The Great Ocean Road on 102 horsepower: the slowest car was the fastest decision

My girlfriend and I were in Australia - Melbourne, specifically - and we'd been reading about the Great Ocean Road for ages: 240 kilometres of tarmac (the B100) starting at Torquay and hugging the Victorian coast all the way to Allansford, wedged between the Southern Ocean and the Otways hills. It's not just a 'nice road'; it's the road you see on every list of the world's great drives, right next to the Pacific Coast Highway and the Amalfi coast.

Being car people, our first question wasn't where to stay. It was what to drive. And having ruled out the obvious - a convertible for the views, something fast and expensive for the corners - we landed on the most peculiar and most beloved little 4x4 in the world: a Suzuki Jimny. White, with that clever boxy design that recalls a G-Class - a G-Class of the people.

Espresso at 7am

We collected it in the centre of Melbourne at seven in the morning. Melbourne is possibly the most serious coffee city in the world - espresso here isn't a drink, it's a religion - so the first stop was non-negotiable: our usual at Tone coffee roasters.

There is no better combination than arriving at a café early in the morning with a good car parked outside, drinking your espresso and knowing a whole beautiful day is waiting in front of you.

Torquay, Bells Beach, Lorne

First stop, Torquay - the capital of Australian surfing, birthplace of Rip Curl and Quiksilver. Then Bells Beach: the most storied point break in the country. We stood above the cliff watching surfers wait for their set - people who, like us with cars, have found their thing that needs no explanation.

From there the road becomes what we came for: the tarmac hugs the shoreline, the ocean appears and disappears behind corners, and every bend comes with a pull-off for photos. It's worth knowing what you're driving on, too: the Great Ocean Road was built by hand, with picks and shovels, by 3,000 soldiers returning from the First World War - dedicated to the comrades who didn't return. It is the largest war memorial in the world. That changes the way you see the drive.

Lunch in Lorne - a seaside town that feels purpose-built for stopping to eat - and then back towards Melbourne.

So, the car?

Let's be honest: to drive, the Jimny is nothing special. You sit up high, like in a little truck. The four-speed automatic is from another decade - slow, reluctant, shifting whenever it decides to. The 1.5 with its 102 horses doesn't pull; on climbs you drop a gear and practise patience. On every metric we usually judge a car by, it fails.

And yet. Every time we stopped - and we stopped constantly - I turned around to look at it. And every single time, without exception, it put a smile on my face.

Here's the secret the Great Ocean Road taught us: on a road that exists for the view, the fast car is the wrong tool. It rushes you. The Jimny, with its 102 horsepower, forces you to travel at the speed of the landscape. You don't overtake the journey - you live it. After the 911's 450 horses, it took 102 to understand: some roads want speed, and some roads want time.

Albert Park, obviously

On the way back, there was no chance we'd skip Albert Park. For 51 weeks of the year, the road around the lake is a quiet public street with a 40 km/h limit - and for one week a year, it's the circuit of the Australian Grand Prix. We did a lap in the Jimny, fully legal, imagining the braking zones into Turn 3. Quite possibly the slowest lap ever recorded there. Definitely one of the happiest.