Thank Frankel It's Friday – Cheap thrills in Welsh hills

But there is a catch, and while I’m not expecting you to be welling up any time soon, a catch it remains. None of these cars is mine. I drive them for usually quite a short period of time and then have to give them back. Recently I drove the Aston Martin ‘Red Dragon’ that will be auctioned at Goodwood by Bonhams tomorrow night (estimate £1.6 million to £2 million) and completed a grand total of six laps before I reached the point where spending any longer in the car would be to risk something going wrong (as it always can in old cars on race tracks) for no further gain to the story I was there to write. So I parked it up. It was like someone whipping the cork out of a bottle of Petrus and being told I could only sniff.

Sometimes however, and admittedly at the rather more modest level accessible to me as a private individual rather than an allegedly professional journalist, me and a few chums get together to mess about with our own machinery. And as you all saddle up into your beloved old classics and head down to Goodwood for the Revival, I thought I’d share the most recent experience, not least because it happened one week ago today.

This time I was hosting in the Welsh borders, my guests being fellow hacks Richard Bremner and John Simister and BMW public affairs boss Graham Biggs. And what an eclectic assortment they brought: Bremner selected a late Triumph TR7 from his extraordinary arsenal of Leyland survivors, Simister a Sunbeam Stiletto that on no account must ever be referred to as a Hillman Imp. Biggs turned up right on message in his near perfect BMW 3.0CSI.

As for me, my old Land Rover, even older Fiat 500 and positively ancient Citroen 2CV would have all been too slow while my Peugeot 205GTI would have been perfect for the job. But I’d used that with both Simister and Bremner for the MSA Spring Classic a few months back and as a startlingly blue Porsche 968 Sport is the most recent addition to what is starting to look like a worrying accumulation of old metal, that’s what I took. A little over specified for the job perhaps, but better than holding everyone up.

We met for lunch in a local pub and headed off over a route I pretended to have sweated over for weeks but which I more or less made up on the spot. The wonderful thing about being in this part of the world with no specific timetable or destination is that if you’re not enjoying the road you’re on, you can just turn off and enjoy another instead.

Actually we did have a goal in mind, a road I’ve been using for nearly 30 years – a dozen miles of wide open space, light on traffic, long on quick, challenging corners and with car parks at either end. And so we just thrashed up and down until we’d all driven every car.

The Triumph made me sad, because it’s so easy to see what a success it could have been had it been better looking and less approximately constructed. Impossibly softly sprung, it rode and handled beautifully. I thought the BMW would be a pudding with a lovely engine and was proven precisely half right. Any BMW straight six engine from that era was a thing of wonder and for its smoothness, voice and response and it still is, but it’s the car’s balance and precision that I’ll remember more because it was so surprising. What I feared might be a somewhat sloppy tourer proved to be a real driver’s machine.

As for the Stiletto, even on the way it had surprised simply by its ability to keep up with cars with engines two or three times the size of mildly tuned 1.0-litre motor in its boot, but to drive it was a revelation: so tight, taut and like an early 911 to handle. A hoot in other words.

Once we were done, we popped into the pub for a quick sharpener before going home and letting the food, wine and tales of derring-do really flow. How much fun did we have? I ask only that you believe me when I say there have been days when I’ve driven cars worth more money than most people will see in their entire lifetimes and enjoyed them less than this.