Yes, that’s right. On a bright March day, full of steak and ale pie, I signed up to learn the noble art of marshalling.

The noble art of marshalling. Not pictured: fire.

If you don’t know what a race marshal does, think back to any Formula 1 or MotoGP race you may have seen. When the inevitable fireball appeared, little figures in bright orange ran straight into it to drag out the driver and put out the fire. Yup. Those are race marshals.

On a rainy day in February, I wrote an email to the Motor Sports Association, saying I’d quite like to get involved in marshalling. Fast forward a few days, and Bob from the MSA emailed me to invite me to a training day a couple of weeks later. Someone from a local club, he said, Will Be In Touch. I was instantly filled with bone-crushing terror.

Oh, God. I was going to be contacted by an Eddie or a Chas or a Kev, and they were going to ask whether I wanted to hand out brochures or something.

Instead, I received a very nice email from Mildred, giving me the details of the training day, and asking if I would be needing lunch, and would I make sure to email Anne my contact details. In my head, I was suddenly headed to a wayward chapter of the WI, complete with jam sandwiches.

Marshalling: like the WI, but with extra explosions.

The actual training day was bloody terrifying, and more than a little bewildering. I mean, MARSHALLING, seriously. It’s like those strange people that take up a new hobby and devote an entire room in the house to it. You know it’s not gonna end well. The pre-reading was also not encouraging: marshalling introduction, incident response theory, fire theory, fire practical, flags theory… Hey, did anyone spot the fire practical in there? Me too.

Before that, though, there was mostly a whole lot of PowerPoint (mostly of explosions), lists of kit (mostly of the flame-retardant variety), and Golden Rules (when there is carbon fibre flying at your head, duck or be decapitated). About halfway through the day, having been fed a proper meal of pie and chips, I found myself bent double and touching my toes while a large man peered critically at my bum. “Well?” I asked him anxiously.

He hissed and tipped his head to the right. “No,” he said finally. “You definitely want the other one.”

In the manner of personal shoppers everywhere, he was helping me pick my perfect outfit: a hi-vis, flame-retardant overall. They come in one colour (bright orange) and two styles (cheap-without-pockets and expensive-with-pockets). The main thing to get right is the size. Too big is not good, because you can catch it on stray bits of car, ripping the fabric. Too small is disastrous, as it impedes movement when staying nimble is important for maintaining a normal life expectancy. You wear the overalls over at least one, and possibly up to four, layers of clothing. You work in them, eat in them, and occasionally fall asleep on the way home in them.

Very occasionally, you will have to evade flying bits of car in them.

My outfit properly selected, I tied up my hair, kitted up in fireproof hi-vis, donned my giant welder’s gauntlets, and joined my fellow trainees in the woods around Brands Hatch, where a car had been set alight for our benefit.

Can I just say, THIS. THIS IS HOW FIRE TRAINING IS SUPPOSED TO BE DONE. No longer will I accept ridiculous PowerPoint presentations of the correct way to remove the safety thingie from a fire extinguisher. Set something on fire and shove me at it to get some damn practice in! It was ruddy marvellous.

So, marshalling: surprisingly awesome. And it turned out that I wasn’t the only woman there, which was a major relief. Of the sixty or so new trainees present, just over a tenth were women. (Interesting demographic titbit: while the men spanned all socioeconomic ranges and ages from 14 to 64, the women were primarily professionals in their late twenties and early thirties.) The practical teams were pretty mixed, and our own team was 50/50 male/female. So it was an odd thing that, when the day wound down and we all gathered around several big tables to be fed some caffeine before the drive home, all the women trainees had somehow congregated around one table. Without even asking or discussing, we had all got out our phones and exchanged contact details. Afterwards, my personal shopper came up to me.

“Is everything okay?” he asked anxiously. “Only, I noticed that you all went…away.” He gestured vaguely at the Women Only table.

Truthfully, I hadn’t even noticed until he’d pointed it out. The funny thing was, everything was okay. The day had been brilliant, full of new things to do, plus bonus cars-on-fire, and I hadn’t felt awkward or out of place even once. But, in the end, the ratio had won out, and we’d all gravitated towards each other.

The orange jumpsuit of marshalling glory: stylish AND flame-retardant. Matching umbrella optional.

Since then, personal shopper and I have become pretty good friends. We’ve been to several race meets together, and coordinate travelling to the track. There have been many adventures, and when I stop being on fire and/or decapitated I shall finish writing them all up. But somehow, strangely, I still recognise those women I met for just a few hours those months ago. Partly it’s because we shared a profound experience of alienation in a testosterone-driven, male-dominated field, despite everyone’s best intentions.

But mostly it’s because we all have to get changed into our kit in the ladies’ loos at the main paddock, and there’s only three bloody cubicles in there.

