Of the two other 79s, 79/1 was the development car and raced just once in 1978 (with Jean-Pierre Jarier to no great effect at Watkins Glen) before being sold to privateer Hector Rebaque for the 1979 season. The last car, 79/5, was built for the ’79 season, almost as if Colin Chapman knew he needed a long-stop in the event of the radical Lotus 80 failing to realise its potential.

Today, the 79 has another beauty, one conveyed on it by history. It seems scarcely believable now, but when it won Mario his championship, the era of the slicks-and-wings F1 car had not yet seen its 10th birthday. All we knew then was that, of those seen so far, it was the most beautiful of all. But now more than 30 further years have passed and I still cannot think of another that comes closer to visual perfection from more angles. If a spaceman fell to earth pondering the meaning of the phrase ‘if it looks right, it usually is right’, you could do no better than point him in the direction of this 79.

But there’s an added magic of this particular 79. Unraced since 1979, it’s not a recreation clinging to a chassis plate as some kind of identity – it’s all real. The tub, bodywork and even the engine and gearbox you see here belonged to this car in period. Clive is usually very relaxed about his cars being raced, but just a few are regarded as simply too important to risk compromising, and 79/3 is one of them. Gently restored to fully-functioning condition about 10 years ago, it goes to shows, has run up the Goodwood Hill and has attended other demonstrations, but that’s it. It is fabulously original.

“With this weather, you won’t get heat into any of the tyres we could put on it”

Today, its task is to carry me around the same Hethel test track upon which it would have been shaken down all those years ago. Sadly conditions are terrible – the air is a single degree above freezing, track conditions vary from quite damp to properly wet, and fog limits visibility to around 100 metres – not much for a car capable of making a Bugatti Veyron’s acceleration look very ordinary indeed.

Frankly, I’d been expecting a call to reschedule, but Classic Team Lotus – still staffed by ex-Team Lotus engineers – is made of sterner stuff. Chris Dinnage used to be Ayrton Senna’s chief mechanic but today he has the somewhat less edifying task of looking after me. Conditions are right on the cusp between slicks and wets, but the slicks stay on because they’ll look better in the shots. As Chris says, “in this weather you won’t get any heat whatever we put on”.

Before climbing aboard, there’s time to soak up a few last details. The front of the car represents standard F1 thinking of the era, but as your eyes pan back past the cockpit with its effective little wind deflector, things change. There’s no fuel in those long sidepods because, unlike the 78 that had three different fuel cells, all the 79’s petrol goes directly behind the driver, freeing up space for the venturi tunnels that would change the face of F1 racing. It still wears its skirts, too, but on a bumpy track like Hethel, they’re stowed in the pods. Simply dropping them to the floor doubles downforce.

Likewise at the back, everything has been moved out of the way of the airflow under the car: brakes and springs are inboard and years of traditional suspension design was abandoned because longitudinal radius arms would have got in the way. In their place came wide-based wishbones. Indeed when work began on the 79, ground effect was the dominant principle around which the rest of the car was designed and, where needed, compromised. Even the air intakes that wrapped around the roll-hoop of a 78 were abandoned as they interfered too much with the flow of air to the rear wing.

Needless to say, power is of the Cosworth DFV variety. The 79/3 runs a standard long-stroke engine to period specification which means around 480bhp at 10,600rpm, perhaps 80 more than the earliest DFVs, but at least 60 less than the maddest short-strokers have shown. As expected, it directs its power through a Hewland H-pattern gearbox, the Getrag sequential shift Chapman had intended proving insufficiently robust for racing.

It’s time to go. Thanking Peterson’s lanky frame for the fact that I can get in the 79 at all, I’m struck by how traditional the driving environment is… how backward, even, compared to its cutting-edge exterior. In terms of its dynamic abilities, it’s probably closer to modern F1 than an early ’60s machine, but the cockpit design appears to have evolved hardly at all. You still have to peer at tiny Smiths instruments with spidery numerals to read your revs, pressures and temperatures, which must have been irksome in a car of such retina-detaching performance. There’s a brake balance bar and separate controls for the front and rear rollbars (Dinnage says Ronnie could never remember which way to move them until Mario chipped in with ‘hard in, soft out’, after which he never forgot again), but that’s it. Compared to the jet-fighter interior of a modern F1 car, the 79 seems nearer 50 than 30 years old.

But it also makes it gratifyingly simple to drive. Just flick on the fuel and ignition, wait for the external starter to spin the engine, catch it on the throttle and settle down to an even 3000rpm idle. There is an exquisite nastiness to close encounters with DFVs, like eating raw chillies or downing neat bourbon, and you’ll put up with all the discomfitures just to feel the power. The clutch is sufficiently kind to avoid red-faced getaways and this particular Hewland ’box is as light, precise and easy as you could wish. But how would this irreplaceable slice of British racing heritage react to such terrible conditions?

At first it was unexpectedly accommodating. The motor would pull from as little as 4000rpm and felt quite strong at 6000rpm. The steering is light, the brakes meaty but responsive. I wasn’t stupid enough to risk full throttle in the lower gears, but once up into fourth, I felt I could risk stretching its legs. But I was wrong. In that instant the car jinked right, and the revs and my heart-rate leapt as one. Wheelspin at 8000rpm in fourth gear. I’d bet plenty it would have done it in fifth too. Gerhard Berger once told me that a car could only be said to have enough power if it could spin its wheels at any given point on a race track. That day at Hethel, the 79 was that car.

Now treating it with even greater circumspection, I learned after several more laps where it could and could not be pushed, and as long as you trod ever so gently, full throttle could eventually be reached but not for sufficiently long in the fog to feel full thrust for more than an instant or two. It was mesmerising, tantalising and really rather frustrating.

Still, I think the 79 inspired as much confidence as you could expect from a bewinged F1 car on stone-cold, soaking wet slicks. I’d anticipated next to no grip in slow corners, for its springs have to be stiff enough to maintain ride height at maximum speed and downforce, but lateral adhesion was actually good enough not to make you fear going straight on every time the wheel was turned. It understeered, but mildly and predictably. The only frightening deficiency was traction, which was fairly forgivable under the circumstances. As for the quicker stuff, it would have been insanity to try. Even in that weather, it was quick enough through Hethel’s infamous Windsock curve to make driving little more than blind. Certainly had something unexpected appeared out of the gloom there would have been no chance to stop, leaving high-speed evasion the only option. And I didn’t much fancy that.

“I felt I could risk it. But the car jinked right… the revs and my heart leapt as one”

So on the last lap I cruised, surreally driving a Lotus 79 like it was a road car. Not only was it a lot less frightening, it allowed time to look around and savour what I was actually doing, a prohibitively dangerous luxury at any higher-effort level. Mario’s wheel was in my hand, Cosworth’s DFV at my back and Chapman’s incomparable design all around me.

I can’t say I consummated my 32-year-old love affair with the 79 that freezing, foggy day in Norfolk – to be honest it wasn’t much more than a fumble round the back of the bike sheds – but when you operate from the position of someone who never even expected to sit in one, even that fleeting glimpse into its world is precious beyond words. Statistically the 79 was far from the best grand prix car in the world: it was competitive for just one season – compare that to the 72 which won races in five consecutive years – and chalked up just six wins to its name. But it did change racing and stands today as one of the most iconic cars of its or any other era. And as we move into a new era of Lotus F1 cars, it’s worth bearing in mind too that it was the last to win a world championship. And that is an act that will take some following.