THE IDLE WILD

The reasons why range from the prosaic to the romantic — the money needed to participate; the thrill and adrenaline that victory delivers to the man who, otherwise, has it all — but the elite have always gravitated towards racing machines. It’s a phenomenon that stretches back to Alfred Dunhill, who dubbed the pecunious Edwardian aristos upon whom Kenneth Grahame based Mr. Toad his “Dunhill’s Motorities”. And it endures today, as mingling with the motorheads at Goodwood will demonstrate, not to mention Netflix’s The Gentleman Driver movie, which charts the exploits of contemporary high-net-worth drivers Ed Brown, Ricardo Gonzalez, Michael Guasch and Paul Dalla Lana.

Birkin commandeered a Bentley up the staircase of the Savoy Hotel during a well-lubricated dinner.

Along the way we’ve had Count Louis Zborowski, a Kent-raised American and heir to a whopping (in the early 20th century) £11m, a man who unwittingly made a huge mark on pop-culture history by speeding past a schoolboy called Ian Fleming in a 23-litre, Maybach-engined beast named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (the name was apposite — it was so loud it was banned from passing through Canterbury). We’ve had the exploits of the Scotch whisky heir Rob Walker, a man who, having learned to fly at Cambridge, was turfed out of the university air squadron for clearing the fences at the Cottenham racecourse in his Tiger