Vintage print by Rene Vincent, 'Women Join The Racing Driver Fraternity'

So, if women compete in the same events as men – and why not, given that it is just as much about the cars as it is about the drivers – why are there so few women racing drivers? After all, there’s an entire association out there promoting women in motorsport with handy lists of everything you’ll need to buy to get started, and it’s not like lack of body mass would be a disadvantage in what is essentially a test of lightness and speed. OK, at the top ends you’re going to need some neck muscles to prevent you being spontaneously decapitated by your own car as you hit maximum G, but no more so than a female bodybuilder needs to achieve, surely. So why the lack?

To the internet! The wonders of googling “female racing drivers” yielded this pertinent thread where I didn’t learn much other than the names of four female drivers in the history of the entire sport. Thanks, guys, that totally answers my question.

Anyway, I decided to do a little more research. How do you become a racing driver? Surely you can’t just turn up outside Ferrari’s headquarters and demand to join their team? (Why hasn’t anyone tried this?) Silverstone’s driver testimonials are unsurprisingly all by men. They do have one thing in common, though: they all started young. The official site for the Ginetta Challenge, one of the many races I’d watched that day, has a helpful flowchart showing what it takes to get to the top of the league, as well as a price list. The Independent interviewed a young Porsche driver and explained the top wage (£60k) and the likely costs (thousands of pounds if you don’t get sponsorship).

So, to summarise: this is a sport where you have to start investing hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds into a pre-teen child, shepherding them along and making them practise every waking hour until, in their mid-teens, they get signed up to a racing team that then commandeers their careers until they’re 35, at which point they’re expected to retire.

I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE DANICA PATRICK WHEN I GROW UP. Image courtesy of Hot Fresh Pics and numerous dodgy sites.

This is all well and good, and we can assume that no families on income support are ever going to produce the next Monaco GP winner. However, there is more to it than that. Starting that young, a child has to show a pretty strong preference for the sport, and the parents have to be supportive/pushy enough (delete as appropriate) to pour their savings into karting and rallying and fire extinguishers. They have to want it just as much as the child.

So there you are, eight years old, going up to mummy and daddy and saying, “I want to be a racing driver! Will you sign my permission slip?” And mummy and daddy look down on their precious little one and say, “Why don’t we buy you a new dolly instead?”

Maybe that’s not what happens to every little girl. Some undoubtedly come from racing families, and just as much effort is poured into their motorsport careers as would have been done for a male child. In some circles, with the right family emphasis, girls in motorsport can flourish. I’m guessing that this is about the same ratio as male ballet dancers.

To answer my own question, there are female racing drivers. Sabine Schmitz is queen of the Nurburgring. Danica Patrick rocks IndyCar and NASCAR. Amanda Whitaker won the National Formula Ford Championship. Wiki has a list of five – five! A veritable cornucopia of choice! – Formula 1 female drivers, including Desiré Wilson, the only female F1 driver to actually win anything in Formula 1.  You can see an entire bevy of them in this poll listing the “10 Sexiest Women in Motoring and Motorsport“. Now not only am I armed with names, I also have cup-sizes. MY QUEST IS COMPLETE, GUYS.

I will leave you with the baffling sight of Top Gear – not precisely the bastion of political correctness – pointing out that this is insulting and patronising in the extreme:

Actually, I think it starts a lot earlier than that, but the sex kitten perception is unlikely to encourage any parent to finance his or her daughter’s racing dream.

My point is this: it takes a pretty determined kind of little girl to decide that she wants to go into motorsport when the whole world is insisting that she should be playing dress-up. And it takes a pretty supportive kind of family to encourage her, rather than simply buy her something frilly to shut her up. Maybe the tide is turning. Maybe the little girl with the need to go faster faster faster only needs to ask. But if it’s not turning fast enough, we will have an entire generation of little girls with no female motoring heroes to look to.

And I can promise you that no one ever tried to talk Jenson Button or Lewis Hamilton into playing with their dollies.

To be fair, I don't think the bikini shot is far off. Image (c) McLaren Sport

The first person I didn’t kill was the bloke in the angry Merc behind me, who decided to respond to a downpour in London rush hour traffic by tailgating a car sporting L-plates and stalling at tricky junctions. I don’t understand the mindset of people like this. There you are, in your expensive and pointless car (because who cares about 0-60 when you’re gonna be doing 0-10 at most, and wearing out your left foot), and you think, “Hmmm, yes. I think my car could do with having a little more Fiat inserted up its nostrils.” So you start breathing down the neck of a tiny little 500 with a driver who clearly has yet to master indicators. Or the clutch. Or – worryingly – the handbrake.

It was worse with the second person I didn’t kill. That was me, by the way. It was a few weeks later, with the indicators now mastered but the elusive handbrake still outfoxing me at every turn. I turned right, as I am often instructed to do, and did NOT get rammed in the passenger side by on-coming traffic. I declared the turn a success, and exited the main road, entering the right-hand street, which had a rather steep gradient, almost hill-like in its ferocity.

At the top of the hill was a van.

