These are the years that saw the decline of the US and British car industries and the ascent of the Japanese. Cars got safer, smaller and more efficient. We started driving hatchbacks and the MPV was invented. In fact, for an industry that often didn’t know where its next meal was coming from, a lot got done. So unless your car predates 1970, it owes a lot to the 1970s.

It all started so well. In 1970 Steve McQueen made Le Mans, and at the wheel of a Porsche 911 and 917 made driving cooler than it ever had been. But it all went wrong almost immediately with the US Clean Air Act of 1970. If you’re under 50, you’re one of the children whose health and future the Act was designed to protect, and of course we’re very grateful. But we can’t help but mourn the US muscle car, which was at its maddest in 1970 with the monstrous, bewinged Plymouth Superbird. But because of the Act, the muscle car was stone dead in just a year in the most extraordinary, instant mass-extinction event in automotive history.

The oil crisis of ’73 and the recession that followed nearly did for the supercar industry too. Some of the most famous names changed hands more often than an old fiver and bounced in and out of bankruptcy; car magazines regularly arrived at the factories of Italy’s Supercar Valley to test a new model only to find the gates locked shut, or the paint still drying on the car they were meant to be driving. But Lamborghini somehow still managed to make the Countach. It was the definitive seventies supercar; shocking and angular to look at and terrifying to drive. First shown in 1971, it took three years to get the cash together to get it into production.

The British car industry pretty much did die in the seventies; from making 1.9 million cars in 1972 it slumped to half that number by the end of the decade, and soon not a single British-owned volume carmaker was left. But the oil crisis wasn’t to blame; just look at the cars the British carmakers were insulting us with. The Austin Allegro, launched in 1973, had all the dynamism and sex appeal of your elderly Auntie Flo in her mauve Sunday best. By comparison with VW’s Golf, launched just a year later with Giugiaro’s hallmark seventies ‘folded-paper’ styling — and a practical hatchback – the Allegro looks dumpy and retarded. No wonder buyers – Brits included – deserted the British carmakers.

Others were showing the old powers how it ought to be done. Honda’s super-clean, super-frugal CVCC-powered cars led the Japanese assault on the US. American buyers, once chauvinistic but now desperate for reliable, economical cars loved them, and the US car industry has never really recovered. Volvo’s VESC experimental safety vehicle not only presaged how Volvos would look for the next 20 years but had two decades’ worth of safety advances aboard too; some of which we now take for granted (crumple zones, airbags) and some, like reversing cameras, that are still reserved for high-end cars.

But Giugiaro’s Megagamma concept was arguably the most significant of the seventies, though its impact wouldn’t be felt until much later. It started life as a sketch for a competition run by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in ’76 to design a new checker cab for the city. To cut congestion but create more cabin space Guigiaro decided to build upwards, and the people carrier was born.

If you want to see how the car moved on the ‘70s, look at the performance cars that bookmark the decade. At one end, that crude Plymouth Superbird. At the other, the Audi Quattro; turbocharged, four-wheel drive and beautifully made. And frankly, not all that different to the 270bhp, turbocharged, four-wheel drive and beautifully made Volkswagen Golf R that’s sitting on my drive as I write this. The logbook for my car says 2010, but I know it was born in the seventies.

A few more muscle cars trickled out in ’71, but the Superbird’s massive rear wing marks the literal high-point of muscle car design, and also its swan-song.

1971 Lamborghini Countach concept

Why are all the best supercars – McLaren F1, Bugatti EB110 – launched into the teeth of recessions? Fortunately, the Countach’s incandescent styling meant it lasted into the nineties.

1972 Volvo VESC

This ESV embarrassed some of the bigger players who had taken a distinctly lax approach to their buyers’ health. Volvos have sold on safety ever since.

1973 Austin Allegro

Just bloody awful: epitomized everything that was wrong with the British car industry. Some say there’s no such thing as a bad car now, but there was back then.

1974 Volkswagen Golf

There had been hatchbacks before, but none looked as good, or mixed premium feel with affordable price like the Golf. Set the template that family cars still follow.

1975 Porsche 911 Turbo

‘911’ and ‘Turbo’ put together have always seemed slightly tautological, and were certainly terrifying in these early cars. But 35 years on they’re still being made.

