He never courted the limelight even in his pomp — as an interviewee he would leave journalists in no doubt that he would rather be doing engineering work than media work — yet he was fearlessly outspoken, which meant that he often provided damn’ good copy. Moreover, amusingly, if he wanted to be seriously indiscreet — and he often did for he was both irascible and fearless — he would alert you to the fact that what he was about to say next was too sensitive for publication, off the record in other words, then bellow it so thunderously that everyone in the F1 paddock would hear it anyway. Put it this way: if you think the famously stentorian actor Brian Blessed has a booming voice, you cannot have heard Patrick Head in full flow.

In terms of formally heading up Williams’ technical operation, he finally called it a day in 2012. The last F1 grand prix of that season was the Brazilian Grand Prix, in late November, a wet race, in which Williams did not do well: Bruno Senna shunted himself out on lap one, and Pastor Maldonado did likewise a lap later. As a swansong for Patrick it was a damp squib. The next day we all flew back to the UK. By that time I had been a McLaren team member for a number of years, I had been sitting near Patrick on the plane, and it so happened that I walked off it and into Heathrow right behind him, and queued right behind him at passport control. Without wishing to be sentimental, I have to admit that I was, if not quite overwhelmed, then certainly affected by witnessing at such close quarters one of the great men of our sport check out of it immediately in front of me. He returned briefly in mid-2019, following the departure from Williams of Paddy Lowe, but his glory days had been the late 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early 2000s, during which he, Frank, and all at Team Willy, as they called it, had serially shown everyone else how F1 should be done.

He now lives in Cagliari, in Sardinia, with his wife Monica and their daughter, Sophie. They appear to be greatly enjoying their life there. He keeps in touch with some of his old F1 chums, but for the most part he seems to be settled peacefully and blissfully in his Mediterranean island idyll. I have been to Cagliari twice, the first time in November 2002 and the second time in November 2003, and I thoroughly recommend it to you, for it is a truly lovely place. In 2002 I was there to report on the final round of that year’s Euro Formula 3000 Championship — which, as the only non-Italian journalist present, I did as a favour to Pasquale Lattuneddu, Bernie Ecclestone’s then right-hand man in F1, often dubbed F1’s ‘paddock policeman’. A proud Sardinian, Pasquale was pulling whatever strings he could to achieve a bit of positive media coverage for ‘his’ race.

The circuit was tight and twisty, run on public roads encircling the Stadio Sant’Elia stadium, which had hosted three football matches played by England during Italia ’90, but what made it of historical significance was not so much that World Cup connection, nor even that it was the first proper motor race ever staged on Sardinia, but that it was the first street race run on Italian soil since the 1967 Gran Premio di Caserta, which utterly tragic Formula 3 race took place on June 18 of that year on the Caserta street circuit near Naples.

I will explain why that race was so tragic in a little while, but first I should tell a few stories about motor racing in Cagliari, starting with the fact that the 2002 Euro F3000 race there was attended by 130,000 deliriously happy Sardinians and was won by Jaroslav Janiš from the Czech Republic. The following year — 2003, which was the final year, for there were only ever two pukka race meetings in the Sardinian capital — Lattuneddu invited a dozen or so F1 journalists, including a few Brits, and there were to be two races: a Euro F3000 round and a so-called Sardinia F3 Masters. The first was won by Jaime Melo, from Brazil, and the second by Robert Kubica, from Poland, driving with a plastic brace and 18 titanium bolts in his recently broken left arm: an injury far less severe than that which he would sustain to his right arm in a rallying accident in Italy eight years later, but surely debilitating nonetheless.

Fernando Alonso and Jarno Trulli were on hand to do demo-laps in their Renault R23B F1 car — the very chassis that Alonso had driven to Hungarian Grand Prix victory a couple of months before — and Jean Alesi was there to give ‘taxi rides’ to journalists and local dignitaries in his Mercedes CLK DTM car. I was one of Alesi’s passengers and, at my suggestion, he drove our laps absolutely flat-out. Indeed, on one of the left-hand turns he pitched that big Merc into a magnificent power slide, delicately tapping the armco on my side as he did so, his right foot never flinching from its position buried on the loud pedal.

Lattuneddu had invited not only specialist motor sport journalists from the UK such as your humble correspondent, but also Stan Piecha of The Sun, Ray Matts of the Daily Mail, and Ian Gordon of the News of the World. More worrying still, he expected them to be able to persuade their hard-nosed and football-obsessed sports editors to find space in their newspapers for reports of what were, with the best will in the world, races of remarkable obscurity and therefore precious little interest to their almost exclusively British readers. Over a few beers we motor sport specialists pondered their quandary with them, and we came up with a plan.