We are all familiar with Van Man. He cat-calls with the firm conviction that he is somehow brightening up your day. He plays obnoxiously loud music and makes racist remarks, happy in the belief that he represents The Real England, whatever that might be. He also never – ever – gives way. Ever.

Spare a thought for the state of my pants when I saw Van Man accelerating down that hill towards me.

At my left was a car. At my right was a tiny narrow spare, then another car. Behind me was a busy main road. And in front of me was my rapidly-approaching death, in the form of a van so big it wouldn’t even see my tiny little Fiat before it squashed it like a bug. A small, white, L-plated bug.

At the very last second, when my eyes were like saucers and I was seriously regretting not having sorted that sodding will, he veered off into the tiny gap on my right. He didn’t even clip my car (although the car on the other side may not have been so lucky). By all accounts he didn’t even notice that he had nearly caused vehicular dismemberment.

“Well,” my instructor said brightly, after a horrifying and awkward pause, “shall we get on, then?”

Needless to say, I nearly burst into tears. “What the hell was that? That was like a cartoon death! I don’t want to die a cartoon death! I don’t want to be killed by a flying piano or a toilet seat, or a giant truck that doesn’t see me and runs me over!”

“Don’t worry,” my instructor soothed, looking a little rattled himself. “That sort of thing doesn’t actually happen in real life.”

That thought gave me pause. I wondered what, precisely, he thought we were doing right now. Maybe it was a rehearsal for real life? Maybe real motoring wouldn’t be like this. Maybe – and here was a horrifying possibility – it would be worse.

Like this, except white, a Fiat, and EVEN SMALLER. Photo from petithiboux@Flickr

It was.

Over the next few weeks I’ve had parking spaces stolen by aggressive BMWs that more or less manhandled me out of the way, I’ve nearly been killed by drivers doing 40 in a 20mph zone down a sodding bus lane during restrictions, I’ve nearly squashed toddlers that decided to run out into the middle of the road while their parents looked on, oblivious, and – worst of all – I once nudged the rear bumper of another car. It was at less than 1mph and left no physical mark whatsoever, but I maintain that the psychological scarring will stay with me.

My conclusion is this: you would have to be absolutely mad to want to drive in London. You have nowhere to park, and everywhere there are people that view red lights as simply suggestions, bus lanes as express lanes, and children as speed bumps. If you are a woman in a small car, every large car will attempt to physically crowd you off the road, and if you are a woman in a large car, everyone will hate you because you are clearly being overly aggressive in daring to get behind the wheel of something bigger than an armchair.

And yet.

I loved that stupid little Fiat. I called it Bertie, and the moment it was named, it leaped about like an eager little puppy. I did a little dance of triumph on discovering that my turns in the road were textbook-perfect, and that parallel parking really isn’t all that bad. True, my instructor was a closet sadist who decided to make things ‘more interesting’ by making me do obscenely complicated compound manoeuvres – reversing around a corner with obstacles and a time limit springs to mind – but once you choose to view the whole thing as an elaborate obstacle course, it’s fine. And the little Fiat 500 made me feel ridiculously proud of myself every time I got behind the wheel. Look at me, I’m driving!

It’s a shame it had to end. All things must, I suppose, but it made me tear up a little bit just the same to walk around to the passenger side and get in, knowing that this would be it. The thing about driving tests is, no one tells you that you don’t get to have any more lessons after you pass.

Bye bye, Bertie. You were a smart little car and you took a lot of abuse. I’ll come visit you over the summer for my advanced driving course.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to look up Bertie’s sexy two-wheel cousin and sit my CBT.

After all, what’s the point of a driving license if you only get to drive cars? There’s a motorbike out there with my name on it.

Yes, my mum sent it to me. It has little hearts inside as well.

• Vik has now recovered from her driving ordeal, and is fully licensed to make cars go vroom. Stay tuned for Project Engine and further motorsport adventures.

On the surface of it, I am this book’s target audience. I passed my test recently (send plaudits and flowers to the usual address), and was immediately filled with the urge to run out and buy a car. Not a simple, sensible car that can lug my marshalling gear from racetrack to racetrack, or even a smart, neat little city runabout to get me to meetings on time. No, I wanted a swooping, curving, monstrously beautiful beast of an Alfa 4C. It’s not even out yet. They’re only making a handful of them, and they’ve probably all already been sold. I wouldn’t be able to afford the deposit, let alone the monthly repayments, let alone the insurance, let alone keeping it fed and watered on UK oil prices. It’s not a car, it’s petrolhead pornography.

Couple the above unnatural lust with a penchant for heels and pearls, and surely I would jump for joy at a book with a back cover featuring a girl in a miniskirt and thigh-high purple boots bending over a car? Why, add a tasteful hair accessory or two and it could even be me!

Anyway, the pertinent point is that I did indeed read it (albeit borrowed from the library rather than sending my hard-earned cash to the pink publisher). Not just little bits. The whole damn thing, cover to cover. And I hate to say it, but I think the writer has been stitched up.

