This old chestnut

“I’m sorry to bring this up again, but I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough when it comes to driving music. And the breakthrough is this: Why bother with it at all?”

Let’s think about this for a moment. Music of any sort in the car in my opinion is unnecessary, simply because you can’t hear it properly. There’s a huge business in so called “noise cancelling” technology, the point being that when listening to music you won’t be able to hear any of the background noise that is present normally. And I can think of few places short of a jumbo jet where the background noise is greater than in a car.

And since most cars aren’t fitted with any sort of noise cancelling systems yet, the only option available to you to hear your music clearly is to turn it up, which inevitably makes it worse. So what’s to be done? The simplest option is to continually play your music at a ridiculously loud level, but this will only result in you damaging yours and everybody else’s hearing. So something else must be done. And here’s my plan.  Switch it off altogether.

This is probably a point that only avid petrol heads will agree with, but there is no greater soundtrack to driving than the sound of an engine. The subtle symphony of a Porsche 911’s flat six, the vibrant thud of a Dodge Charger’s V8. Or, and this being the more likely of my three examples, the deafening roar of your brother’s souped-up Peugeot 206.

We were driving back from a meal the other day, and inevitably there was some argument over the choice of music my sibling insisted on providing. A compromise was reached when we opened the windows and listened to the roar coming from the not-so-standard exhaust system. In an instant I was gone, lost in a daydream of Italian mountain roads and an endless succession of Audi R8’s. People driving past must’ve thought I looked quite odd, visibly drooling out of the window with a look of pure ecstasy on my face. The sound was enough to create that fizzing penis sensation James May keeps harking on about. I now know what he means, and you will too if you try this.

Of course, there is a bit of a problem to tackle with this plan. And it’s this: unless you happen to have a garage full of Ferrari’s and Aston’s (or a sibling with an avid interest in exhaust-loudening technologies), which are capable of providing the aural thrills you seek, you are going to look a bit stupid driving down the M1 lustfully listening to the engine of your old Mondeo. So whilst this sort of thinking is, I feel, a stroke of pure genius, the only people who can viably take advantage of it are those who probably don’t need to.  And as for the rest of us, I doubt that a CD of recorded supercar engine noises will provide the same sort of satisfaction.

Maybe it’ll have to be Radio 2 for the time being instead…