Whenever Gordon Murray’s biography is written, I do hope the author doesn’t get too away with the carried with all the fast car and grand prix stuff, and gives due time and space to Murray’s attempts to reinvent personal transport for a new age.

What he's proposing is new, much more efficient system of designing, making and using the cars that govern so much of our lives (and, in the case of us car enthusiasts, our waking moments).

The F1 cars and the McLaren F1 were extremely important, of course, because they gave this most gifted of engineers the oxygen he needed to get on with what he believes will be his most important contribution to our lives, the invention of the iStream manufacturing process, and the cars that utilise it.

When I think of Murray, I think of what I read as a child about Barnes Wallis, another of Britain’s most gifted engineers who was guided not by some customer demand, but by a remarkable inner certainty that gave him the spur to bring extraordinary inventions to life, to make things better for us all.