I’ve read Maria McCarthy’s columns in the Telegraph, and went in, despite the cover, expecting much the same: sensible journalism with an eye to problems faced by female drivers. It’s… not that. It’s actually rather like  – and when I say ‘like’, I mean ‘this is what I reckon happened’ – someone took McCarthy’s manuscript, looked at the proposed cover, and said, “this should have more ‘girlie’ things in it.” And then picked up the editing pen and wrote in said girlie things, whether they made sense or not.

For example, McCarthy opens her chapter on car insurance thus:

Sorting out car insurance can be a bewildering experience for many of us.

Except she doesn’t. What actually opens the chapter, in full, is:

As far as disagreeable but necessary obligations go, sorting out your car insurance is right up there with filling in tax returns, going for gynaecological check-ups or visiting dreary in-laws. But as with all these experiences, the best approach is just to grit your teeth, remind yourself that it’ll be over soon and plan a nice treat for afterwards.
Sorting out car insurance can be a bewildering experience for many of us.

Yes, that’s right. It reads like someone went back in and added in an additional, wholly unnecessary introductory paragraph. It doesn’t stop there. On choosing a new garage:

It’s a bit like trying out a new hairdresser – you’d probably go in for a trim or maybe a few highlights first and check out the way the hairdresser worked before asking to have your waist-length chestnut hair transformed into a blonde urchin cut.

On using car magazines to research a car before buying:

Unlike Autotrader, which feels like something your dad might read, What Car? is an attractive glossy that’s easy to flick through when you’re having your highlights done.

On washing your car:

If you want to experience the Middle England lifestyle to the full then you’ll hand-wash your car every Sunday morning. If you want to live out your boyfriend’s fantasy then you’ll do it wearing your bikini while he watches, nursing a cold beer.

And this from a writer who recently wrote about the benefit of PassPlus courses for older female drivers returning to the road after a separation or bereavement.

Or is it? Because the thing is, I’m not convinced the above extracts of pink vomit are actually McCarthy at all. Maybe, at a stretch, it’s McCarthy under duress; McCarthy with a metaphorical editorial gun to her head to make the book more appealing to young women browsing in Waterstones. Certainly the ridiculous inserts drop off mid-way through the book, and by the time you’re on Chapter 8 (presumably having shelled out the £7.99) with a car in your driveway and insurance to secure, they’re largely gone.

The question is, why on earth are they there in the first place? The book is screamingly successful, rated 10,102 in Amazon (which is pretty impressive for a specialist manual). Once you get past the purple passages it’s also – whisper it – really rather good. It has typical labour rates in major cities in the UK. It has suggested insurers if you want to be added to someone else’ insurance and still rack up a no-claims. It has helpful suggestions on how to avoid being ripped off when buying a used car. All of these things are useful for any novice, and I was making notes whilst reading. No wonder it has garnered such glowing reviews!

And yet… click on the Amazon page. Go on, I’ll wait. Click on it and scroll down to Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought, and tell me that at first glance you didn’t think they were showing you little girls’ toys. The Pink Car Wash Kit. The Pink Fluffy Furry Dice. The Pink Toolbox.

I have a strong feeling that if Maria McCarthy is ever presented with any of these items and told to change a tyre, the pink wrench from the pink toolbox will disintegrate the first time it is used. The pink car wash kit will be useless in actually washing a car, unless used when wearing a bikini, and the pink fluffy furry dice will distract her from safely driving her lovely new Alfa 4C and she will plough it into the back of a horsebox on the M4, whereupon everyone passing will tut and say under his breath, “bloody lady drivers.”

There's just no excuse.

I had already recruited one colleague to help with the eventual engine rebuild, and she would therefore be present for the assembly of the model. The instructions promised that a 10-year-old would be able to put this together with a little adult supervision. Surely that meant that two 20-somethings should be able to manage it?

Of course, prior to assembly, we had to purchase a few things that did not come as standard in the kit. The first was batteries. The second was beer.

Haynes internal combustion engine model

Alcohol and batteries thus acquired, we put in our takeaway order and opened up the box. Out spilled plastic heaven. A million fiddly parts attached to plastic frames, with tiny numbers on the frames indicating the part numbers. The manual would instruct us on how to assemble it. It also named all the parts, so hopefully we would learn the names of at least some of the moving bits and pieces by the end.

Things started off pretty well. We had Top Gear’s Africa adventure on the telly and the pistons/crankshaft assembly in the cylinder block, and the pistons made satisfying up-down movements when you turned the crankshaft. The instructions said that you needed sanding paper to get the edges of the plastic smooth, but as we lacked sandpaper we made do with nail files, which seemed to do the trick. The whole thing turned so smoothly that we didn’t even need the vegetable oil to make it work.

“This would be even better if it was the right size,” I said as the plastic innards were slowly swallowed up inside the model.

