I’LL MISS THE PHONE CALLS FROM TONY Brooks. Sometimes it was to clarify something we had written in the magazine, sometimes just to get some information and then discuss Verstappen vs Hamilton; on one deflating occasion it was to announce that like his friend and team-mate Stirling Moss he was withdrawing from public life. Dealing with cancer and major surgical operations, he no longer had the energy to appear at press events and race meetings. He was then heading towards his nineties.
I got to know him at various press and public functions and when he contributed to stories for the magazine, he was unfailingly helpful with his memories. He had fine recall of his various races, and if I plied him with some abstruse corner of history that he simply couldn’t remember, he was apologetic that he had somehow let me down. Always courteous and unassuming, he was the most self-effacing of that generation of grand prix drivers from the front-engined era of whom he and Stirling Moss were the last and perhaps the greatest.