Stuck on an Italian motorway.

"Er, help?"

"Schwibbledy bon giorno telepass."

"I have no Italian, could you say something in English, please?"

"SCHWIBBLEDY BON GIORNO TELEPASS."

"WE HAVE. A TELEPASS."

"SCHWIBBLEDY BON GIORNO TELEPASS!"

We were getting nowhere. I was sitting in the facelifted Mazda 3 MPS with the internet's Alex Goy in he driving seat, apparently on the verge of sobbing down an Italian motorway intercom.

We had survived the Mazda's violent tendency to throw you into the path of oncoming traffic under acceleration, and we had survived my somewhat perky driving style. To die here, to die now, in the corner of some unknown Italian tollbooth... Well, it would just be perverse.

To die in a Mazda 3, that would be something. Nowhere near James Dean's Porsche Speedster on the scale of cool ways to go. They may have tinkered with the driving dynamics, fettled the dampers and reprofiled the front bumper to shave 0.01 off the drag coefficient, but they had done nothing to make James Dean want to crash one. Though he may not have had a choice - seriously, that torque steer...

Something in Alex's voice, the faint quivering tremor, the fact that he had just reversed the car out of one toll lane to try the next Telepass booth and nearly triggered a minor RTA - the stoic man at the other end of the intercom marked HELP in blocky yellow letters took compassion where I could only laugh and take the handbrake off so that we rolled imperceptibly forwards as Alex hung out of the window yelling. The barrier, once forever blocking our way to freedom, lifted up. Zoom zoom.