Adam Hay-Nicholls

I was recently lent the latest Subaru Forester to test drive, and I enjoyed its sturdiness, its space and the frugality of its 2.0 hybrid engine. But as my mileage progressed over the course of a week’s bombing around the back roads of north Norfolk, I started to have a hankering for a nose ring, a tattoo of interlocking female glyphs, and to dye my hair pink and blue and wear dungarees. I put on a k.d. lang playlist, drove home, and watched Angelina Jolie in Gia. Was the Subaru turning me – a bloke, with no unusual pronouns – into a lesbian? Let me explain. In the 1990s, Subaru launched a calculated and groundbreaking advertising campaign on the US market.

The year was 1982. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher rerouted an RAF Hercules over foreign territory and requested the scrambling of jets and choppers and ground troops. The diplomatic cables burned back and forth. President Ronald Reagan expressed concern. The situation was desperate. This wasn’t the Falklands War – that came a few months later. This, in fact, may have been more emotional for the Iron Lady. Her only son, 29-year-old Mark, had gone missing. A privileged and rather bored young man who’d failed his accountancy exams three times, Mark Thatcher was searching for some meaning in life and caught the motor racing bug.

As an 11-year-old, I tried to persuade my mother that we should sell our Victorian farmhouse in the Wiltshire countryside and pour every penny into a brand-new 212mph Jaguar XJ220, which cost £435,000 at the time. We would simply live inside this low-slung two-seat supercar, parked up in a lay-by with a washing line hung between the car aerial and a nearby tree. ‘We’re not just doing that to be cool, we’re doing it because it makes us more money’ Now an alternative has arisen. Car manufacturers are racing to build luxury residential towers in the enclaves of flashy money. In Miami and Dubai, Mercedes-Benz is putting the three-pointed star on buildings designed to accommodate their aspirant demographic.

The Cotswolds used to be a wonderfully bucolic fantasy of English villages; red telephone boxes, gilded honey-stone hamlets with verdant greens where the vicar would umpire cricket matches, and pubs where poachers and gamekeepers would mix. Then it became fashionable and now it’s been Farrow & Balled to within an inch of its life. The Cotswolds is not the country. It is an extension of Notting Hill You could blame the King for purchasing Highgrove House in Tetbury in the 1980s. Suddenly, wannabe poshos began buying Cotswold cottages in the hope some royalty would rub off on them (real poshos would never consider doing something so outré, and prefer Norfolk anyway). Now it’s experiencing the ‘Bamford effect’ thanks to the Daylesford farm shop.

Steve Cotten is standing to be an MP in this week’s general election. He has also been called ‘Britain’s grumpiest pub landlord’ by the Daily Mail, the Mirror and the New York Post. In truth, Steve, 64, isn’t grumpy. Not often, anyway. He’s eccentric, certainly, but kind, generous and good humoured, and dedicated to his rural community and his pub’s clientele – many of whom are almost as mad as he is. He’s also met Rishi Sunak. ‘His handlers got upset that I kept calling him Ricky’ I discovered Exmoor’s Poltimore Arms five years ago, and have now made it my local despite living four-and-a-half hours away in London. The ‘Polti’, as regulars call it, has no address, only GPS coordinates.

Finland has a population of only 5.5 million, but it leads the world in motorsport. It’s the crucible of racing greats Markku Alén, Timo Salonen, Ari Vatanen, Keke Rosberg, Hannu Mikkola, Juha Kankkunen, Tommi Mäkinen, Mika Häkkinen, Marcus Grönholm, Kimi Räikkönen, reigning World Rally champion Kalle Rovanperä and current Formula One driver Valtteri Bottas. Known collectively as the Flying Finns, the country can boast nine F1 drivers, 57 grand prix wins and four F1 world titles, 16 World Rally crowns, five Paris-Dakar wins, two Le Mans 24 Hours victories and a World Endurance GT champion. Could omnipresent driver aids and the green movement spell the end for the Flying Finns?

Equal parts hype and horsepower, this weekend’s Las Vegas Grand Prix is the most talked about sporting event of the year. For the first time, Formula One will take to the strip, with 20 cars screaming past the floodlit Venetian Caesar’s Palace and the faux Eiffel Tower at 200mph. Certainly, it lost its shirt on Thursday when a loose drain cover damaged the Ferrari of Carlos Sainz and the Alpine of Esteban Ocon. The first practice session was cancelled after just eight minutes while someone went to fetch some fresh concrete. The second and final of the night’s practice sessions was delayed and extended, finishing at 3.30 a.m. on Friday and waking up anyone who wasn’t in a nightclub or at a card table.

