Hypermiling to a world record | Thank Frankel it's Friday

Well, a few years ago, I did something similar, except I decided to see how many countries I could reach on one tank of diesel. What do you reckon? Actually, I was asked to do the job by the RAC and we thought we could set a new World Record so asked Guinness along to verify the attempt.

And I’d love to say I had a brilliant time, but in fact, I hated every second of it and could not have been more delighted when I crossed the final border. There were plenty of reasons for this, only some of which I’ll go into here.

The first problem is that it is of course very, very boring. Sitting at 54mph (the lowest speed at which an Audi A6 Ultra will engage top gear) for hour after hour is extremely tedious. It is also perhaps not desperately safe. We had to take a second driver because the risk-averse Guinness World Records would not sanction the record if I’d driven solo, which is what I had wanted to do. But even with two drivers you really don’t want to be swapping all the time because that burns fuel, and even when you’re a passenger (which I was for as little time as possible) you still have to keep scanning the nav for possible problems ahead so you can route around in time.

And there were plenty, including the closure of a vital 14km tunnel meaning we have to go over rather than through an Austrian mountain. And seeing all those hard-earned miles per gallon evaporate as you climb to a height higher than any place in the UK is heartbreaking. And yes you get some back on the way down but by no means all.

Actually, the most fun part of the whole attempt took place weeks before I’d even got the car, sitting in the pub with a pint and a mate, planning the route and working out how to optimise the car. For the latter Guinness would accept nothing that could not be done in the normal run of things, such as fitting special tyres or taping up the panel gaps, but we could choose the low rolling resistance rubber that was a standard option and choose our own pressures. They even allowed us to jack the car up on one side and add a few more drops of diesel, which surprised me somewhat. We also used a car that had done a few miles and was therefore fully run-in, which was just common sense.

We started in The Netherlands at 10am on day one, at a hotel so close to the Belgian border you could see it. So by 10.01, we’d already done two countries. We were in Luxembourg at midday and shortly thereafter in France. Four down, who knew how many to go?

We hit Switzerland at 5.15 pm, our fifth country and the number at which Guinness had said it would recognise the record. But we were not done yet. Not even close. By 9pm, we’d crossed the country, popped into Liechtenstein because, well, you would, and were now in Austria which is where we had our tunnel trouble. And as one day turned to the next we were still in Austria but had nipped briefly into Germany as we went past the border. That made eight.

From there we headed south, paying a fleeting visit to Italy on the way but as we arrived at 4am were in Slovenia precisely six minutes later, I can’t say we exactly made the most of our visit. Slovenia is unutterably beautiful but small, which is why we were in Croatia before breakfast with a decision to make. Bosnia was not far, but we expected queues and bureaucracy at the border. But it would be our twelfth country and too good an opportunity to miss. We were in and out by 10am, precisely 24 hours after we started, and 12 countries to the good.

And now we had a really difficult call to make. We were already very low on juice but knew we could make it to the nearest border with Serbia. However there was a more distant border we might not make, but if we did and could survive just seven miles on Serbian soil, we’d get Hungary too. Which we did, crossing the final border into our 14^th country some 26 hours after leaving our first, with 1159 miles covered on a single tank of diesel. At which point the good lady from Guinness popped out of the support van, checked the seal on our fuel filler cap one last time and presented me with the certificate that hangs in the smallest room in my house to this day.

I was happy we had made it, happier to have a record that stands to this day and happiest of all to know I’d never have to do anything quite so stultifyingly tedious and tiring ever again.