“That would be much more satisfying,” Colleague X agreed, trying to get the tiny screw to stay perched atop the tiny screwdriver, and slot the entire thing into the tiny hole on the side of the crankcase. “This feels more like keyhole surgery.”

“Which is also important.”

“Yes. But not the sort of thing I had in mind when I bought the six-pack.”

I, too, was getting a little restless. Earlier that week I had opened my planner to try to book a last-minute meeting with a senior colleague. He, peering over my shoulder, wanted to know what “Engine Build” was referring to, and why it had so many exclamation marks. I attempted to explain.

“Hmmm,” he said, frowning. “Yes, interesting. But an engine’s a big commitment. Did you think about starting with something a little smaller?”

A motorcycle? Sure. Ultimately, though, I’d decided on the engine, because I was learning to drive a car, not a bike.

“No, not a motorcycle,” he said, just as thoughtfully. “Something smaller. A lawnmower, maybe, or a hairdryer.”

I very pointedly did NOT stab him with his own pen, but instead said that we were doing a model version first.

“Yes,” he said. “I think that’s probably for the best.”

Anyway, other than patience and tact when faced with senior people and their hairdryer suggestions, what did I learn from doing this little side-project?

Firstly, it’s bloody cool. There’s now a little engine model on a shelf in my living room, and if you press the little button it lights up and makes happy engine noises.

Secondly, the instructions may well be wrong. Try the different bits together until they fit. This will probably be more useful that memorising engine layouts.

Thirdly, the reviews and advertising for this product piss me off something chronic. “Ideal for a dad and son project,” one proclaims. Well, yes, it is, but it’s also ideal for a dad-and-daughter and mum-and-son project. Or mum-and-daughter. It’s basically model assembly, and doing this with a kid (without taking over and finishing it off yourself) would probably take an afternoon.

Fourthly, the rocker arm assembly fits on top of the valves and the camshaft, and there’s only one correct way of lining up all the cams on the camshaft. There is no obvious way of knowing what that way is without having them labelled in alphabetical order. (This may require a textbook. Or a mechanic.)

Finally, although doing the plastic model was fun, it is limited in several major areas. It is extremely simplified, for one thing. The water-pump is two bits of plastic moulded and snapped together. The ‘sparkplugs’ are tiny Christmas tree lights that light up according to the position of the crankshaft (so the position does have to be correct, and the wiring is a bit tricky, but it’s not actually how a spark plug works). The dipstick is a completely pointless clip-on piece of plastic that looks like a Barbie accessory, and I still have no idea what it does (although presumably you dip it in things).

Lookit! All shiny and plastic and PERFECT.

You also get the feeling that filing tiny bits of plastic with a nail file is not precisely what engine maintenance is all about. (Although it may well involve nail files. At this stage I have no way of knowing.) Assembling the model did make me more familiar with a lot of the parts, and I think I understand the fundamentals. But it felt a bit… delicate. A lot of the parts were so tiny that you had to hold them by the tips of your fingers, and slot them into place using your nails. It’s the same problem as following a textbook: it’s too clean. I didn’t start this wanting to stay in my living room, with clean fingers and a perfect working model completed in a couple of hours. I want something that will take months and leave me exhausted and exasperated and absolutely triumphant when it is in fact finished.

Colleague X and I sat back and contemplated the finished product while James May and Richard Hammond performed emergency surgery on Oliver in the background.

“Well,” she said eventually, “it’s very nice.”

“Yes,” I said. I pushed the button again, and we watched the pistons move up and down and the little lights pretend to be sparkplugs. “Shall we build the real thing?”

“Let’s.”

• Look out for more Secret Diary of a Female Petrolhead entries as Vik continues her engine adventures (you can read her previous Secret Diary entries in the “Toolbox” category on the sidebar on the right).

Real engines go in real cars. Our glowy plastic engine will have to go in a glowy plastic car.

No, seriously. If anyone out there has a clue, please write in and explain to me how anyone can consider them ‘cool’. Now, I like a supercar as much as the next person.  Wait, scratch that. How can I say I like it? I’ve never driven a supercar. I’ve never touched one. I’ve never even seen one in real life close up. (I will obviously have to make an effort at the next motorshow.) So how can I categorically state: yup, that one there, that’s the one for me, the one with the bright orange paintjob and the rotating guns mounted on the spoiler?

I realise I’ve just finished telling you that I am really quite partial to the Zonda R, but that’s more of an abstract sort of love. I love it like I love Dali – I’ve no idea what’s going on with it, and would feel vaguely disturbed if I did. But to stand up and say, yup, I’d love to own one? No.

And then it melted.

And yet, despite that, I’m having to wage battles over whether or not the Exige – or the Agera, or the One-77 – is cool, uncool or just too uncool for words. My logic, for anyone who is interested, is this: if it looks like it’s something a City banker would drive without a hint of irony, there are no words for how uncool it is. Give it up now.

Actually, I don’t see why I should be having this argument at all, because it’s my fridge, and my fridge magnets, and if I decide to have the Exige in the Uncool section, on my own head be it. And still, out it came – “but look at it! It looks like the Batmobile!”