Back in the early days of the motor car, Rolls-Royce would sell you a ladder chassis and drivetrain, but for the bodywork you’d have to consult a coachbuilder and write a separate cheque. It wasn’t until 1946 that Rolls-Royce provided its own. Henry Royce dealt with the oily bits, but when it came to the styling, his patrons had to visit the likes of Park Ward, Mulliner, James Young and Hooper. There were dozens of firms to choose from and the outcome would be a collaboration between designer and client, not unlike tailoring. There was an upside to all of this: Rolls-Royce customers often ended up with something unique, or at the very least rare.

There were a couple of moments where this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed might’ve been a little dicey. Day three of the four-day extravaganza, on Saturday, was cancelled due to 50mph winds. That may not sound all that alarming, but the ‘central feature’ at the Festival of Speed amounted to nearly 100 tonnes of steel sculpture soaring eight storeys over Goodwood House – seat of the Duke of Richmond since the 17th century – with typically several thousand petrolheads picnicking below. It also included six valuable Porsches hovering just below the clouds, and with the public told to stay away there was still every chance His Grace might suffer a Blaupunkt 962 stuck in his roof. The steel sculpture over Goodwood House [PA] The Goodwood hillclimb takes place on a 1.

Last weekend, Ferrari contested the top category at the Le Mans 24 Hours for the first time in 50 years, and they took me along for the ride. The greatest endurance race in the world celebrated its centenary, and the grandstands and campsites were even more packed than usual – 325,000 fans descended on France’s La Sarthe region, many of them Brits making the journey over in their sports cars and motorhomes.  For petrolheads, it’s Glastonbury with wheels. They come to see more than 60 cars, and their tag teams of three drivers each, driven to their limits and often beyond from 4pm on Saturday till 4pm Sunday. Durability – both human and mechanical – is the watch word here, as well as speed.

Some years ago, I was despatched to Las Vegas to learn how to be a chauffeur. The Wynn hotel had purchased a fleet of Rolls-Royces, and their Aloysius Parkers were being taught how to drive the Rolls-Royce way – i.e. a cut above your Lincoln Town Car etiquette. ‘The umbrella can be used both defensively and offensively,’ I recall Rolls-Royce’s Andi McCann saying, as if he’d walked off the set of Kingsman. Andi is the personal driver to Rolls’s CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös and the company’s lead trainer.

I recently spent a long weekend in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, driving a fast car, eating tortellini alla panna twice a day and rifling through Luciano Pavarotti’s DVD library. The tenor’s house, outside Modena, has been converted into a museum filled with his many shiny awards and Hermès scarves, framed photos with Bono and Mandela and, yes, his unrivalled collection of Police Academy movies. I also visited Modena’s sprawling San Cataldo cemetery to see the imposing family tomb of one Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari, 1898-1988. I listened carefully. It was peaceful. Apart from birdsong, not a whisper. There was no whirring, no drilling, no vibration or rumbling from underground. Everybody said he’d be spinning in his grave. Talk about a let-down.

Last weekend, Beyoncé was paid $24 million (£19.5 million) to perform for 1,500 invited guests in Dubai. Somehow, I was among them. Her set, which was her first live performance in four years, was 85 minutes long. That’s £230,000 a minute or £13,000 per head. And those millions are the mere tip of the air-conditioned iceberg. Queen B’s record-smashing fee barely surpassed my own champagne and beluga caviar bill that evening – covered by the host. This was all in aid of the opening of a hotel – Atlantis The Royal – which cites itself as ‘the most ultra-luxury resort in the world’. Never has a ribbon-cutting ceremony been so decadent. It brought to mind the Shah of Iran’s notorious 1971 party amid the ancient ruins of Persepolis, but designed for Instagram.

Prior to kick-off, Fifa declared the World Cup in Qatar to be ‘a fully carbon-neutral event’, triggering enough spluttering, snorting and involuntary cackles to feed an entire wind farm. Seven giant brand-new stadiums, open-air air-conditioning in the desert, goodness knows how many long-haul flights in and out, and an armada of cruise ships to store the Wags. Righto, Mr Infantino. The Fifa president is the poster boy of talking tripe – the Comical Ali of sports-washing. Football is losing the climate fight like Costa Rica lost against Spain (7-0). Instead, the world’s most eco-friendly sport is motor racing. I’m serious. Let me introduce you to Extreme E. Extreme E, or XE for short, is like Mad Max meets The Blue Planet.

‘Bang! Bang! …Thud.’ It’s Friday 12 August, better known to tweedy types as the Glorious Twelfth, and the inaugural grouse on the West Allenheads estate in Northumberland has met its maker. The 26°c temperature yields a slow morning, with the moorland birds reluctant to come out of the shade and the beaters and guns mopping their brows, yearning for elevenses. After the first drive, the bagged game is slung in the back of a Defender and divvied up in the gun room. And now the real challenge begins. Imagine a sort of Beaujolais Run, except instead of getting Gamay wine from France to Fleet Street, our mission is to dispatch grouse from Hadrian’s Wall to SW1. The destination for ten brace – i.e. 20 birds – is Wiltons on Jermyn Street.