1976 Aston Martin Lagonda

William Town’s insane styling is one of the stand-out designs of the decade. Digital dash and computer-controlled everything meant they broke down as much as they stood out.

1978 Lancia Megagamma

At the Turin motor show Giugiaro unveiled a concept that would spawn not just a new car, but a whole new type of car.

1980 Audi Quattro

It might have been launched in 1980 but the Audi Quattro  –  full of brawn but laced with new tech – was the ultimate expression of seventies automotive ethos. A truly modern performance car; still sensational to drive, and still inspiring current fast cars.

Neville King
Chef and co-proprietor of the Old Station Inn in Hallatrow, Somerset, Neville bought his Corvette 13 years ago whilst he was living in the US to keep in the UK as a runaround. The plan had been to buy a British classic motor car, but this was a little piece of the American dream he wanted to keep close.
“She has dangerous curves — great going in a straight line, but gets interesting in the wet. She’s still a very comfortable drive, if a little noisy. Last weekend she was driven up to Newcastle and back without a problem.“
www.theoldstationandcarriage.co.uk

Elsie Pinniger
Pro surfer and seamstress Elsie Pinniger bought ‘Mo’ the 1976 Morris Marina in Harvest Gold, 18 months ago. Though Marinas haven’t had the best press of late, Elsie is in love.
“It’s so easy to fix! All you need is the manual. I always surprise the AA men by knowing what to do with Mo in a crisis. Mo’s also long enough to keep the longboard in. Huge priority.
www.goodneon.co.uk

Why? They’ve ruined it. Sure, the best guys still win, but electronics, even the most basic examples, have helped homogenise racing. Now there is barely any variety.

Look at any class and there is a right way and wrong way to do it. Technology has removed the grey areas. No one needs to go with their ‘gut feeling’. And even fewer take risks when it comes to development. In public, at least.

The scientific approach — testing everything behind closed doors, on wind tunnels and with telemetry, has taken romance, repeatedly slammed its head in the garage door and buried it behind the Research and Development department.

Now there is just one approach, one line, one tyre. To spot the differences you need a microscope. And I’m not just talking about the machinery. It’s the riders’ approach too. There are nutritionists, personal trainers – three hours consulting the data while sucking on a bucketful of isotonic slurry. There are teams that even use satellite tracking to determine the optimum apex of any given bend. That’s three satellites to work out the best way around a corner!

To find my race paddock nirvana you need to return to America in the late seventies. For a good example set the time machine specifically for October 1977 at Riverside International Raceway, California. Look for two dudes in Nippondenso leathers hanging around with a crew of oily Japanese fellas.

Steve McLaughlin is one of the racers. Wes Cooley is the other. The leader of the engineers is Pops Yoshimura. A former boy pilot in the Japanese Navy, Pops was fortunate not to become part of the ‘Divine Wind’ ordered to take a one-way flight into an American aircraft carrier during World War II. Lovers of fast Suzukis the world over should be glad he somehow side-stepped the dubious honour of becoming a kamikaze pilot.

Bike-mad and with an understanding of how engines worked and what to do to improve them, Yoshimura arrived in America in the late-1970s and put the cat among the pigeons in AMA Production Superbike racing. And it is those Production Superbikes I love.

Yoshimura worked on both Kawasaki Z1s and Suzuki GS750s and 1000s. Back in 1977 and 1978 the US Superbike road racing scene was on the cusp of hitting the big time. Yoshimura has been described as the founding father of Superbike racing.

‘Back then the superbikes had high handlebars, twin shocks and conduit for a frame,’ remembers Eddie Lawson, ‘But they had a lot of horsepower.’ Science hadn’t caught up with tuning. In fact, science hadn’t even been given a pit pass. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that it would start to make a big impact. Back in the 1970s the cutting edge of pit-lane tech was a new digital stopwatch on a string around your mechanic’s sunburnt neck. The bikes were as dumb as dinosaur droppings.

So while Pops Yoshimura could coerce obscene gobs of power out of an eight-valve, four-cylinder Kawasaki, the bits of the bike he wrapped around the hulking power plant couldn’t handle it.