There is, I suspect, a significant difference between engine enthusiasts and car enthusiasts. Both care about what the car has under the bonnet, but the car enthusiasts also care about whether or not it looks like a Batmobile. Whereas I actively gravitate towards non-Batmobile cars (they don’t go with my handbag).

Anyway, the point is, I’ve now had a few driving lessons, and have therefore been thinking about what car I would hypothetically buy once I pass my driving test (and before I move to my castle, complete with moat). Meanwhile, my instructor was telling me to stop giving way to people (why? They were busy and going somewhere, whereas I was driving in circles!) and hold my ground. I had to stop being so cooperative, otherwise I would be ‘forever taken advantage of’.

While I was thinking about being less cooperative, I was cut up by a bloke driving a royal blue Ferrari. I can’t swear as to the model, due to the extreme speed at which he almost ran me off the road, but its sloping front looked rather like a Ferrari Daytona. Suffice to say I was rather surprised to see one in Clapham, and even more surprised to nearly have it embed itself in the side of the Fiat 500 I was desperately trying not to stall.

Ah, I thought. That is what I’m supposed to do. That raw, unbridled aggre-

“Was that the same Ferrari I saw on the roundabout a few minutes ago?” my instructor asked. I wouldn’t know, since at the time I was trying to remember which turn I was meant to be taking. But if so –

“Why is that bloke driving around pointlessly?”

As several Very Busy Persons behind me decided to improve my driving skills by honking their horns and pointing out that I should have allowed the Daytona-alike and my little Fiat to merge rather than braking and therefore delaying them by 3.4 seconds, I pondered the problem of the supercar. Even a Ferrari seemed a little pointless in South London. Surely anyone who drove one would either have to buy their own corner of Monte Carlo, or would otherwise have to face running for a pint of milk in something that looks like it should ram other cars for daring to share road space.

There’s a reason I’m going to have to learn to rebuild an engine. (Image via alfaromeowallpaper.info)

I’m going to have to decline. I’d much rather drive something that didn’t automatically make people hate me from miles away.

I’ve settled on an Alfa 166. No, it’s not a supercar.

It’s better.

No. It’s: “Will it make me look hotter when I step out of it outside a bar or restaurant?”

Yes, the main thing that will make a woman decide on a particular car is how ‘hot’ she feels in it. Telegraph writer Neil Lyndon – bemoaning the fact that his wife’s friend opted for a car she liked and he deemed useless – goes on to tell us all about the new Citroën DS3, decorated by graphic artist Orla Kiely. Now you really will be able to match your car to your handbag. Isn’t that snazzy, girls? All your tricksy car decisions solved by this one simple, fashionable step!

The new Citroën DS3 - if I use the Orla Kiely design, can I have this racing version? Image (c) CarsRoute.com

According to Lyndon, his wife’s divorced friend ignored all sensible, practical considerations when making her car choice, and simply went for a pretty French hatchback. Because that’s what women do, of course: we go for the pretty option despite it possibly being on fire.

The thing is – and this will come as no surprise to those familiar with his prior work – Lyndon is talking complete twaddle. According to AutoEbid.com’s Help Me Choose a New Car function, you can choose from six factors when trying to find the perfect car for you. They are: Comfort, Styling, Handling, Depreciation, Economy, and Safety. The price is a liming criterion: the thing that helps you to narrow your choice, rather than the main principle of selection. In fact, unless you are going into the market with an extremely limited amount of money, the cost of the car will only ever help you to select a class, or possibly a financing option. Put it another way: no one will switch from a brand-new Fiat 500 to a second-hand Volvo XC90, even though both can be had for roughly £10k.

So how do people choose cars, then, if it’s not the price?

1. First and foremost, functionality. What are you going to use the car for? If you have five children that will need running to school every morning, you will probably end up with that Volvo. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an urban runabout, something small and easy to park is probably better.

2. Up there as a consideration is styling: you want it to look good. In fact, certain TV shows have gone so far as to have an entire segment over whether a car is ‘cool’ or not. The guide there, by the way, is whether a cool person would drive it. Perhaps X & Y Communications neglected to canvas the Top Gear audience in their research.

3. The last, all encompassing question is: I live with it? This includes things like reliability, fuel economy, ability to park it in London, whether the suspension will destroy your spine the first time you drive over road-humps.

The ‘price’ question helps to narrow your options, and, on occasion, to disabuse you of the notion that you really could afford to buy a supercar if you sell the house and both kidneys.

The key question Lyndon ignored was what his wife’s friend wanted in a car: she wanted a cute little urban runabout that would cheer her up in the mornings. Put simply, she wanted that ‘new car’ feeling: you’ve chosen well, your car looks good, and you love it more than it is natural to love an inanimate object. If she was a man lovingly polishing his vintage (decrepit) Rolls, Lyndon would have smiled indulgently.

