Richard Hammond column: Hammond feels the fear - 2010

It's not by accident that some cars look scary. There are very specific design tricks that their creators incorporate to suggest aggression and attitude, and give a sense of primitive, brutal power. I've no idea what those tricks are exactly, and I could no more sit down with a CAD machine and create a scary supercar than I could lap the Nürburgring in a Murciélago LP670-4 SV without burying it in the Armco. But I know that such tricks exist. As do we all. And I think we can all guess they include things like gaping air intakes to indicate an insatiable hunger, and bulging haunches stretched across fat rear tyres below narrow window apertures to keep the devil contained within.

They're tricks, of course - the most fiendish supercar could probably be styled to look as cute as a baby dolphin and still function perfectly. But we fall for those tricks all the same. We find ourselves drawn in and hypnotised by an angry face and a few straight lines slashing violently across muscular curves.

When I walked up to the Murciélago LP670-4 SV that I drove last year, I did so with all the confidence of a young goat dared by its mates to tickle a T. Rex's nut-sac. Firing it up, I closed my eyes and offered a silent prayer. If this went wrong, it would be expensive, quite dangerous and, perhaps above all, massively embarrassing. Within seconds, the fear was replaced by respect, and then enthusiasm. I was stabbing the throttle, tweaking the wheel and hauling it about with merry abandon, lost in a world of balance, power, control and mind-blowing noise.

Smooth a couple of air-vents, round off a couple of corners and soften a straight line or two, and I could have walked up to it twirling the keys like a majorette's baton, without going through the trouser-threatening fear of approaching something that looked as though it might just leap up and tear my head off. But I don't think all this stuff is there only so that the lucky owners can impress lesser mortals. I think we, the drivers, want to be scared.

"I have had the crap scared out of me by cars on TopGear, many times before I have actually got in"

I know I do. I have had the crap scared out of me by cars on TopGear, many times before I have actually got in. It's a pretty grim feeling; lying in bedin some cheap hotel knowing that the following dayI must slope over to a race-track and plonk my arse in something that will, almost certainly, laser me to death before I can get the key in the ignition. I have lain in sweaty turmoil, convinced that the car itself, whether the Renault F1 car I drove a few years back, or some one-off special created by an automotive SWAT team, is lying in its own garage, dreaming of what it will do to me in the morning. And none of the things it wants to do will be fun. Or painless.

Of course, on one particular occasion, the bloody thing really did jump up and try to kill me. The night I passed before driving a certain jet car in 2006 was, I'll admit, a long one; about 86 hours of staring at the ceiling and wondering what it would feel like to strap myself to a jet engine and head into three figure speeds where the first number wasn't a one. Or a two. In the event, among all the noise and the unfamiliar controls and the terror, it was utterly wonderful, enthralling and the most ballsy adrenalin rush I had ever experienced. It wasn't just the speed, it was the sensation, the rush, the sense of taking myself to the edge that made me feel more alive, more in contact with what it is to have a beating heart, pumping veins and a head full of flashing neurons than I have ever been.

And then I woke up in hospital convinced I was at a party and that my wife was French. Yes, it went wrong. And no, I wouldn't drive that particular car again. But, and here's the crucial bit, I would walk up to a scary monster again and poke it. I have done so since, many, many times. I have sidled up to a Bowler Nemesis in the desert that looked like it might just open an eye and eat me. I blasted across the Salt Flats at Bonneville. This morning, I rode a hundred miles of twisting, real-life roads on a Suzuki Hayabusa that could, in the hands of a pro, take me to the moon. And this month, I walked up to a helicopter, got in and fired it up without anyone with me for the first time and took off into the skies.

And that's the thing; I like being scared... we all like being scared. We are happy to have our imagination stalked by sinister, automotive monsters that want to treat us badly. They are the wasp's nests we approached with a stick as a kid. This is not some extension of walking a dangerous dog on a chain to impress other gang members. This is about seeing who's got the balls to walk into its kennel and really, really get under its skin. And then walk out again.