You really could call the new TVR Cerbera heavy metal were it not fashioned from plastic. The best way to experience this car is to be about seven mi… - Jeremy Clarkson

Can we be honest for a moment. You didn't have a good Christmas, did you? Your turkey was too dry, your kids spent all day glued to their internets, and you didn't bother watching the Big Christmas Film because you've owned it for years on DVD. What you should have had to liven things up was my mother. She arrived at my house with a steely resolve that the Christmas holidays would be exactly like the Christmas holidays she enjoyed when she was a child. Only without the diphtheria or the bombing raids.

Cars. To some, they're just transport. A convenient alternative to highly-flammable dirigibles or walking. But you- you understand that cars are far more than this. They are our history. They mark the moments by which we define decades. Cars are some of the most intoxicating, most beautiful things ever forged by mankind. They represent the glory of technology, the essence of freedom, and have been the weapons in some of our most gripping sporting battles. They grip us, they cheer us on, they hold us up as heroes. So this is about the love of all things four-wheeled and fast. This is a shrine to power, to speed, to metal made beautiful. This is where dreams are driven. Welcome to Forza.

We see the same sort of thing in Japan. There was never a Mr. Toyota who, since he was a small boy, yearned for the day when he could build a small family hatchback that never broke down. And you can scour the history books until the sky turns green but you'll not find any mention of a young Timmy Datsun who stayed up until ten o'clock, even on school nights, devising his plan for a car with two milometers. Subarus are made by a romantic-sounding outfit called Fuji Heavy Industries. At night I bet the chairman sometimes forgets he has a car division. It'll just be another entry in his plofit and ross accounts. The only Japanese cars with even a trace of humanity are Hondas, and there's a very good reason for that. There was a Mr. Honda and he did have a vision when he was a small boy. Even today that vision still steers the engineers, and as a result there's a very definite correlation between the S2000 sports cars and those early motorbikes. It's solely because of this link with the past that I like Hondas more than any other Japanese cars.