What Lyndon is bemoaning is not women’s tendency to pick cars that make them look good – we all do that. No one has ever looked at a car and thought, “sure, it’s beautiful, but given the choice I’d go for the ugly, uncomfortable one on the left.”  Our budgets and priorities may vary, but the intent remains the same. You buy the thing that makes you feel happy when you’re inside it. Lyndon seems to have forgotten that, or have momentarily blanked out all car adverts, ever. It’s such an established cliché that car makers can now produce meta-tastic pastiches of previous ads and we lap it up. Check out this Volvo V60 “How to make a sexy car advert” clip:

When you sell a lifestyle, of course you’re going to sell a cool, stylish one. Only a fool would try to market a boring car for boring people.

I'm told it has great fuel economy. Image (c) NewCarNet

Of course, that’s really the thing Lyndon is taking an issue with. He wanted his wife’s friend to go away and make a list of her requirements, and bring back the top three cars that fulfilled them. He would then counsel her to make the reasoned, practical decision. She wanted to buy a cool hatchback following a messy divorce. The thing is, women going through messy divorces are not meant to want cool hatchbacks. They’re not meant to want anything funky or stylish. They should be worried about making ends meet, and where the rent is coming from, and how they’re going to get to work now that their ex-husband has custody of the car. No divorced woman should want to look or feel attractive, and she certainly shouldn’t be be gallivanting around bars or restaurants. I could choose this point to make a catty comment about how Lyndon left his wife for another woman, published a book railing against the “universal dominance of feminism” and has since been struggling to rebuild his career.

Lyndon’s article reveals nothing about gender or, indeed, about car choice (and I highly doubt the odious Mr Lyndon chose his own car based on a set of requirements and flowcharts). All it shows us is how deep his prejudices still lie: a woman who is hard up and urgently needs a car should not, in Lyndon’s world, get to make that sort of choice. Having asked his advice, she should have acknowledged his superiority and allowed him to select one for her. After all, her preference for a “chic little French-made hatchback” instantly indicated to him that she must not have the know-how to do it herself.

And as for the Citroën DS3, the target of Lyndon’s ire: well, it’s not doing too badly, despite Lyndon’s contempt. It’s just been named Top Gear Magazine‘s 2010 Car of the Year.

Let me tell you about it. It is a simplified, reasonably accurate version of a four-stroke engine, and it comes with its very own Haynes manual. It’s also entirely plastic and aimed at ages 10+. Bollocks, I say. If I had kids that age, I wouldn’t let them anywhere near the thing with their wickedly sharp craft knives. They’d have their fingers off before the first tea break.

The Haynes model internal combustion engine. Like Airfix, only not.

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago, I decided that I was going to learn about engines. I’ve always been a bit hazy on the theory behind internal combustion, and despite my father’s repeated attempts to explain, I’ve never really been able to get it straight in my head. This could have something to do with his insistence on explaining over the dinner table, rather than opening up the bonnet of his car and explaining there. (My brother got the lecture over the open bonnet of the car. He got so bored he fell asleep.)

This will all be a lot easier to grasp if I can actually do it myself. If I can take apart an engine and put it back together, you can be reasonably certain that I’ll know how it works afterwards. OK, maybe I’ll explode the back garden a couple of times, but I’ve accepted that as an inevitable consequence.

Miraculously, my new-found zeal is shared by a colleague of mine. She, too, wants to strip down an engine and see what makes it tick. Excellent! We ordered a plastic model to assemble in order to get a vague idea of what it will all involve, before thinking about taking things a little further. While we waited for the model to arrive, we may have become a little… unruly. Rowdy. Noisy. Obnoxious? Surely not!

After one of our exchanges, a colleague came up to me. She works in HR. You know the type: perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect smile. Was my enthusiasm too, er, enthusiastic?

“I just wanted to say, what you’re doing is fantastic,” she murmured quietly, and straightened the strand of pearls at her neck. “I love my car, I’d kill any fucker who so much as touched it. There’s nothing quite like a good engine purring, you know?”

I didn’t know, actually, but I nodded just the same.

The next day, another colleague was delivering some papers over my lunch hour when she saw the driving lessons website open in my browser. “Oh, are you learning to drive? Good for you! I learned in Nairobi, I thought I’d be quite frightened and sedate but it turned out I was a real girl racer, I nearly failed because I was speeding the entire time…”

I’m guessing that speeding will not be encouraged in London.

The next day, colleague Y came up to me, very upset, and drew me away from my desk. “I heard that you and colleague X are rebuilding an engine!” she said, looking very upset. Well, yes. Was this against her ethical beliefs? Was I in trouble with the ‘cycle to work’ initiative?

“Why didn’t you invite me?”

