THE YELLOW HAMMERHEAD

Since the late 1940s, the nerve centre of open-wheeler racing construction across the planet has been in southern and central England. Cooper was less than 25km south-west of London and its spin-offs – Brabham, then Ralt, and McLaren – were also based in leafy Surrey.

Lotus eventually moved to Norfolk, while Lola went nearly as far when it outgrew previous establishments and landed near Cambridge. BRM, as ERA had been before the war, was just up the road in Lincolnshire while just about every other manufacturer of note was within an hour of Silverstone.

The cars, engineers, and ideas that evolved out of this confined area were transplanted across the globe, and indeed most of the current F1 teams remain in this very general spot – McLaren’s fantastic Technology Centre in Woking is just 25km from the dirt-floored grader shed where Bruce optimistically started his company in 1963.

Technology was portable, as the American IndyCar scene proved when British innovations started transforming ‘oval racing’ from the mid to late 1960s — not that English-built cars were unbeatable as the Adelaide-based Elfin, by way of example, proved