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I chased down second into Redgate and found that my tighter line into the corner was yielding a couple of tenths a lap. The cornering mantra was always ‘slow in, fast out’; taking a wider entry maximised your speed down the straight. But when the car allowed it, you could drive ‘fast in, fast out’. It bagged me second place.

I saw Marc Hynes in the distance. Mr Whippy had managed to steer clear of the carnage I caused in the heat and was chasing down another championship. I was faster, but catching him with only a handful of laps to go was a tall order.

I set fastest lap after fastest lap until I finally got to sit on his gearbox. He was sluggish through Old Hairpin. I aced it. I powered up his right side, around the flat-out kink towards McLeans. With time running out, Marc put me on the grass.

I needed tarmac to round the kink at 120. As I went sideways my life should have flashed before me, but I was treated to a close-up of his Nestlé Ice Creams livery instead. I kept enough throttle trimming the lawn to lose only five car lengths. He had to defend at the chicane. I could taste victory as we rushed to complete the penultimate lap.

As I prepared to knobble Marc with the scissor shuffle, we were red flagged. A big accident behind us meant the race was being stopped. The jammy dodger took another title win ahead of me in second and Justin in third.

GT appeared, positively beaming. ‘If you can drive like that every time you’ll piss it next season. Incredible race; Jackie thought it was fantastic.’

A dream ticket was at the tips of my fingers. With the benefit of their vast experience I would have a clear shot at winning the main title …

But it was not to be. The feedback – via GT – was that I was ‘too old’. PSR wanted to take on Justin. Halfway though the next season I made the jump to Formula 3 National Series instead.

* * *

The Formula 3 car was made of beautiful carbon fibre. Everything from the steering wheel to the gear lever were proper bits of kit. It had sophisticated push rod suspension like a Formula 1 car, with four-way adjustable dampers and a range of critical settings for tuning them.

It reacted to infinitesimal inputs from the driver. Visualising a perfect lap in your mind’s eye was the only way to make the tiny adjustments needed to shave off the thousandths of a second on every corner that constituted the difference between pole and the rest.

Everything ran on a knife edge in Formula 3. It was the birthing pool for F1 talents, from Mansell to Schumacher and the great Ayrton Senna.

I won most of the remaining races from pole position, with fastest laps and a couple of lap records. It was time to move up to the International Formula 3 series and duke it out with the big boys.

In 1997 I took the seat vacated by Juan Pablo Montoya at Fortec. They were running Mitsubishi engines which had monstered the field in ’96. The team manager reckoned that with me and Brian Smith (an Argentinian!) we should win the championship hands down.

Unfortunately the new spec Mitsubishi was a dud. Brian, Darren Turner, Warren Hughes (who ran Mitsubishi) and I only scored a handful of podiums between us.

It was time to prepare for the British Grand Prix support race at Silverstone. As always my old man was on hand, Marlboro in one hand and stopwatch in the other. He marked my split times through the different sectors and told me where I needed to improve.

He was so charming and gregarious, but he set the bar pretty high. I loved him to bits, but there were times when it wasn’t that easy being his only son – or one of his workmates. They dubbed him ‘Bionic Bill’ because his idea of downtime was to stop working between midnight and five in the morning.

Having a poor engine meant that driving balls-out through the corners became de rigueur. I drove back to the pits after the kind of lap I could only repeat twice without crashing and sat down with David Hayle, my engineer, aka ‘Mole’. Sweat dripped off my finger as we moved the cursor along the analysis screen.