‘The tyres?’ says Wes Cooley and starts to laugh. ‘Ha, they were really different. Nothing like they’ve got now, that’s for sure. When I started riding the Kawasaki 900 it handled better with street tyres than with slicks. It would hook up too good with the slicks, which would make the frame torque [flex]. I could get away with running road Dunlops and make it slide a lot better. With slicks it would just wobble all over the place. And the brakes? I could put my feet down and probably slow down better.’

What kind of power was Cooley and his competition dealing with? Probably 100-110bhp in 1977 and going on for 130 a few years later (or the same power as 2002 Fireblade).

Lawson really came to the fore in the Superbike class in 1980–81 (before launching into Grands Prix and winning the 500cc title twice), but he first tested Kawasaki’s 1000 in 1979.

‘You look back on it now and you wouldn’t even ride it. At the time you just thought “All right, it’s not actually gonna spit me off, I don’t think. So hold it wide open.” It was pretty crazy. If you could ride that you could ride anything.’

Every top-level bike racer from any era has his own problems to deal with, and it’s indisputable that racing is much closer now that it was then, but I still yearn to see the best of their day bucking and weaving on a glorified, petrified muscle bike. Forget electronic damping and anti-wheelie, in 1977 adjustable suspension was still around the corner.

Wes Cooley knows where I’m coming from. We spoke about those days, when he was one of the most famous racers in America (now he’s an orthopaedic nurse). ‘I think the period is so fondly remembered because it was the beginning of the superbikes… Because it wasn’t all computer-controlled, riders had to ride the bikes differently. It was real life, down to the nitty-gritty, salt-and-rock, blood, sweat and tears. They were rough-looking motorcycles: the high handlebars, the 19-inch wheels and the four exhaust pipes. They weren’t sleek and modern.’

And it is those motorcycles from that raced on circuits across America and beyond, from 1977 to 1981 that still define the term ‘muscle bike’ – they were strong in the arm, thick in the head. They didn’t have electronic brains. They didn’t even have clockwork brains. They were about speed and power, not precision or efficiency. They were of their time. Of course, they were as doomed as they were dim-witted. Progress would see to that, but look at a period photo, of one of the brave riders hanging off, gaffa tape prototype kneesliders licking tracks called Loudon, Daytona and Sears Point or tucking behind number boards to escape the 160mph windblast and try to argue that there are many more evocative sights in bike racing. I dare you. I double-dare you!

Hunt was the tall, blond, good-looking British public schoolboy, who liked a ciggy and a beer and wore ‘sex-the breakfast of champions’ badges on his overalls. He arrived in Formula 1 as the underdog — a talented, brave driver run by Lord Alexander Hesketh and his bunch of Hooray Henry Establishment friends.

Hunt was a good story, especially when he broke his duck and scored a fine win in the ’75 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, beating Lauda’s Ferrari into second place. When Emerson Fittipaldi unexpectedly left McLaren to start his own team, Hunt suddenly found himself with a top drive.

Lauda was the buck-toothed young Austrian chancer from wealthy stock opposed to his career choice! He borrowed to the hilt to get himself into the March and BRM teams, then along came Ferrari and Niki no longer needed to worry about cash. By the end of ’75 Lauda had arrived, winning five races en route to the championship – Ferrari’s first champion since John Surtees in 1964.

At the start of ’76 it was all Lauda. Hunt was quick but things didn’t go his way. But then Lauda tipped a tractor over while building himself a house and cracked a rib. In Spain he had to drive in a corset with pain-killing injections. James came down his inside, edged him over a kerb, knocked the wind out him and won the race. But then Hunt found himself disqualified, his McLaren marginally too wide.
It was typical of Hunt’s luck, it seemed. On a weekend trip on team mate Jochen Mass’s boat, Hunt had to knock girlfriend Hottie (Jane Birbeck) out of the way when she was almost collected by an errant sail arm.
“She nearly went for a burton and it would be careless of me to lose another one like that…” joked James, whose wife Suzy had run off with actor Richard Burton.

Going to the south of France for the French GP at Paul Ricard, Hunt’s situation looked hopeless: Lauda led the championship with 55 points and five wins, Hunt had no wins and eight points. But Niki’s Ferrari blew up while leading, James won and also heard he’d had his Spanish win reinstated. The score was now Lauda, 52; Hunt, 26.

