Forget the blues with China! No, our former friends and colonial masters, the soap dodgers, have thrown 414 years of the US relationship and 251 years of the Australian one down the gurgle hole, through the S bend and into the stinking sewer of feculent history.

Yes, this week, the unofficial arm of the British secret service, the online and telephone comparison and switching service Uswitch.com, put Steve McQueen's car chase in Bullitt near last in their list of best car chases of movie history! First, The Dark Knight Rises (DNR). So, when ScoMo beards Boris in his Downing Street den this Monday his first words should be: "McQueen last? You're pushing your luck little man. No trade deal for you."

As Mike Magda wrote in MotorTrend about the 104-minute classic petrol head film with no plot starring two cars in a 10 minute 53 second car chase: "Bullitt did more than excite audiences. It changed the way Hollywood looked at cops at a time when policemen were being called pigs. It paved the way for more movies to be shot entirely on location and outside of the Hollywood mentality."

Did Steve McQueen actually drive the two identical green Ford Mustangs in Bullitt? You're not serious? This is the man who said: "Racing is life. Everything else is just waiting."

Now because this is a motoring column, not the arts section, let me just tell you that the most featured of the two 1968 Mustangs sold last year for about $4.4 mill which is not bad for a piece of metal the owner paid $4 grand for 45 years before.

Get ready for a tear attack. When Ford was introducing their latest Bullitt Mustang in 2018 they invited Steve's granddaughter Molly McQueen to the launch. Molly got a shock in the week before when they unveiled the original Mustang Grandpa Steve had driven. After being told she was about the eighth person ever to sit in the car she said: "I think it creates the most tangible connection I've felt to my grandfather. He helped plan out the car chase in the film. One of the studio's historians said that on the shooting script it just said, 'car chase'. And he came up with everything else because he loved cars so much."

If you haven't got a lazy $4 or $5 mill in the cunning kick the V8 Mustangs on sale here in Oz are not only great value but just as bad ass as Steve's old ride. This month's Wheels magazine journos test drive the new manual Mustang Mach 1 ($84k) and rave.