THANKS TO our full-fat winter, the number of spanner-welding opportunities have been severely culled and I’ve had too much time to kill.

  Yes, I could either risk doing a bit of fettling in the road – and risk gift-wrapping my frozen spanners with my own skin – or chance a run up to the shed. Then I’d skid off somewhere remote, get stuck and end up eating that ancient packet of Tunes which have semi-decomposed and welded themselves to the Focus’s driver doorbin. No thanks.

  So, yes, because there is nothing ever on proper TV, I fell victim to the endless hypnotic, repetitious emissions of Dave – as I did my damnedest to break my own tea guzzling and bollock-scratching record.

  The result of which means that where I once didn’t really see the point of the Bugatti Veyron, I now passionately, obsessively loathe it – and it really has consumed me. I’ve ranted at the telly, corrected self-appointed experts on forums, bored mates with my feelings and only just stopped myself from ringing up and interrupting Jeremy Vine on his wireless programme. So dear reader, I really have to get this off my chest once and for all.

  However, my loathing of the fat Bug is not for the usual fundamentalist reasons... It’s not because it sullies a hallowed badge or that it is the current four-wheeled celebrity-endorsed sweetheart. Nope, it’s because of the ridiculous number of times I’ve heard it being likened to Concorde – which is the biggest dose of over-inflated heaving dung I have yet encountered.

  “Oh, this really is a Concorde moment,” chant those with limited imaginations and a Dave loyalty card. Thus insinuating that the Veyron is an uncompromising technical tour-de-force of equal parallel to the Big White Bird.

  Now, as someone who was born within the roar of Concorde’s Bristol-Siddeley Olympus 593s, I don’t merely proclaim this as complete and utter bunkum – I know it is complete and utter bunkum.

  Firstly, on what planet does this make any sense? Can anyone really compare a pioneering supersonic air-liner with a car - even if it is admittedly a fast one? No, they cannot.

  Of course, there is a very real danger I am about to bore you so utterly, that you will be reduced to a gooey stain on the carpet. Citing almost autistic attention to detail, such as Concorde’s fuel doubling up as coolant for her sizeable and essential air-conditioning units – thus saving precious weight – and contrasting that to the 2 tonne Veyron. A 1001bhp car which is rumoured to squander the equivalent of a further 2000bhp in heat generation. However, I know – and would fully deserve it – that you would quickly click off elsewhere.

  No, it’s far simpler than that – you can tell the Veyron isn’t an Earthbound Concorde by just looking at it. There couldn’t be a greater contrast to Concorde’s elegant beauty and purity of design – a design not created by a stylist who can't talk without excessive gesticulation, but by pure mathematics and physics courtesy of boffins at Filton and Toulouse.

  Now, ask yourself this question: if the Veyron was similarly singularly created – without compromise – to cheekily slap the buxom bottom of Mother Nature and to cruise at hyperspeed with the minimum of fuss, would it really have a series of ruddy great holes in its nose?

  Of course it wouldn’t, but then the Veyron was built for a very different reason. It was a four-wheeled show-pony – a concept car – which had to perform thanks to a dictate from VW’s then boss. Not to assault technical obstacles and to challenge physics, but to re-establish Bugatti as the premium super-car amongst the world’s obscenely rich über chavs. If this approach were adopted by the Bristol Aeroplane Company and Sud Aviation, the original brief would have read: ‘Super Sonic Transport aircraft, cruise speed Mach 2.2, must be styled to resemble blinged up retro aircraft. Ya get me...?’

  To me, the Veyron looks very-wrong, thanks to its brutal glaring Daniella Westbrook nostril, which from some angles makes it look like a fat toad which has been run over. Yes it’s fast, it also has four-wheel drive and one of those daft DLT gearboxes, which is so infuriating that it may as well be an automatic.

  Respected road testers say that to drive the Veyron is to be driven by a computer. Compare that to Concorde, a refined projectile which carried 100 passengers yet when empty it handled with such balance and deftness that it could execute a barrel roll.

  Admittedly, I have to quote others, because I have not driven the Veyron – but then, I don’t want to – and after this, fully expect to have a restraining order served on my grumpy arse. Experience tells me that in order to have a first class driving experience, you only need two-wheel drive, balance and lightness. Ask me to compile a list of exhilarating drives and there won’t be single 4x4 car on it. You see, 4x4 hampers superfast turn-in and steering feedback, and even the best, the Nissan GTR, isn’t quite up to a Lotus for pure joyous handling. So pile on more weight and a silly gearbox, and I suspect it will handle with the verve of HMS Dreadnought.

  If a car really has to be compared to Concorde it should be the McLaren F1. A joint venture which is devoid of crass ‘ooh-look-at-me’ jewellery, with a soundtrack that makes a chap’s trousers fidget and which owes its success to being as simple as it possibly can be. The F1, like Concorde, demonstrates uncompromising clarity of analogue thought and is so joyously devoid of computer-trickery that it represents the pinnacle of its type.

  Were it not for technological jealousy, Concorde could have and should have changed the way we all travel. Instead, the knee-jerk reactionaries started bleating concerns about the effects of passing through the sound barrier over land. Now, we can see that this was just the thin end of the Nanny wedge.

  Sadly although the Veyron is the fastest production car in the world – it is also the first most pointless fast production car in the world. As every NIMBY in these Islands campaigns for 20mph urban limits and the Kremlin reduces country speed limits and enforces existing speed limits with Stalinist zeal, what really is the point of an ugly toad that will gobble your licence in second gear?

  The Veyron doesn’t excite or thrill on the same scale as Concorde did during her service life – and I can prove it with one word, or more accurately the lack of one word. Some car manufacturers have contrived to make us talk about their products in the same way as we do about Concorde, but this connivance has been completely unsuccessful.

  You will have read about the ‘completeness’ of Mondeo or perhaps the life-affirming benefits of Prius, but it just doesn’t sound right. Will your appreciation of Veyron make you yearn for Veyron or, more correctly, will your appreciation of the Veyron make you yearn for a Veyron?

  To date, there has been no other type of transport which is so revered and so appreciated by the British public that it loses both its indefinite and definite articles – as if it had become a living being. Ultimately, Concorde is such a beautiful, magnificent achievement that to call it ‘the Concorde’ just seems wrong.

  Almost as wrong as comparing a strange-looking £1m supercar to one of Europe’s finest engineering achievements.