The British GP at Brands Hatch was next and Hunt’s bad luck reverted to type. The Ferraris collided on the first lap and Hunt’s McLaren was damaged in the ensuing debacle. Hunt won the restarted race but was disqualified for failing to complete the first lap of the original race and therefore being ineligible for the restart. Niki scored another maximum.

But then it all changed. Lauda crashed at Nurburgring and the Ferrari burst into flames. Niki, badly burned, was pulled from the car by four fellow drivers but for days his life hung in the balance as the oxygen count in his blood fell below that generally necessary to sustain life.
A priest shocked Lauda into hanging on by administering the last rites and, amazingly, six weeks later, having missed just two races, a badly disfigured Lauda was back in the Ferrari cockpit at Monza. Well-known British sports broadcaster Harry Carpenter, whose main beat was boxing, called it the bravest sporting story he had ever reported.

Hunt, meanwhile, had won the restarted Nurburgring race in which Lauda had been injured and also the Dutch GP that Niki missed. Suddenly he was right back in the fight. The score was now Lauda, 61; Hunt, 47, with four races to go.

Monza of course, is Ferrari territory. Hunt found himself put to the back of the grid due to a fuel octane infringement and Lauda came home a fabulous fourth, the first of three Ferraris entered that day.
‘Hunt versus Lauda’ became great newspaper copy as the media lapped up the twists and turns. In Germany, meanwhile, Bild ran headlines such as “how can a man live without a face,” having snapped a bandaged Lauda lying defenceless in a Mannheim hospital bed. Niki had recently married Marlene Knaus, formerly the partner of actor Curt Jurgens.

Hunt won Canada as Lauda struggled home eighth in an ill-handling Ferrari. The Italians had signed a deal with Michelin for ’77 and the Goodyear tyre development was going in McLaren’s direction. At Watkins Glen in the USA, Lauda got up early on race morning, knocked on Hunt’s bedroom door and informed him, “today I win the world championship!” He didn’t. Niki came home third as James won again.
With the score Lauda, 68; Hunt, 65, it all came down to the season finale at a soaking Fuji in Japan. That was bad news for Niki. His eyelids and tear ducts had been burned in the accident and despite an operation he could no longer blink away tears properly. He was okay in the dry but, in the wet, Lauda freely admitted that he was struggling, and scared.

Emerson Fittipaldi was among those protesting that conditions were too bad, but the race went ahead as TV scheduling won the day. Lauda parked after the first two laps, along with Carlos Pace. Ferrari offered to say it was the engine but Niki declined. “Life,” he said, “is more important than the world championship.”
Hunt needed a third place to overhaul him. He led but then needed a tyre change and came back fifth. He passed Lauda’s Ferrari team mate Clay Regazzoni and then Alan Jones to do just enough to win the title. At first, amid the confusion, he didn’t realise he’d done it and berated McLaren team principal Teddy Mayer for not pitting him earlier. Then someone put a hand on his shoulder and told him he was world champion, 69 points to 68. Lauda was already on his way to the airport…

The Dome Zero

Japanese company Dome released the Zero concept at the Geneva Motor Show in 1978, It was supposed to be a demonstration of homologation special for a new line of sports cars. However, it failed to pass homologation regulations in Japan. In 1979 the company debuted a revised version of the car that came with U.S standard safety equipment. In the same year, a racing effort was launched at Le Mans but the ‘Zero RL’ failed to finish the race. Not the most successful wedge design, but it looked great anyhow.

The Lancia Stratos Zero

The Lancia Stratos Zero was a Bertone design exercise that was showcased at the Geneva show of 1970. The Zero was just 883mm high so drivers would have to lift the windscreen to mount the car. The Stratos HF production car was based on the concept – albeit very loosely.

The Maserati Boomerang

The Maserati Boomerang concept was presented at the 1972 Geneva Motor Show – sitting next to Giugiaro’s other famous wedge of that year, the Lotus Esprit M70. Its windscreen had an extreme 15 degree windshield rake. Giugiaro’s company ItalDesign apparently used the Boomerang as inspiration when designing the Delorean. In 2005 the original Boomerang concept was sold to a collector at a Christies’s auction for $1,000,000.

