When I was about 10...

When I was about 10 years old, I worked out that cars don’t fall over and that bikes do, so anything on two wheels must be avoided. By 20, my idealistic youth was behind me, I cleared my head and gave up being a Communist. At 30, an air hostess poured so much wine into my glass with such grace during a scary 10-hour flight that I proposed to her on the spot. She stupidly accepted, and my status as an eligible bachelor was over.

By 40, I reached another milestone – I gave up being a petrolhead, and declared that diesel power was the way ahead instead. That was eight years ago, but my stance hasn’t changed. Really, there is absolutely no reason why a clued-up, real world motorist paying for his own fuel would buy anything other than an oil-burner. Years ago I even warned sports car makers in general, and Porsche in particular, that if they continued offering petrol-only model line-ups, they would regret it. Last year in the Daily Telegraph, I came out as a confirmed dieselhead. Ask any manufacturer, and they will tell you that when I am invited to test the latest models, my preference is always for a diesel version. Sometimes I will reluctantly settle for second best and take a petrol model if that is all they have to offer.

And when Audi announced it would be competing in the 2006 Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race in two diesel-powered cars, I felt fully vindicated for my long-term stance. I must say I became very smug when one of the pair duly won and the other one came third. Audi’s groundbreaking, derv-powered victory proves beyond doubt that diesel is at least a match for and usually better than petrol. Rival firms, such as Toyota and Mercedes, must be kicking themselves at the minute as they languish in Formula One, often embarrassing themselves with unreliable petrol cars that rarely win.

Meanwhile, Audi has demonstrated it’s a world-beater despite the fact that it runs on a so-called alternative fuel. F1 teams say that the technology they try to perfect at grand prix meetings eventually filters its way down to bread-and-butter road cars. But that, I suspect, is not entirely true. The painfully high-revving petrol engine in Fernando Alonso’s Renault F1 car, for example, is from a different planet to the modest lump in the new Clio. But the unit in Audi’s diesel race cars is much closer to those in the firm’s road models. Here is not the place for a detailed comparison of specifications, but basically the firm’s Le Mans-winner wears a TDI badge just as the oil-burning road cars, which start from only ÷£16,730, do. And when you think about that, it’s easy to understand how potential buyers can relate one to the other.

The similarity doesn’t end there, either. Audi’s diesel competition cars operate in a similar rev range to its road machines, and the road cars came first and are therefore the basis for the racers, not the other way round. Trouble is, diesels make a terrible din, the sceptics still cry. Really? Then how come the winning Audi at Le Mans was considerably easier on the ears, more refined and less stressed than the inferior petrol-engined Porsches, Corvettes, Lamborghinis, Ferraris and others that were quietly but comprehensively thrashed by the TDI? Put simply, I don’t think that anybody has realised just how significant this win was and how diesel will now play a major part in top-flight motorsport, including quite possibly, F1.