Hanslip already has 21 concertos under her fingers, and a few more in her sights. This year sees her taking on Bernstein’s Serenade, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Barber’s Violin Concerto, and Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto. Naxos has given her a list of around 50 concertos to consider, some of which will appear in her next three scheduled discs for the label.

Though Hanslip is firmly on the soloist track, chamber music has loomed larger on her horizon after she first went to her first Prussia Cove seminar in Cornwall in 2003, where she studied and performed with cellist Steven Isserlis and others. This past summer, she was at the International Music Academy in Blonay, Switzerland, where she took a quartet master class with Pamela Frank, Nobuko Imai, and Sadao Harada.

“I think chamber music makes me more rounded and makes me listen more,” she says, while admitting that being a soloist in a chamber ensemble has its challenges: “When I first started, people would say, Maybe you could try being a little less in this bit?” she says. “You are playing chamber music.

“I was always aware of what was going on in the orchestra anyway, but since I’ve been doing chamber music it’s becoming even stronger,” she continues. “I did the Tchaikovsky Concerto recently and since it was in a cathedral they wanted me to stand on a podium. I couldn’t see the conductor or anything. I just said, I’m really sorry, apart from anything else I’ll fall off it. I really like to have the connection with the conductor and to be able to turn slightly, so if I have a duet with a person in the orchestra I can have eye contact and see exactly what they’re doing.”

Despite the car accident, Hanslip turns out to be a serious car freak and is already on her second Mini (“they’re extremely well-built cars”). The night before we met, she’d been at the launch of the BMW 3 series (“beautiful, beautiful car”) and earlier in the year she’d attended a Formula One race with her father.

This car passion might come from her days counting Mercedes Benzes from the window of buses and trains in Germany, or it might come from her BMW-owning father, with whom she’s shared more than a few “mad drives.” When she studied with Bron, her father “used to drive out every other weekend to see me and my mother in Lübeck.”

When not practicing her daily dosage of five to six hours or zooming to the latest car show in her Mini, Hanslip enjoys swimming or dancing salsa or Bhangra at a local gym. She’s also active in charitable causes, playing benefit concerts for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, for example.

This year, she took her first long vacation in three or four years, but is ready to plunge into a busy schedule that sees her playing concerts in the UK, Cyprus, Istanbul, Germany, and North Carolina, among other places. If her career is a fast ride, then Hanslip is very clearly in the driver’s seat and prepared for the long haul.

“I’m happy with how things are going,” she says. “I’m not complaining.”