Pininfarina-Ferrari Modulo

Paulo Martin designed the rare and famous Pininfarina-Ferrari Modulo concept– and gained 22 design awards along the way. The extreme design was developed using the Ferrari 512-S racer, and was primarly a showcase for cutting edge build techniques – and of course to flex the flair and passion of Pininfarina to maximum degree.

Countach Concept

The original Countach concept was an unadulterated, groundbreaking production design drawn by Gandini for Bertone in 1971. Its striking scissor doors were pilfered from the Alfa Carabo of 1968 – but were actually a practical requirement because of the extreme width of the car. The pure design of the concept was translated loosely into the production first LP400. Soon however, splitters, wings and other safety equipment were added to the mix – watering down this most pure of seventies wedges.

So why do wannabe Enzo Ferraris and Ferdinand Porsches of these Islands fly in the face of the evidence and think they can found their own fast car family? Is it the ego trip of having your name on the nose of a supercar, and not just in the logbook? Do they really believe they can take on the vast budgets of the big players? Or can they outsmart them by offering something idiosyncratic, rare and very British to buyers bored with ten-a-penny Porsches?

It is almost impossible for a small company with a tiny budget to develop a fully-featured car to anything like the standards of the big makers. Making a car fast and agile is relatively easy; making its doors seal properly and its windscreen wipers function are next to impossible without budgets in the hundreds of millions. Customers are aware that they are not buying a mass-produced Porsche, but they are still wealthy people with high expectations making an expensive, discretionary purchase meant to give them pleasure, not a headache.

Ariel’s owner Simon Saunders is a brilliant designer, but his business nous is better. His solution to the problem of doors and glazing and cabin trim was to design a car that didn’t have any. This makes the Atom light, and affordable and makes it look unlike anything else on the road. This in turn guarantees a tall pile of orders, but Saunders has been careful not to expand too rapidly.
“What made me want to build my own car? Stupidity, I suppose,” he says. “Or bloody-mindedness. If you were to analyse the proposition properly, you just wouldn’t embark on it. When people come to talk to me about starting their own sports car firm, I warn them not to if they can’t afford to lose it all.” Saunders definitely hasn’t. He can’t put a figure on the amount he has invested in Somerset-based Ariel since 2000, but says that the true cost is easily in seven figures. But it is the only Brit sports car start-up of recent years to establish itself as a viable business, with acclaim from the critics and a long queue of buyers. “You have to make a virtue out of being small. The Atom doesn’t have doors because they are an engineering nightmare, and very expensive to get right. Here, unlike Porsche, you can come and watch your car being built and get to know the people building it.”

Wasn’t he tempted to name it after himself, like so many other sports car entrepreneurs? “I’m not that egocentric, and I don’t think a car called the ‘Saunders’ would sell that well!”

But why does this lemming-like urge to start a sports car form seem to happen all the time in the UK, and seldom elsewhere? A country’s car industry is often a reflection of its car-buying public. Britain’s certainly is. It’s hard to quantify this, but talk to a senior engineer or marketeer at any car company and they’ll tell you that British buyers are the most demanding in the world. Demanding but open-minded: our petrolheadedness continues to support a low-volume sports car industry unlike any other. But while we’re sentimental about plucky one-man bands and venerable British brands, we won’t abandon our high standards for them. If their cars aren’t good enough we’ll just buy another Boxster. That open-mindedness encourages firms to start. The high standards shut them.

The other crucial ingredient is a supply of hundred-plus octane petrolheads prepared to put their fortunes into these follies; other country’s eccentric millionaires must just be more sensible. Take Arash Farboud, for example. Messrs Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche were all happy to have a make of sports car bearing their surname. But that’s not enough for the extraordinary 35 year-old Cambridge multi-millionaire. Since 1998 he has invested around £4 million in two new British sports car firms, one bearing his surname, the other his forename. Aged just 23, he asked Porsche to build him a road-going version of its ferocious GT1 racing car. Porsche turned him down, so he decided to build his own. The resulting Farboud supercar was renamed the Farbio when control of that project was handed to a group of investors, and when it was bought out again this year it became the Ginetta F400. Arash has now founded Arash Cars to build his latest creation, the £320,000 AF10.

