmosphere is pretty laddish, as you might expect, a bit sexist and not entirely grown up. It’s a fair reflection of the show, but is it actually any good if you want to know a bit more about a car? The Scuderia may have Jeremy leaping about shouting “Power!”, but what is it like to live with in the real world?

First an admission: my car is a Citroën C4 Picasso. This has seven seats, with DVD screens in the rear seats for the kids, and is incredibly comfortable to drive. I love it. It’s a car you get in and you don’t even have to think. The headlights come on automatically, it has windscreen wipers that sense when it’s raining, and automatic air-conditioning. That’s the sort of car I like and I am deeply attached to it. It is a total living room on wheels.

The Ferrari is not like this. According to my 11-year-old son Sam (who is a Top Gear fan and immediately Googled it), the Scuderia is based on the standard Ferrari F430 — only it is faster.

He told me the 4.3-litre V8 engine produces an “incredible” 510bhp and 347 lb ft of torque, whatever that is; that it features new pistons and hand-polished intake manifolds, plus an exhaust system that “breathes” more freely. It also has Ferrari’s fastest gearbox, which can swap ratios in 60 milliseconds, and it can sprint from 0-62mph in 3.6sec with a top speed of 198mph. It costs £168,9621, or about £148,000 more than my Citroën.

When it arrived at my north London home, the first problem was getting it onto my driveway. The front of the car is so low that the slight slope of the drive meant there was no way I could manoeuvre the Ferrari up there without scraping the underside.

The man from Ferrari and I spent half an hour discussing this, and then discovered that if you reversed it up the drive at a specific angle and only a hair’s breadth from the wall you could get it in with only a couple of horrible-sounding scrapes.

Our neighbours watched this manoeuvre with their hands over their faces. Before he left, the Ferrari man eyed me warily and said that although most things were covered by the insurance, if I kerbed the wheels I would have to pay for them.