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I think that I’m about to do something rather distasteful and quite painful. No, I won’t be joining Sir Max for one of his weekly dungeon sessions – this is far worse. You see, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to go out and buy myself a seven-seater. My actual circumstances haven’t changed – Mrs. R isn’t in the family way again – but for all kinds of reasons my clan needs a minibus.

So after my last post on the Scirocco I found myself cruising the internet looking for relevant examples. And, after a bit of lateral thinking on the subject of German coupes, I started looking at some online 944s.

This Porsche is a sort of heavy metal Scirocco, and for me one of the very best sportscars of all time. Even more so – and prepare yourself for sacrilege here – I’ve always preferred it to the 911, what with a proper water-cooled engine in the right place and far fewer associations with red-brace wearing merchant bankers.

Sorry to start the new year as harbinger of doom, but my new year prediction is the collapse in supercar prices that I reckon we'll be getting sometime before the end of December.

Predicting what's going to happen at the top of the motor trade has always been an imprecise science. It plays by a different set of rules when compared to the business of slinging Mondeos or vending Vectras, and the correlation between the health of the wider economy and the mega-car market is never completely precise. The early '90s collapse in supercar values happened some time after the rest of the economy had started its inexorable slide downwards.

The luxury manufacturers still have nice long waiting lists - but these aren't growing. Indeed, a recent conversation with a salesman for one of the most exotic brands revealed that he'd been sharing the showroom with little more than tumbleweed for the last two months. City boys are seeing their bonuses wither - and many of them are also starting to wonder whether £150,000 of toy is really the best place to plough their soft-earned.

Went to British Car Auctions the other day, mostly for a classic car sale viewing, but also got drawn into a prestige auction that was running at the time.

There were any number of BMWs and Mercs going through, some of them rare groove stuff such as M5s and a mouthwatering CL600 that went for £14k, but what got me wishing I'd registered to bid/arranged to borrow funds/had somewhere to park the spoils, were a couple of cars that were a little out of the ordinary for this particular auction. Past experience (though very limited) suggests that the unusual tends to earn a lower price, because that's not what the traders came for.

In truth, the Audi Quattro is about noise, not performance. That might seem strange for a car which kick-started the four-wheel-drive revolution 27 years ago, but while Audi’s marketing bods would point at Quattro technology, what stirs the soul is not differentials but exhaust burble.

On a dry road the Quattro is hardly a revelation. In the 1980s, four-wheel drive didn’t come cheap in terms of weight; the five-cylinder engine is fairly hefty, too, and ahead of the front axle line to boot. As a result, the Quattro is prone to huge, tyre-scrubbing curves of understeer. At least it’s stable and predictable.

But once conditions become more slippery, the relatively agricultural transmission becomes your friend, giving you just enough traction to stay out of trouble, but sufficiently little to keep you entertained.

At the end of 2005, the world lost one of its finest and most affordable drivers’s cars. The Fox city car is all very well for VW, but when it was introduced back then, it meant the end of the Lupo and consequently no more Lupo GTi. And the Lupo GTi was the first new car I ever really wanted.

I was a year into my degree when the Lupo GTi tore onto the pages of Autocar. Then, on a budget that just about extended to rent, tuition fees, pencils and the occasional medicinal pint of lager, it was the affordable fun-to-drive featherweight I day dreamed about. The group 11 insurance looked affordable, 40 miles to the gallon likewise, and the £13k asking price looked reasonably realistic too. The finance would have been £250 a month after a £3k deposit, and I reckoned I’d be able to afford that once I got a graduate job.