It won't be long before they're selling a half-litre of petrol at Duty Free - a presentation bottle of BP's finest would make a grand Father's Day present

Off to Le Mans again, and a cracker of a race. As a guest of Audi I got to spend the first half of the race commiserating with them, as the troops prepared to hang out the white flag to the French, but was then able to join in the celebrations as the race was turned on its head, and there was an awful lot of ‘I told you so’ and ‘tortoise and hare’ stuff.

In fact, the race was really more hare and hare, as both Peugeot and Audi were pushed to the limit. Peugeot should be
congratulated for a really terrific effort. There seemed no thought of backing off for a finish, and the fact that the race was a record-breaking distance this year, beating the pre-Mulsanne chicane epic of 40 years ago, made their attempt all the more worthy.

My real support was saved for the Highcroft team and the LMP2 class, with no2 son-in-law on board, but despite my mind-force projections the car failed in the final quarter of the race, although they got it across the line to qualify as a finisher. I thought watching the family race would be a nice way to enjoy retirement from racing myself, but it’s hopelessly stressful – and there’s a particular difficulty when they do really well. Winning an American Le Mans Series race rather puts ‘Mason triumphs in Silverstone five-lapper’ in the shade.

As an antidote to all this rushing about I went off to drive some of VW’s new cars, and enjoyed trying to see just how much fuel
I could burn on the indicator of the Polo BlueMotion. I managed 16mpg for a moment, but overall you’d be hard pressed to get worse than 80-odd miles to the gallon. It won’t be long before they’re selling a half-litre of petrol at Duty Free, and it’ll be worth bringing in a couple. A presentation bottle of BP’s finest would make a grand Father’s Day present…

The bit that worries me, though, is the size of these cars. The Polo now feels about as big as a Transit, and a Golf must be the size of a vintage Bentley. After I had done my ecological duty I was unable to resist a jaunt in the Scirocco R. I know I’m rather spoilt when it comes to unnecessarily powerful cars, but I have to say this was quite fast enough to keep a team of specialist speeding lawyers busy for a week.

The Bugatti Club held a ‘Wings and Wheels’ outing to Rendcomb, which was a fantastic day, with perfect weather, lovely cars and lots of messing about with old aeroplanes. The flour bombing of a target from a Piper Cub is always fun, and at 50 knots at 100 feet most struggled to hit the target. I hope it gave all of them renewed respect for Guy Gibson and the Dambusters who did it at night: faster, higher, and with nasty people firing guns at them. There was also a wing-walking display, which was nearly as good as the one a couple of months ago, when ‘Steady’ Barker celebrated his 92nd birthday with a trip atop a Stearman.

I have to say that I think I saw him do exactly the same for his 80th, so the novelty is beginning to wear off for both of us, but I understand he’s going to do something more spectacular for his centenary – which should mean most of us won’t be allowed by our doctors to watch, for fear of getting panic attacks.

At the time of writing, the Goodwood Festival of Speed is approaching and I have gone onto a strict dumpling-and-sausage regime in order to fit into my Auto Union ‘one size fits all’ overalls. I’ve been offered a couple of mouth-watering drives in other cars from factory collections and, although I don’t think the timetable will allow me to take advantage of them this year, I really do feel cheered that more and more of these cars are being brought out to entertain the public as well as to promote the brands.

Not only do I approve of seeing these cars run, I think it may be another way of ensuring that some of the engineering skills required to maintain them may get handed down to a new generation of engineers. An ever-increasing number of manufacturers are now appreciating the advantages of being able to look after customers with heritage cars as well as new ones, and I suspect more and more weep when they think of those huge piles of spares consigned to the scrapyard. But it would be nice to think that there may be profit opportunities in digging out some of those old drawings (and some of those old engineers) and re-manufacturing the really hard-to-find items.

NICK MASON

Pink Floyd’s drummer and a great car enthusiast, Nick has raced classic and modern cars for the last 30 years and has written two books: one on cars, Into the Red, and one on his version of the history of Pink Floyd, Inside Out.