I DON'T want to meet David Hasselhoff. Whenever I read about him it's usually some story about how the former Baywatch star is struggling with alcoholism. It's all a bit sad. Baywatch you can keep. To be frank, I've always preferred flesh to plastic and the only thing on earth less attractive to me than Pamela Anderson comes out of my dog's bottom.

But Knight Rider. Now that's different. I have the theme tune on my cellphone. As a boy I just loved it.

It was the perfect mix of cars and adventure, with Michael Knight, played by Hasselhoff, and KITT (the car, actually a Pontiac Trans Am) always bravely confronting villains that, I can see even today, had a certain darkness about them.

I distinctly remember the trauma of watching the episode when KITT was reprogrammed by the baddies and told to kill Michael. I was terrified.

But meeting your childhood heroes is a dangerous game. I've learnt this the hard way. If Hasselhoff would likely be a disappointment, then imagine the horror of my recent mistake of buying a few Dukes of Hazzard DVDs.

As a boy, I loved the show, which ran from 1979 to 1985 & I'm not talking about the awful movie of the same name starring some cross-dressing chap called Jessica Simpson.

As far as I know, the Dukes of Hazzard never made it to SA. At the time, for various dull reasons, we were living in Germany, where the show was broadcast.

I was all about the Dukes's car, a 1969 Dodge Charger called the General Lee, in which good ol' boys Beauregard -Bo- Duke and his cousin Lucas -Luke- Duke would hare around Hazzard county, usually sideways, running moonshine and outsmarting corrupt county officials and bungling cops.

The show was famous for its car stunts, especially amazing jumps, usually accompanied by Bo Duke's rebel yell, -Yeeehaaa!. Uncle Jesse, the grey-bearded, wise patriarch of the Duke clan, was always on hand for philosophical advice. His character was played by the impossibly named Denver Pyle. Honestly, google it.

The Dukes of Hazzard even provided my first love, Daisy Duke. Bo and Luke's cousin was famous for her hotpants and ready smile, though she was no slouch in a bar brawl down at the Hog's Nest either, often employing suitably revealing high kicks.

So, full of nostalgia, I settled down to watch. God, it's awful, hamfisted stuff. The scripts are bad, the acting is atrocious and the all-American morality is cloying.

When it comes to cars I like to think I'm still a seven-year-old boy, but apparently not.

Whenever the General Lee leaps skyward and Bo screams -Yeeeehah!, I want to ask why. Cars do not just take off, for goodness' sake. The General Lee even seems lumbering and slow. And because it's an American car from the '70s, it is.

And Daisy Duke? Not a patch on the girl who resides all gorgeous in my synapses. It was most deflating.

This, obviously, brings me to the Lotus Seven. It's a car I've wanted to drive for at least 20 years, a car designed in the 1950s as a stripped-down, pared-back machine to reconnect the driver to the exhilaration of driving. Lotus stopped building the two-seater in 1972, but the design was so popular that there are dozens of manufacturers around the world that continue to make faithful replicas. Most famous among them are Caterham and Westfield in the UK.

Well, to be fair, it was a bit cramped. It was so tight that they had to move the pedals for me and it felt more like a straightjacket than a car at times. But Birkin does manufacture cars for taller people, I am assured, and a guy can be accommodated comfortably.

Lotus was founded by Colin Chapman in 1952. His philosophy for the Lotus Seven was adding lightness. This thinking flies in the face of modern methods, where manufacturers are forced to add power to compensate for the enormous weight of safety kit and luxuries buyers quite rightly demand.

But adding lightness offers a different experience. The S3 I drove had a Ford 2l motor, which sounds as interesting as auditing, but it produces a race-tuned 120kW and that, in a car that weighs less than a mosquito, means it absolutely zips along, hitting 100km/h in about 5,5 seconds.

But it's the cornering that's so extraordinary. I have often written about cars that turn into a corner sharply and directly, that have that delicate sense of touch, but none corners like this. As I said, it weighs less than a mosquito and it corners like one, too.
The violence with which this car changes direction is merciless. It's Brownian Motion, not driving.

Inside, it's animal. It comes with a roof, but it's not worth the bother. It has headlights and indicators as afterthoughts. These South African cars are just about road-legal, but the experience is like that of racing.

You're sitting on the floor. The exhaust is deafening; it's inches from your left ear. The gear lever is short-throw, making for fast and accurate gear changes.

And the view down the long bonnet? Well, it hasn't changed for more than 50 years, and neither has the lunatic grin of the lucky fish behind the wheel.

What a blisteringly unique experience, a small taste of driving before healthandsafetyism took over. What utter, unbridled joy.

And get this. You can get a 1,6l Toyota-powered S3 (trust me, it'll be very quick) for about R175000. At the other end of the scale, for R350000 you can get a 250kW Ford-powered S3 with every conceivable carbon-fibre extra that'll hit 100km/h in something like four seconds.

On a track, where these cars belong, nothing - but nothing - will catch it. There are a few faster cars on the straights, but come the twisty stuff and no Ferrari, no Lamborghini and no Porsche will come close at all because of added lightness.