Mondello's is a tricky old track. "Technical" is, I think, the correct term.
A sharp right-hander at turn one, into a sweeping left-hander, down a long straight, into a double apex right-hander, up the hill and into an "esses" section I have never managed to get right, leading tight into a right-hander, up the hill to the final tight right-hander, Dunlop. I'm rubbish at it.
Stefano Modena, on the other hand, is pretty good. The former Tyrrell and Jordan driver is at pains to tell us how much he hates doing this now, that he feels uncomfortable ferrying passenger around at high speed, but he's milling through the double right-hander with effortless pace, collecting some drift, complaining about how the BMW's power just dies if a slide is effected.
"You know people come to the test track in Rome all the time, and when they are finished their day, they always ask for a few laps on the circuit," he says. "I really don't like doing it anymore. It's too dangerous."
What about yourself? "I gave up racing in 2000 and I don't want to go back, ever. I've had friends who have died doing this. It's just too much. (One friend was Christian Peruzzi, one-time head of Fiat in Ireland).
"When I quit racing, I never went back to a race circuit again," he confesses. "Until last year. I was invited to go to Imola for the Grand Prix and I went."
You didn't like it? "No, not at all. Sure there were some people I could see, from my time, who are still there, team people and Charlie Whiting (FIA race director) and Herbie Blash (FIA observer), but that was it. I felt nothing.
"I was invited again this year, but I made a lot of excuses." A strange fate for a man who in 1989 took his Brabham to third on the world's trickiest circuit Monaco, and brought his Tyrrell home second in Canada two years later.
But such is the nature of motorsport. The fortunate never lose the craving for the adrenalin rush, the thrill of controlling a force of science and nature, and for some the memories are painful, so steeped in loss and disappointment that, as BB King would have it, the thrill is simply gone. - JUSTIN HYNES