Amid the squealing of tyres and roaring of engines, the lads were having fun. George Frew went along to speak to the chief perpetrator of noise, Jeremy Clarkson

Big Jezza - and he will not mind me referring to him as such - has folded his 6' 5'' frame into the new version of the Mini Cooper.

In the far reaches of Grove Technology Park, in Grove, near Wantage, engines are gunned and video cameras get set to roll.

Jeremy Clarkson

Jezza, more commonly known as the celebrated Jeremy Clarkson, is filming Clarkson's Top 100, a VCI video in which The Lads' Lad drives and races a selection of minis and finally gets round to naming his top 100 cars.

This is the 11th day of filming around the country, but he's on fine form as he and programme director Paul Hembury, who is driving an old Mini Cooper, go tearing after each other like they're filming a scene from the sadly-missed The Sweeney.

They go roaring into an indoor karting track and vanish from view, to a soundtrack of squealing tyres, indignant gear changes and protesting engines.

Then they whizz back out again. Forget The Sweeney - this is more like the motoring overture to the car chase in The French Connection.

Big Jezza handles his car with skill and evident enjoyment, his lips parted in a wolf's grin as he slews the vehicle round corners like its a gin-soaked sailor on his last legs.

In many ways, Jeremy Clarkson is the last of a vanishing breed. His kindred spirits in these first years of Britain in the 21st century are people like the acerbic columnist Richard Littlejohn and Jezza's big mate, the journalist AA Gill, who, like Clarkson, specialises in giving offence to his readers like a man on a mission.

Gill once conducted a campaign of sustained invective against the Welsh nation which included such inflammatory (and funny) remarks as: "The only man who ever entered Porthcawl wearing a smile was driving a crane with a wrecking-ball on the end of it," while Jezza needled the natives of Norfolk by insisting that Lotus cars were "bolted together there by women in hairnets". The 'We Hate Jeremy Clarkson' fan club is still thriving in East Anglia, apparently. "I drove to a wedding up there once," he reveals, giving the mix another stir, "and I went into a major service station and tried to pay by credit card. The man had never seen one in his life!"

Jezza sits on a wall sipping coffee, clad in his denim Levi's. Dissapointingly, he's wearing trainers, rather than the cowboy boots with which he's usually associated. Clarkson's detractors have him labelled as an oaf and a braggart, with overtones of immaturity.

In fact what you see is not what you get. Offscreen and off the page, Jezza is Jeremy, husband of nine years to Francie and father of Emily, Findo and Katya.

True, he roars around the leafy lanes near his Chipping Norton home in his beloved red Ferrari and some might say he wears his Levi's a little too tight for dignity or decency for a man of his age, but those who know him speak differently about him than those who see Jezza only on television or read him in The Sun or The Sunday Times.

Clarkson does a lot of charity stuff which goes unreported and a spokesman for Macmillan Cancer Relief who has known him and his wife for some years describes Clarkson simply as "a very nice man".

Quizzed if the popular peception of the 'very nice man' is just an acquired image, she smiles and says:" Well, you'll have to ask him that." So I do.

It's all an act, this Lad of Lads thing, isn't it? I ask. Jezza laughs heartily.

"Heh, heh! I love it. To be thought of as a lad when you are 41 years of age with a wife and three children is soooo flattering," he says.

"But me? Super Lad? I think not." He fishes in his pockets for a fag and offers me one. He smokes - what else? - Red top Marlboroughs. I offer silent thanks that I didn't offer him a girly Silk Cut.

You could no more imagine him smoking a Silky than driving a Robin Reliant. Or a Lotus.

Would he describe himself as a strict father? "No - I encourage rebellion," he says. "Which doesn't matter as long as they have good manners. I'd say I was a liberal with a very small 'l' and a huge libertarian."

He says he decided to do Clarkson's Top 100 because "historically, the time was right. It's 100 years since AC (the classic sports car firm) was founded, so it seemed like an ideal opportunity."

What about the cowboy boots thing, though?

"Eh?" The cowboy boots you're supposed to have been born wearing. Jezza looks bemused for a moment. "I haven't worn cowboy boots for 20 years," he insists. "And I wear jeans because they're practical.

"Anyway, I saw his Tonyness going into Number 10 last week wearing jeans, so there you go." So does he rage around Oxfordshire in his Ferarri with Meat Loaf or Def Leppard blaring out from the CD player and frightening the horses?

"Nope. Drove down here this morning with Radio Two on, listening to Terry (Wogan.) He came out with a good one," he chuckles. "He said: 'If God didn't mean us to eat animals, then why did he make them from meat?' Heh, Heh."

A short while before this, I'd heard him explaining his fondness for sushi. Yet when a basketful of mid-morning greasy rolls is brought forth, Jezza is not slow to grab and devour a large bacon baguette. Mind you, he sticks to the Diet Coke.

Ask him about his friendship with AA Gill. "I knew Adrian when he was a drunk living in a dog basket in Kensington," he remembers fondly.

"I recall sitting in a pub with some serious horse-racing punters watching the final stages of the Cheltenham Gold Cup when the front door burst open and Adrian staggered in.

"He climbed over some tables and switched the TV off. I remember thinking, 'Hmm, that is a very brave man..."

I watch him dog down the last of his bacon baguette and ask him if he bothers taking care of himself. I already know the answer that's coming, but I ask him anyway, just for the hell of it.

"No," he confirms, " I do not look after myself. I smoke, I do all the things I'm not supposed to - in fact, I didn't go to bed at all last Saturday night and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to the whole of Chipping Norton."

He says his wife Francie is fond of fast cars, too. "She's a mother of three and she's got two two-seater sports cars and goes off to rallies in places like Libya." He shakes his head in wonder or admiration, it's hard to tell which.

What will he do next, I wonder? "I'd love to write a novel one day, when the hair has all fallen out and the teeth have turned yellow," he replies.

"When only 85 per cent of people think I'm awful, instead of the current 90." So does he ever regret upsetting people?

"Every week," he nods. "Sometimes I think, 'Hmmm - shouldn't have said that'. But my hate mail has decreased. And anyway, sometimes they've got a point."

So how does Jezza see Jeremy? "I'm a working journalist," he says simply. "That's what it still says on my passport."

Who would get up his nose, if he found himself stuck on a desert island with them? "John Prescott," he says, without pausing.

"Not for his violence, but because he'd turn the whole island into a bus lane. On the other hand, I suppose Kirstin Scott Thomas would prove decorative..."

With this, he jumps back into the Mini Cooper, barrels it down a stretch of road and, at the director's behest, performs a handbrake turn at speed. The rear of the car lifts off the ground slightly and clatters the mounting pole of a CCTV camera. He gets out and takes a look. "It would," he says. "be hard to find a better life."

Big Jezza.

Lad of Lads.

Husband and father.

Man among motoring men.

Picture: Antony Moore