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  The Fiesta’s inherent agility and actually quite responsive 88kw 1.6-litre engine (and, of course, go-fast kits bits) and you have a recipe for good, legal fun. Photo Gallery

?A car can be a tool but it can also be so much more. It can be a heart-starter, it can be a drug, it can be a piece of art and it can stir your soul.?

Thus spake Jez Clarkson in London’s The Sunday Times one recent weekend of the latest Lambo. He is, of course, right. A car can be all those things.

Unless, equally of course, that car is being driven in Australia, a nation wherein so much as juxtaposing “car” and “driving” with “fun” will soon be made illegal by the same people who pretend its potentially fatal to go at 111km/h but not 109.

Which is why, I’m starting to think on the basis of one week with Ford’s top of the line Fiesta Zetec three-door, that it’s one of the few remaining new cars you can buy in this country to live the dream as envisaged by Top Gear’s top dog and marketing device. No, don’t laugh.

Yes, the Fiesta is so far departed from a Lambo in terms of price, performance cachet and just about any criterion you care to name, that it seems a bit mad to classify both of them as cars.

Yet unless you have ready access to one of our already massively oversubscribed racetracks (or your own airport), you’ll never tap more than 4/10ths of a Lambo without being arrested, vilified and clapped in stocks for the sanctimonious to pelt you with smug epithets. (Hang in there, Rod.)

The coolest thing about this little Euro Ford is that even in the urban blight, you have, by its very nature, to get into it in order to maintain progress. You mightn’t be going terribly quickly, but, as a grizzled old builder of rally specials remarked: “I love small underpowered cars. You’re always up ‘em.”

Er … quite. To that add, inherent the Fiesta’s inherent agility and actually quite responsive 88kw 1.6-litre engine (and, of course, go-fast kits bits) and you have a recipe for good, legal fun. It’s early days yet, but I can see how this story is going to go.