I’ve never quite been able to make my mind up whether cars are better with names or just combinations of letters and numbers.

Consider my old Roller. It’s a Rolls-Royce Corniche, and I really like the oral sensation of those melt-in-the-mouth words.

The car sounds rich and well presented, like a luxury chocolate, and intended for travel to boutique destinations. But that might just be because I know it was.

It’s a good idea to avoid the earliest incarnation of this car, partly because the gearbox was a bit troublesome but also, and more importantly, because it was correctly known as the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow Two-Door Fixed-Head Saloon by H J Mulliner Park Ward. I can see why they did away with that.

Talking of the Silver Shadow, the four-door version: I always thought that was a silly name. Why not just call it the Silver Spoon and have done with it?


Or, this being a Sixties Royce for a new breed of self-made, self-improved owner/driver, the Silver Shovel? The Bentley versions were called the T1 and T2. Better.

The Yanks are excellent at naming cars: Corvette, Chevelle, Mustang, Continental, Brougham. The Germans are good at the letters and numbers thing: CL 65 AMG, or the delicious BMW 635 CSi.

We became quite good at names, too, at least once we’d shaken off our innate deference to the establishment - Oxford, Cambridge, Consul, Ambassador.

Fiesta was a great name. I know it was a $$$$$$ mag widely available from building sites when I was a teenager, but it sounds like a laugh on a small car. Not as good as RS2000, though.

This is important, I reckon. Ford got it more wrong than anyone in history when it launched the Probe. What were they thinking of?

Pity the dealers: “Are you interested in a Probe,” is one of those questions to which the answer must always be “No”, along with “Would you like a croissant?”

Anyway. I’d now like to consider the US version of the popular television soap Top Gear. I don’t envy the three blokes who have this job, because they are required to adopt a format that is already, for some strange reason, watched all over the world in its original guise.

There they are, hamstrung by our conventions but bereft of the eight-year inheritance during which we have carefully cultivated our mutual loathing of each other.

Ultimately, though, I believe they will vanquish us and stand on our mutilated corpses, holding Clarkson’s severed head aloft like Perseus triumphing over Medusa, and all because they have the right names.

We begin with professional racing driver Tanner Foust. Not only has he apparently emerged from the pages of Goethe, he actually sounds like he’s giving the car a thrashing.

I can just see myself, hampered with the name James May, trying to charm someone at a ball-aching media function when this snake-hipped b-----d shimmies up and says: “Hi, Tanner Foust, racing driver.”

That’s worth five seconds a lap on the great circuit of life and he’s across the line while I’m still poncing around in the pits.

Next up we find actor Adam Ferrara. He’s virtually named after a car, for Pete’s sake. Even if I’d achieved this distinction I’d be called something like Mr MG Magnette.

This man simply wasn’t going to appear on an internet yoga channel any more than Emerson Fittipaldi was going to become the proprietor of a shoe shop.

I can just see myself, lumbered with a single-syllable surname evoking a popular bank holiday, trying to impress someone in a bar, when this drawling handsome git glides in and announces himself as a human supercar. It’s not really fair and I blame my parents.

Finally, we have Rutledge Wood, who is some sort of automotive analyst. He has a beard, he’s been seen in lumberjack shirts, he has nerdy specs, he’s from Alabama and he might even be a bit chubby. I’ve read him described as “bookish”.

And well he might be. In Britain, Rutledge Wood is probably a place where you should be careful not to step on any spent condoms, but over there he sounds more like the author of the Great American Novel, soon to be serialised in the mornings on Radio 4.

I can just see myself on a long-haul flight, contemplating my predictably biblical name and leafing through the complimentary magazine, and then coming across one of those twittish what-I’m-taking-on-holiday celebrity Q&As.

The question will be: “What’s in your hand luggage?” The answer will be: “Some moisturiser, my iPod and the latest Rutledge Wood.”

We cannot compete with this. Once again, what’s true of cars is also true of life. These men are destined for greatness, and I’m not, as were the Triumph Stag and Austin Maxi respectively.

I hate them already.