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would affect everything he did thereafter. Driving, and at speed, has always been more for him than mere transport. It is a meditative and transcendent experience — one he says he also had during prolonged periods of online gaming.

The autobahn offered speed without limits. “I always loved speed. When I was 18 years old, you could go on any German highway and go as fast as your car would take you.”

In his Mercedes, surrounded by leather and steel, he put electronic dance music on the car stereo and turned it up loud. “You drive fast at night and you go 250kmh, 260kmh . . . and you have these lights flashing by, the little lights in the middle — it turns into a line. It is like you go so fast that it almost feels like flying. At those speeds . . . I’m a concentration freak. I like things that require me to be extremely focused and concentrating. When I get into that zone where my brain has to make an extra effort to be extra careful and extra focused, that’s when I really get a kick. I feel great about that.”

The intense concentration of such driving liberated the mind, freeing ideas which would otherwise be trapped. “It

requires you to turn on areas of your brain that you usually don’t use”, he says. “You need to think so fast and you are so focused. The funniest thing is sometimes . . . I have the best ideas . . . at that moment. You enter into a zone. You’re not even looking anymore, it is just all happening, and then you start thinking about things. I get the same out of online games. That’s why I always play competitive games — it’s the same kind of thing. For me it is exciting because the brain achieves a Zen moment.

“Meditation for most people is being quiet and having to empty your head — meditation for me is going to an extreme mode of concentration. You wouldn’t believe the kind of great side effects that has. When I am in a zone like that, let’s say for several hours, I’ve played extreme online gaming like Quake 2, and I’m so focused. Your brain really has to work hard — your head actually heats up. It’s like you have a fever. When I went to bed after long sessions like this, or after five hours of high-speed driving on the Autobahn, I would have dreams that are so vivid that I can control. I am in charge. I go places, I pick the destination. When I am in that zone, it feels like I have spent days in that dream and explored worlds . . . And I can fly, I fly through space and I visit other worlds. I jump off bridges and fly, pick up girls . . . it actually feels so real. That was for me the side-effect that made it so amazing. It is almost like a natural drug that goes off in your brain that triggers that.”

But driving at speed almost cost Kim everything. Aged 20, he was on the Autobahn travelling from Berlin to Munich at the wheel of a Mercedes E-Class Limousine. He had a friend in the passenger seat and his girlfriend Kirsten sitting in the rear. It was one of the first cars to have electronic stability control, which would detect any loss of traction

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