On the afternoon of April 23, 1962, the professional motor racing career of Stirling Moss ended against an earth bank on the approach to St Mary’s Corner at Goodwood. The cause of the crash has been endlessly debated, but Stirling himself has no memory of it. “I remember chatting up a South African girl at a party the night before, and I remember knocking off the exhaust of my Lotus Elite that morning reversing out of the car park of The Fleece, John Brierley’s pub in Chichester. After that, nothing. I woke up six weeks later in a room filled with flowers, and I remember thinking vaguely, ‘Somebody must have thought I was going to die.’”

The race was the Easter Monday Glover Trophy: a comparatively minor event, no championship points at stake, not even much glory. Stirling’s car was a Lotus-Climax, an elderly 18 chassis despite its 21 bodywork, owned by Rob Walker but running in the pale green colours of the British Racing Partnership. It was well out of the running, having already been delayed by a pitstop to fix a jamming gear selector on the Colotti gearbox. Graham Hill’s BRM was comfortably in the lead, and the Lotus was two laps behind.

But Stirling always regarded whatever race he was doing today as the race that mattered. It was typical of the man that he wanted to give the paying spectator value for money, and there was still the outright lap record to go for. He’d already equalled the new record, set a few laps earlier by John Surtees’ Lola, and there was more to come.