DEAD RINGER

It’s around hour eight of this odyssey for the ages that I hit the wall. Not literally, because that would have been a disaster. I feel broken. I’ve been driving for so long my neck and shoulders have fused into an amorphous mass of tendon and gristle, I’ve started moving like Michael Keaton in Batman. It happens again at hour 12. That’s when I consider Thelma and Louising the Audi Q4 e-tron off the side of Coventry ring road into the abstract grey mess that is the former sports centre, just to end the boredom. Still two hours to go.

You might be wondering how I got into this mess, but actually it’s all my own fault. I thought it was funny when someone else was going to do it – if the ex-Forces heroes at Mission Motorsport can hypermile a Renault Zoe 425 miles on standard rubber, why can’t do it? Not in a Zoe, obviously, we’d need something fancier. No track, either. Why not the Coventry ring road? And so here I am in a new Audi Q4 e-tron in the heart of pound shop Detroit, Britain’s motor city. I’ve got a soft spot for the rolling concrete landscape of Coventry, I grew up here. There’s nothing like the advantage of local knowledge.