But his huge investment in two of his own supercars hasn’t dented his ability to afford the other guys’. He has owned countless Lamborghinis and Porsches and even a Bugatti Veyron, all funded by his stake in the family pharmaceutical company and other business interests.

“I need to be buying other people’s cars. I appreciate the technology and the engineering, and it’s retail therapy too,” he says. “But I have to be creative and I’m not happy unless I’m building stuff. I’m completely nuts about cars and I can’t just take something off the shelf. And it’s really cool to be driving a car with your name on the X-box.”

But will he ever get any of that £4 million back? “It’s a labour of love. If you want to make money, make widgets.”

FBS Census
This odd-looking roadster rather boldly named itself the ‘Future of British Sportscars’. It stank of glue, broke down, and then sank without trace.

Panther 6
Panther lurched from crisis to crisis for twenty years before succumbing to the inevitable. The Solo was quite good, the Panther 6 quite mad.

TVR Cerbera Speed 12
The maddest product of TVR’s nineties heyday under Peter Wheeler: 1000bhp, but only one made it to the road. Less than a decade later TVR was dead, but there are rumours of reincarnation

Morgan Roadster
They’ve been making cars from wattle and daub at a glacial rate in Pickersleigh Road, Malvern for a century now, so must be doing something right.

Caterham Seven
The design might be more than half a century old but it’s simple to build and still a performance and handling benchmark; that’s why Caterham is still in business.

Noble M12
Rave reviews weren’t enough to guarantee a stable business. Despite the departure of the brillant but difficult Lee Noble, the firm is still around and working on a £200,000 supercar.

Ariel Atom
Brilliant design, stellar performance and long queues of buyers; this is how low-volume sports cars should be done

Bristol Fighter
The anomaly of small British sports car firms: this bizarre, secretive, blue-blooded company makes outrageous cars at outrageous prices in tiny numbers with no publicity yet seems immune to the downturn

Midas Gold
“I couldn’t do better than a Midas”, said Gordon Murray of this Metro-based, plastic-bodied ‘sports’ car. That was before he created the McLaren F1. Wonder if he’s changed his mind?

Mike Hawthorn

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Mike Hawthorn, from Mexborough in Yorkshire, will forever have the distinction of being Britain’s first F1 world champion. Hawthorn was the dashing blond hero who started to put Britain on the motor sport map. His title came with a second place at Casablanca in 1958, behind the man he was fighting for the crown – Stirling Moss.

Originally Hawthorn was disqualified for pushing his car but, in an age of gentleman sportsmen, Moss intervened on his behalf. The promising Stuart Lewis-Evans died as a result of injuries sustained in the race and that, added to the earlier death of Hawthorn’s close friend and Ferrari team mate Peter Collins, persuaded Mike to hang up his helmet at just 29. Three months later he was dead after crashing his Jaguar on the Guildford by-pass.

Graham Hill

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Graham Hill, a suave Londoner who did not have a driving licence until he was past 20, started out as a mechanic. Words like ‘tenacious’ and ‘determined’ are oft used to describe him but you can’t win the world championship twice, the Indy 500 and Le Mans without talent. Hill had charm as well and really captured the public imagination.

He won his first world title with BRM in 1962 and added a second crown when he held Lotus together after Clark’s death in an F2 race at Hockenheim in ’68. By the time he broke his legs in the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen – a race team mate Jochen Rindt won – he was past 40. He later devoted his energy to running his own team but tragically died in November ’75 along with promising young British driver Tony Brise when the light aircraft he was piloting crashed approaching Elstree aerodrome.

Jim Clark

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Jim Clark was one of the greatest drivers of his or any other era. From farming stock in the Scottish borders, Clark forged a tremendous partnership with Colin Chapman and narrowly lost out to Hill in ’62. He totally dominated the ’63 season in his Climax-engined Lotus 25 and also stunned the US fraternity when he almost won the Indy 500 at the first attempt in the rear-engined Lotus F1 derivative.

Unreliability saw Clark lose his crown to John Surtees in ’64 but he was back with a vengeance in ’65 to take his second title. He missed Monaco that year to win the Indy 500 on the same day. The smooth effortlessness of Clark’s driving was his trademark, but it was wholly at odds with the spectacular fashion in which he thrilled crowds with his handling of a Lotus Cortina. A quiet, reserved man who lived in tax exile in Paris, his death in an F2 accident at Hockenheim in ’68 was one of those moments that shocked the sport to the core.

