The 1968 Dodge Charger is the American muscle car | Thank Frankel it’s Wednesday

But America has a strange effect on me, at least so far as cars are concerned. It’s like a switch is flicked in my brain the moment I emerge blinking into the heat and sunshine of kerbside LAX. Cars I have loved all my life suddenly mean nothing to me, while others to which I would give not one single thought anywhere else in the world have me screeching to a halt and running across the road to pore over.

I’ve written before about a life-affirming and formative trip I made up the east coast from Miami, through Florida, Georgia, and through the Carolinas with only a 250,000 mile, 7.4-litre Chevrolet Suburban for company. It was 1991, I was 25 and with my elbow out of the window, chain-smoking Marlboros, I felt like the king of the world. Which is strange because what I was actually doing was merely fitting in with what everyone else around me was doing. But with the far-off thunder of a Motor City big block bent eight keeping me rolling, it was a driving experience more memorable than any number I’ve had in implausibly powerful supercars since.

I know that such cars are technically not very good and represent a profligate waste of the world’s resources, but if I lived in the US, particularly in a snow state, I’d have something similar: warm, comforting and reassuring in all conditions.

But what, I have often pondered, would I park next to my not entirely unaffordable all-American three car garage? I can tell you a few things it wouldn’t be tempting as they are: a modern hot-rod like a Dodge Hellcat or Mustang GT500 among them. I’ve driven these and always enjoyed them, but not without the sense that sooner or later the novelty of their 700 plus horsepower outputs would wear off and what would be left behind wouldn’t be special enough to justify the space in the shed.

A Ford GT? Maybe the 2004 car because it was brilliant, but I’m not sure what I’d do with it, and certainly not the more recent GT because I’d have even less of a purpose for it. Besides, driving it would serve only to remind me how much better (and cheaper) the equivalent Ferraris and McLarens were.

No, total cliché though it is, I’d have a 1960s Dodge Charger, straight out of the Dukes Of Hazzard. Specifically, I’d have a 1968 (the best looking) 440 R/T with a 7.2-litre big block and, ideally, in triple black spec, so black paint, black seats, black vinyl roof. A Hemi would be even better, but to me and what I’d use it for, not worth the vast price premium.

I love 1960s American muscle cars, but for my rather simple brain, this is the one. Once, me and a mate hatched a plan to find one in a desert state like Nevada or Arizona because it would be rot free, drive it to New York and ship it home where it would be sold, the profits therefrom paying for the entire trip. I was saved by the fact the only cars I could find were either wrecks or over-restored prom queens, the nice usable example I wanted simply didn’t appear to exist. Which is just as well, because if we’d gone through with it the flaw in the plan would have been revealed, namely that I would never be able to sell it.

Which leaves the last American car. And actually it would be something pre-war. I used to laugh at how terrible American cars were when I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and the 1981 AMC Concord to which I was once briefly exposed may be the worst car in which I have ever had the misfortune to travel. But what is less appreciated, at least on this side of the soup, is just how advanced American cars of the immediately pre-war era were.

I don’t know enough about them to come up with a specific model, but my father once owned a 1938 Buick Special which came complete with independent suspension, syncromesh gears and a rather lovely 4-litre straight-eight motor. His plan was to use it for transport on those rare occasions he was in the US, because it cost next to nothing to buy and parts were plentiful, but ended up enjoying it so much he shipped it back home. Having driven it thousands of miles, I could see why.

So that’s it: three cars, three camshafts and no fewer than 24 cylinders between them. And God bless the United States of America.