Aston Martin DBS Volante

And this brings me on to an interesting question. Can you truly score a row of perfect tens and emerge from the effort with any personality at all? I give you, by way of reference points, Steve “interesting” Davis and Michael Schumacher. I give you, too, Roger Federer. I like the look of the guy and I like his style, but can you imagine him climbing under the dinner table and tying someone’s shoelaces together? Can you imagine him drunk? In short, then, to be good, do you have to be boring? The answer, of course, is no. John McEnroe wasn’t boring. James Hunt wasn’t boring. And yes, I could imagine George Best drunk, easily.

This is because they have a gift. Sure, they worked hard to reach the top of their game, but plainly they didn’t have to exorcise every human trait in order to get there.

And that’s what’s gone wrong with the R8. It was designed by people who are not naturally given to making supercars. They had to work harder than those who are. They had to have more meetings, set up more committees, and work longer into the night to overcome their natural tendency to give it a diesel engine and two back seats.

You do not see this with a Rolls-Royce Phantom. This scores just as many perfect tens as the R8, and yet it has a soul as well. It feels like it was born good, not nurtured over a billion cups of committee-room coffee to be that way.

I’m not sure we will see such effortlessness from the new Rolls-Royce Ghost, which I fear is a BMW trying to be English — a bit like Michael Caine in The Eagle has Landed. I’m frightened it will all end badly, but I will reserve judgment until I have driven one. Or, more properly, been driven in one to the ballet.

We do see it, however, in the Mazda MX-5, the new Ford Fiesta, the BMW M3, the Range Rover TDV8 and the Ferrari 430. All of these cars do what they are supposed to do perfectly. But they have that certain something as well. They have a soul.

But the car that pulls off the trick better than all the others is the Aston Martin DBS Volante.

When I first encountered the hard-top version of this car, I was a bit disappointed. Aston Martin was maintaining that it had made an all-new car but you didn’t need an x-ray machine to see it had done no such thing. The DBS, as plain as day, was a DB9 with some sill extensions and a bit more power.