Snow was forecast for the day of my drive to Scotland in the new Ford Mustang GT Convertible.

“Great,” I muttered to myself, getting out of my hotel bed that morning. “More than 400bhp from a five-litre V8 being transmitted through an automatic gearbox to rear wheels fitted with low-profile275/40 R19 tyres: just the job for the piste.”

 
My mood was not lightened after my day in London by the drive out of the city through the western and northern suburbs.

It was a Friday evening rush-hour in teeming rain. The narrow streets from Shepherd’s Bush out along Harrow Road to the North Circular were as inadequate to deal with the volume of traffic as London’s nineteenth century sewers are to cope with the city’s colossal volume of human waste. The pipes were jammed solid. It took an and a half to drive five miles. At one point the Mustang was stationary for 20 minutes while the rain thudded on its fabric roof. For much of that time, I was trying to avoid the eyes of about 20 people who were getting soaked the rain at a bus stop beside me. One of them was an old black man, about the same age as me, in a shabby parka with the hood up, rain dripping from its fur fringe across his face. His gaze at me and the car was steady with contempt.

This was more like it. This is what a muscle car demands. Now the Mustang felt fully at home and in keeping with its surroundings. We could have been on a highway through Alberta, heading for the high country.

Who could blame him? What could be a more brazen display of pointless consumption than a car nearly five metres long which is effectively a two-seater (its rear seats are for children and soft toys only) and whose gigantic block of an engine emits a thunderous roar when the throttle pedal is touched which blatted off the decaying fronts of the houses in those narrow streets and must have sounded like the gods farting in the face of the poor? A Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari might have made me feel more like a plutocratic tosspot who ought to be lynched by the mob on a lamp-post; but not by much.

Then there was the sodding M1/M6. Massed traffic, nightmare accidents with blazes that might have been funeral pyres and miles and miles of cones caused delays every 10 or 15 miles so incessantly that by midnight I had travelled barely halfway to Scotland. The Mustang was no better or worse in these conditions than any other car, save for the fact that the lettering on its cabin controls is too small to for me to see without putting on my reading glasses and the speed with which the needle drops on the fuel indicator is almost as alarming when the car is standing still as when it is tootling along at barely 2000rpm at 70 mph. Worn out by these frustrations, I rolled miserably into bed in a motel room that smelt as rancid as a hostel for the homeless in Kazakhstan.

At six next morning, I was woken by brilliant sunshine pouring through the cracks in the curtains and parted them to see a glittering, cloudless, azure sky. By 06.30, in scarf and gloves with overcoat buttoned to the neck and with the Mustang’s roof powered open and folded into its compartment behind the rear seats, I was back on the road. The air-conditioning was set to Hi for maximum heat and the three-stage seat heaters were pumping like a power station. Ahead stretched an empty road, a dry surface and some of the most glorious hill landscape in Europe. Snow had dusted the peaks while the lakes and burns were shining brightly in the sun.

This was more like it. This is what a muscle car demands. Now the Mustang felt fully at home and in keeping with its surroundings. We could have been on a highway through Alberta, heading for the high country.