Forget the innovations, this car is our Olympic hope

THE man who brought you the McLaren F1 has managed to come up with another motoring marvel; a car surely designed to confuse traffic wardens!

The T25 City Car is being hailed as the most radical small car in years but while it's promising all sorts of innovative features, it's bound to cause local authorities all over the country a right headache. No matter what you make of it, you can park three of them into a normal parking space.

Not that this is a new claim of course; Smart made the bold claim when it launched its very first car that you could squeeze two of them into a parking space, by parking them nose into the kerb. But in over a decade of them tooling around our towns and cities, I've never once seen anyone actually trying it out.

The problem isn't that a traffic warden is going to get confused and slap a ticket on your tiny T25 if you try out the new sport of triple parking, although I'd love to see the headlines if one did. It's that - unless the new arrival is wildly successful - you're never going to get a chance to have a go in the first place.

For triple parking to work you'd need to have another two drivers who just happen to also own the three-seater city slicker, and need to park in the same place as you do at just the right moment. Unlikely if you're in a hurry to get to work and just need to stick the car somewhere where it isn't going to get clamped or nicked.

Don't get me wrong, I like small cars immensely but I get the sense that the latest creation from Gordon Murray - who also brought you the Rocket sports car and the Mercedes SLR - is going to have to be wildly successful if it isn't going to be viewed by snotty British car buyers as the next Sinclair C5.

But I hope it is a success, because I reckon triple parking is a sport we could be world leaders at. London 2012, anyone?