Alonso says as much when we wander off to have a chat while Jean-Louis tends to his still-steaming Maxi. Any chance of him taking me out in it has gone up in smoke, so to speak. Not that Alonso seems bothered; PR stunts like this are a necessary evil for an F1 star.

I ask him about the early days. Turns out that Alonso first showed promise behind the wheel at the somewhat tender age of two, when his father thought it would be fun to plonk the young Fernando in the homemade go-kart he'd built for his seven-year-old sister. Dad tweaked the throttle cable to raise the tickover speed and Fernando had his first taste of motoring around a supermarket car park. His first race came the following year but he finished last, a position he repeated several times before his father gave up any ambitions of being a kart manufacturer and treated him to a proper race-kart. He was soon winning races and progressed up the ranks before winning the world kart title in 1996, when he was just 15.

You'd think this would have given Fernando a taste for performance cars. You'd be wrong. His first road car? A Renault Megane. It came about from a sponsorship deal with a leasing company and he chose the Megane only because it looked such a good deal (this is before any Renault tie-up, remember). A Peugeot 406 followed, then a Vel Satis, before Renault stepped in and gave him a Megane diesel for Spain and a Megane convertible which he uses to commute between his flat in Oxford and the F1 base at Enstone. Renault did give him a Clio V6 to use but Alonso returned it after a couple of months as he felt uncomfortable driving such a recognisable car around the streets of his home town of Oviedo. In fact, Fernando disapproves of race drivers who feel the need to drive performance cars on the road; he'd rather stick to perfecting his driving talents behind the wheel of an F1 car instead.

It's a recurring theme. He just loves racing an F1 car, considers himself immensely privileged to be one of the 20 drivers on the grid come raceday.

His meteoric rise has a lot to do with luck as well as driver talent, he says. 'There were at least 25 other drivers in the world kart series who were just as good, but I got the breaks at the right time.'

It's almost time for him to go. Flavio wants a word, apparently. Tonight he'll disappear back to his flat in Oxford, a town he loves as he can move around completely unrecognised, unlike Spain where he can no longer live a normal life due to his popularity.

I ask him about the changes to the F1 regs currently being mooted. He says he's not particularly bothered what happens - so long as he's still driving an F1 car. 'The faster the car the more fun it is,' he says, 'Manual gearchanges, less traction control, smaller engines... Ferrari will still be the team to beat. Winning is all that matters.'