I have never hung art in my bedroom. I can never find anything that looks right: too cliché, too kitsch or too highbrow.

I have, however, always displayed a poster of a Metro 6R4, mid-slide. That, for me, is worth 100 Warhol soup cans or Mona Lisa parodies - even if my university housemates didn't have quite the same vision. The appeal of the 6R4 lies partly in the brilliance of its development brief.

For the sake of appeasing British Leyland's marketing bods, the company's Group B racer simply had to be based on a Metro. That brought virtues - a short wheelbase, boosting agility - but also barely any room for cramming in a title-worthy drivetrain. In retrospect, the sensible answer would have been to fit a huge turbo to a downsized engine, graft in a four-wheel-drive transfer case and call it a day.

Turbos were all the rage: Audi, Lancia, Renault and Mitsubishi were all at it, with the newfangled tech promising huge power. Austin Rover Motorsport could have followed easily.

But no. The engineers instead stuck two naturally aspirated fingers up at the new school and set to work on an all-new free-breathing V6, enlisting ex-Cosworth maestro David Wood. The thinking was that you could have sold a showroom full of Metros in the time it took a small engine to build turbo boost - then the engine would have grenaded.

Plus, all the ancillaries required to manage the extra heat and thirst for fuel would have added significant weight, upsetting the Metro's balance. The end result was indisputably a success: a masterpiece in aluminium revving to 9000rpm. It could produce 400bhp, but that's not really the point, because it's the sound that is punched indelibly into my consciousness.