It's the same crowds who once cheered Stirling Moss who come out to wave you on too, though I spied one elderly lady spectating from her balcony who eyed me cynically, as if to say that she remembered Moss in '55, and I was no Moss. It's the same fear of a crash: my Gullwing's sole concession to safety being the tiny chrome grab-handles on the dash which were too hot to grab anyway. Drivers have died in the historic version of the Mille, and I know people who have sustained serious injuries. And sure, you're doing it in four days rather than one, but it's a similar kind of exhaustion. You rely on caffeine rather than amphetamine to finish each day. You sometimes wonder if it's enough, but you neck another espresso doppio and carry on regardless.

I don't expect you to feel sorry for the competitors though. There are more than enough transcendent moments to compensate for all the entirely voluntary hardships, such as when a setting Tuscan sun turns that glorious long silver hood polychromatic as you arc through the Appenine mountains, or when that same hood rises up as you give the Gullwing its head and blare hard and fast and free down the endless straights through the cornfield plains between Milan and the finish line at Brescia. When I got there I slept for thirteen hours, wondered again if I'd risk my neck again if asked, and pretty quickly reached the same conclusion.