It doesn't take long, about five minutes in fact, to take a shine to Vanessa-Mae. It helps that she bends the rules of violin playing like Beckham bends footballs and, from the viewpoint of a red-blooded man, that she is strikingly beautiful. But when she uses a Formula One analogy to describe her musical dreams, she clinches the deal for me.
The Grand Prix moment comes as I ask her, innocently, if she always dreamed of rocking the classical music world, or if she would have been content to have had a career playing in one of the world's famous orchestras. She peers up at me over a plate of scones and a village of tea pots and posh mineral water bottles in a suite at Cliveden. The answer comes back as fast as you can say Murray Walker. "I never geared myself up to be in an orchestra," she says. "I've always looked up to classical artists, but as a child you don't think 'I want to be the next team manager of the Formula One team.' You want to be the next racing driver."
And not just a racing driver but world champion. Her £35 million fortune has come from sales of 8 million albums (her new album Choreography came out in September) bursting with an eclectic mix of Toccata to techno. In a decade she has demolished the barriers between playlists, bridging Classic FM and XFM.
If classical music is a Sunday afternoon drive in the country, then Vanessa-Mae is the Monaco Grand Prix - posh but populist, high-octane but cultured. The fact that that Vanessa-Mae is a petrolhead comes more by luck than design. Years of being constrained by an over-protective mother/manager left the teen prodigy lacking some serious life skills. As a financially secure teen multi-millionairess, she didn't need to drive; she had chauffeurs and bodyguards.
"I couldn't hardly go out alone so I figured what's the point in driving," she recalls. But since breaking free from the shackles of her mother/manager, Vanessa-Mae has developed a taste for freedom, and that includes the freedom of the open road. The car she wanted as her first was the hooligan open-wheel Lotus 340R. She opted for something a little more practical.
"I went for the Elise 111S, because least it had a roof," she titters. Her baptism of motoring fire came in Central London in the small hours. "The first time I ever drove it was at two o'clock in the morning. [Her French boyfriend and fellow car nut] Lionel came round to pick me up from studio sessions for my last album, Subject To Change. And I said, 'Look I need to wind down'. So we went through the park in the car and I didn't put an L-plate on and the police picked me up. And they said. 'Is this your car?'" I think I looked about 20, younger with my training shoes, and I said 'Yeah, yeah it's my car'. And they said, 'So have you got a licence?' And I'm like, 'No... I'm a learner'. He said 'Well you don't have an L-plate'. I said 'Yeah, I know'. And he said 'Well next time'. And they were really cool with it."
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