Why this is my favourite car in the world | Thank Frankel it's Friday

I’m also influenced by the fact I come from a Bentley-loving family – my father had his own rather less illustrious bitsa 4.5 and when he lost all his money in 1974 was very clear that if the bailiffs came to take it away, he was going with it. He drove it everywhere: across America, around South Africa and several Mille Miglias. When I was old enough to drive it, it was the car in which I learned about centre throttles, crash gearboxes and plenty more besides. So yes, I’m biased.

The first actual Blower I drove was the Bentley’s other car, the factory demonstrator which is a standard road car which someone had converted to a conventional pedal layout. Is it heresy to say I was slightly disappointed? It didn’t seem much faster than an unblown car with a healthy engine and that big lump of metal slung out between the front dumb irons made it feel a little ponderous.

My first experience of the Birkin car wasn’t that great either. It was during the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 which massively limited where we could go and what we could do and the weather was filthy. I drove it, but not far and not fast. It was like uncorking a bottle of Petrus and only being allowed to sniff its contents. And I thought that was that. Who gets a second chance at such a car?

Well, me, as it happens. In 2014 and to my dumbfounded surprise, I was asked to do the Mille Miglia in the car. I barely slept I was so excited, right up to the moment I slipped a disc and instead of driving my favourite car on an incredible event, ended up in hospital with someone jabbing needles into my spine.

But the third time was lucky, preposterously so as it turned out. It was now June 2017 and I learned that the Blower was part of a Bentley cavalcade to Le Mans, a race I was attending anyway. And it was quietly suggested that perhaps the car could delay its return by a day and perhaps I could drive it and take some pictures.

And that was that. Thanks to Bentley’s brilliant French fixer I had not only the car and the vast majority of the track that was public road on which to play, but also a chunk of the purpose built circuit too, all the way from before the Ford chicane, past the pits, under the Dunlop Bridge and down the other side to the Esses and towards Tertre Rouge. So I rose at dawn and went thundering down the same Mulsanne Straight as had Birkin 87 years earlier. I rounded the hairpin and drove it as fast as I could down the same road to Indianapolis and Arnage my hero had plied more than a lifetime earlier.

When the roads got busy we retired to the track where in sweltering temperatures I drove the car for hours to get the pictures and film we needed, sliding it through the Dunlop chicane, barely able to believe it was happening. And while I soon wilted in the hundred degree heat, the Blower never missed a beat. It didn’t even get hot: it put up with treatment you’d think twice about dispensing to a brand new car without so much as a cough of protest.

And unlike the demonstrator, the Team Car was everything I’d ever hoped it would be, and quite possibly more. It was fast, amazingly agile for its size, age and weight, ultimately involving to drive and one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life. As ever with such things, just having the car, the weather and the facilities is never enough: you have to be allowed by the owners to drive the car properly. And this time there was no quick sniff of a cork: I downed the entire bottle while its carers looked on in wry amusement at the sight of their ward being used for the purpose for which it was designed.

Somewhat incredibly I drove it again last year at Silverstone (which is where these photographs were taken) just before it was dismantled to be digitised and used as a template for the identical continuation cars Bentley is making. I am sure they will put it back again with infinite care and I hope that, one day, our paths might cross again. If not, I have already been luckier than I could ever had dreamed.