The thing is, I haven’t really mentioned this that much at work, despite being giddy with it for months. The people that have found out about it have either nodded sagely about how many times I’ll set myself on fire, or raved about how brilliant it all is. Invariably, my young female colleagues have fallen into the latter category. They’ve also taken the opportunity to ask me what I thought about the new Pagani (undecided, and I miss the Zonda R), the One-77 (I do like it, but why is it so angry? It looks like it’s been munching on stray pets) and plus, wouldn’t it be nice if the off-road vehicles didn’t kill your spine every time you went off road? (Seriously, Toyota, sort it out.) All of this was delivered in hushed tones over the tea and coffee, and by the time we were back at our desks we were very firmly back on either the Sudan referendum or the receptionist’s new hairstyle.

The Aston Martin One-77: Gratuitous car!porn. Image from CarzTune.com

Why? Was what we were talking about so shocking that it wasn’t fit for general consumption? Would the office spontaneously explode if it turned out that the female accountants and aid workers in my organisation actually knew their Nissans from their Nobles? Why did they get so embarrassed talking about it?

“Well,” colleague X said philosophically, “I didn’t get into cars before because I thought that it was a traditional male thing. And that didn’t mean that I couldn’t do it, but blokes would know more about it than me starting off, and I didn’t want to feel stupid. Then it turned out that they knew just as little as I did.”

Two hours later, a male colleague decided to ask condescendingly what kind of engine we’d be rebuilding. Would it be, he said, sneering, a rotating one?

“A Wankel rotary?” I asked. No. It would be a four-stroke.

• Look out for more Secret Diaries as Vik continues her engine adventure…

At least, that was the case three months ago. I’m not going to go into the many and varied reasons why, sitting on the sofa one November weekend, I decided that I wanted to know more about cars. Suffice to say that maybe I was going a little house-crazy from being stuck indoors with the flu.

So I decided I was going to rebuild an engine.

This is a difficult and challenging task if you’ve worked with cars all your life. It is nigh on impossible if you can’t tell your pistons from your poppets. I also decided I was going to learn how to drive. This, too, would be a challenge, as the last time I’d been behind the wheel of a car had been twelve years ago. My father decided that, as I was seventeen and had my newly-minted provisional license in my pocket, the best thing to do for my first hour in the driver’s seat would be to take me out in London rush hour and make me practise three-point turns and parallel parking. After miraculously not killing anyone, I swore that I’d never get behind the wheel again.

The other major drawback is that my father was an engineer and a mechanic. He had engineering for his work, and mechanics for his hobby. You can imagine what his reaction would be if one of his children finally – finally! – showed an interest in anything remotely mechanical. Even if it was the girl.

Obviously, you can’t just walk off and buy yourself an engine. Well, actually, you can, but there’s not much point. First off, you have to work out where you’re going to keep it. There’s a useful space in the back garden, and I’ve measured for tarp, engine stand, and general manoeuvrability. It will, I am told, be sufficient.

Then, you have to come to terms with the fact that you’re building an engine, not a car. There’s no space to keep a clapped-out old banger in suburban London, and I’m not about to shell out for a garage for no apparent reason. The downside is that my beautiful rebuilt engine will never be seen in action. The upside is that I am far less likely to explode myself and the neighbours.

Thirdly, you’re going to need to get some tools and learn about engines. And therein lies the rub. Have you ever tried to find a general mechanics course? Have you? I have. There are two choices:

1. Full-time year-long course leading to an NVQ or equivalent;
2. How to not explode your car when changing the oil.

OK, so they weren’t terribly suitable. How about a textbook? I used to be an academic, I’m good with textbooks. Well –

1. Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals by John B. Heywood – looks interesting, and has been added to the wishlist.
2. Essential Car Care for Girls by Danielle McCormick – well, it’s pink. It must be just for girls. The reviewers helpfully point out that this is a book simple enough for even women to understand. OK, then.

Pink automatically makes everything simple enough so even a woman can understand.

After wishlisting the first and stabbing my eyes out over the second, I decided that textbooks may be all well and good, but what I really needed was an opportunity to take the damn thing apart myself. (Yes, I was the child that disassembled all my toys to see how they worked.) Unfortunately, in order to do that… Yup, I was back at square one.

Despondent, I complained about this Catch 22 to a colleague of mine, who had been making similar noises about getting a little fed up of being pushed into a knitting club or daisy-counting-clique. What she really wanted, she said, was to mess about with something a little more robust, like an engine…

So. We’ve measured the back garden. We’ve ordered appropriate textbooks and acquired a couple of Haynes manuals. We’ve ordered a model engine to get a rough idea of how this all works. I’ve signed up for driving lessons in the vain hope that I can overcome my car phobia.

And then, once the sun comes out, we’re going to lay down the tarp and set up the engine stand, and buy a crappy clapped-out engine off eBay for 50p and take it apart.

I’m not going to tell my father a word about all of this. I have a horrible feeling that he will be so delighted that I have finally come around that he will decide to show me how to do it ‘properly’. Where my teachers failed to instil any interest in me at age 12, I am hoping that my own interest at age 29 will bear out and let me stick with it.

Who knows? It might even work.

To be continued…