John Surtees

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John Surtees was born into a motor cycling family and by the time he switched to four wheels he was already a seven time world champion on two. Amazingly quick straight away, he elected against driving for Lotus and ultimately ended up at Ferrari, where he won the title for the Scuderia after rivals Clark and Hill hit trouble in the ’64 season finale in Mexico.

He survived a huge accident in a Lola T70 sportscar at Mosport in ’65 and returned to take a fine wet weather win at Spa in ’66 before he fell out with Ferrari. An earnest man with high standards, Surtees ran his own team in F1 for a time before leaving the sport. He returned recently to help son Henry, who tragically died in a freak F2 accident at Brands Hatch.

Jackie Stewart

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Jackie Stewart, with his long hair and shades, brought The Beatles era to F1. He was a great driver, as world titles in 1969, ’71 and ’73 attest, but never a reckless one. He was as quick as anyone but had no wish to die in a racing car, or to see others do so needlessly. Stewart was thus a fervent safety campaigner both during and after a career which saw him break his idol Jim Clark’s then record 25 GP wins. Jackie added two more before stopping at the end of the ’73 season.

An ambassador for blue chip companies such as Ford, Rolex and RBS, Stewart is still a part of the F1 scene and his astute observations always fascinating. He returned to F1 as a team owner with son Paul in the mid nineties and rates their one win as constructors as highly as anything he achieved in the cockpit. Always astute, he sold Stewart GP to Ford for a tidy sum after the Blue Oval had helped establish it.

James Hunt

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James Hunt captured the public imagination as much if not more than Hill or Stewart. Formula 1 still did not enjoy the exposure it does today but Hunt’s battle for the 1976 world championship with Niki Lauda did much to set it on its way.

Hunt was the tall, blond, good-looking public schoolboy with the irresistible do-as-you-please attitude. He liked a beer, he smoked, he said what he thought and his driving was aggressive and exciting. But the exterior hid an extreme nervousness that would often see him sick before a race. In later years he formed a superb commentary duo with Murray Walker and it was a big shock and blow to F1 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1993 at the age of 45.

Nigel Mansell

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It was 16 long years before Britain had its next champion. Nigel Mansell went heartbreakingly close in 1986 when an exploding tyre robbed him in the Adelaide season finale but took the sport’s top prize in the dominant active ride Williams FW14B in 1992.

Always good for drama, whether he was crashing out of the lead at a wet Monaco or pulling off spellbinding overtaking moves, Mansell never had a silver spoon and in many ways seemed to feel that his face didn’t quite fit. A charger if ever there was one.

Damon Hill

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Damon Hill, like his father, was regarded as a worker rather than a natural but, when strong testing performances saw him promoted to the Williams race team he made great use of the equipment at his disposal and ended up winning 21 races in four seasons with the team, as well as the ‘96 championship.

Despite that, he wasn’t retained and after a tough season with an Arrows Yamaha, he joined Jordan Grand Prix and scored the team’s first win, at Spa.

Lewis Hamilton

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Lewis Hamilton, like Hill, had the immense good fortune to arrive in F1 driving the best car. His innate talent meant he became an instant star, refusing to play second fiddle to reigning double world champion team mate Fernando Alonso. But for ‘Spygate’ engulfing McLaren in the middle of ’07, Lewis could well have won the championship in his debut season. He did it in style the following year, beating Felipe Massa and Ferrari in a dramatic battle that went down to the last corner of the last lap of the last race.

Jenson Button

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Such was the effect of F1’s ’09 rule changes, however, that McLaren literally went from front to back before they started to solve aerodynamic issues. Honda had pulled out over the winter of ’08 but the door opened for Ross Brawn to take over the fielding of a car which had enjoyed a long design lead time and immediately proved to be the class of the field. It was the chance that the talented Jenson Button had been waiting for ever since he arrived in F1 with Williams nine years earlier.

Button, frustrated that so many put his ’09 title down to the car, proved the belief in his own ability by electing to leave Brawn GP and go straight into the lion’s den, taking on Hamilton at McLaren. So far, he’s done rather well…