We had discovered that 21-year-old Vitaly Petrov, from Russia, would be making his Euro F3000 debut in Cagliari. He had done no karting at all, having cut his motor sport teeth in rally sprints and ice races in and around his native Vyborg, near the Finnish border. In 2001 and 2002 he had competed in the Russian Lada Cup. To say that he was ill-prepared to race a Euro F3000 car on a narrow street circuit delineated by armco on both sides and all the way around, providing zero run-off therefore, was a serious understatement. Nonetheless, we decided that the readers of the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the News of the World would all enjoy a scoop: ‘Meet the Russian rocket who’s about to take F1 by storm’.

No, we did not believe it, but, even so, Gordon and I attempted to interview him on behalf of ourselves and our colleagues before the race, only to find that he spoke no English at all. Luckily, his companion, Oksana Kosachenko, a fellow Russian and at that time a sports journalist, stepped in to provide translation services. Even so, Petrov was extremely shy and clearly inarticulate even in Russian. As Gordon and I trudged back from his team’s pit garage to what passed for a paddock, Ian asked me: “Is this Russian lad actually any good?” I replied: “Yeah, he goes like shit off a sickle.” Oh how we laughed. He duly finished a very distant 10th.

Our plan worked. The sports editors back in Blighty liked our ‘Russian rocket’ angle, and stories were duly run in those three British tabloid newspapers, but in truth we should not feel too guilty about that because — against all odds — Petrov did indeed make it to F1, although it would be something of a stretch to say that he took it by storm. Nonetheless, he finished third for Renault in the 2011 Australian Grand Prix, beaten by only Sebastian Vettel, who won for Red Bull, and Lewis Hamilton, who was second for McLaren, and that is pretty decent. He also won four GP2 races and two GP2 Asia races.

Finally, I need to loop back to the F3 tragedies at Caserta in June 1967. Soon after the start of the race, on the long Via Domenico Mondo not-quite-straight that hugged the railway line, Beat Fehr, Franco Foresti and Andrea Saltari collided with one another, completely blocking the track. Fehr jumped out of his car, ran back down the circuit to warn others of the hazard ahead – for there were no marshals – but he was too late. Giacomo Russo (nom de course: Geki) and Romano Perdomi (nom de course: Tiger) arrived on the scene, unsighted by the walls and trees, and at maximum speed they crashed into the stationary cars ahead. Geki, whose body was catapulted out of his car onto the asphalt, was killed instantly. So was the heroic Fehr, hit by flying bits of Geki’s car while standing on the track, still waving to the approaching drivers in an effort to persuade them to stop. Tiger was badly injured and died in a Naples hospital eight days later.

I kicked off this column with a description of Patrick Head’s happy retirement, and a memory of my being at Silverstone to see Clay Regazzoni score Head’s and Williams’ maiden F1 grand prix victory. It so happens that Regazzoni was racing in that ill-fated F3 race at Caserta in 1967, and this is an English translation of his description of it in his autobiography, E Sempre Questione di Cuore.

“As soon as I saw so many cars crashing into one another ahead of me, I braked as hard as I could. I could not quite stop in time, but I had slowed, and I remember hits and bumps left and right as my car slewed to a halt against a pile of 10 or 12 other cars. I managed to climb out of my car, although it was pretty battered, and I walked towards Tiger’s. He was trapped in its cockpit, but he was conscious. Just as I noticed that the rev counter had penetrated his knee, and had stuck in it, I heard the sound of another rapidly approaching car. It was Tino Brambilla, who was leading the race and was coming around to complete the lap after the one on which all the carnage had taken place. Tino was completely unaware of all that — because, although we had fire marshals in those days, we did not have normal trackside marshals. I could hear his gear changes as he was accelerating hard towards us, and then I saw him come into view — at top speed. It was an absolutely terrifying sight. I pressed myself tight against the wall of a trackside house, motionless. After the initial impact, Tino’s car flew over all the others and landed close to mine. Amazingly, he was OK.

“It was total chaos. Spectators and fire marshals were close to panic. It was we drivers who remained calmest. Fehr was clearly dead. We started to try to extract Tiger. Although badly hurt, he was alive, and he kept his composure, even though he was in a lot of pain and his days were numbered. In all the commotion, no-one had had time to check on Geki. His car had hit a lamp post and was split in half, the engine separated from the rest. When we got to him, it was clear that we were too late to help him, for he too was dead. Smoke was coming out of his car. I yelled at a fire marshal to go and get some water, and he came back with a small bottle and gave it to me. This was still the stone age of emergency services in motor sport.”

The race was stopped and the championship was cancelled. Since he had been heading the points standings at the time of the tragedy, Geki, 29, was declared F3 champion — posthumously — à la Jochen Rindt — who died at just 28 at Monza in 1970 and was declared posthumous F1 world champion at season’s end. The following year, 1968, an F3 race at Geki’s beloved Monza was named Gran Premio Geki. His young widow attended it, while back at home her mother looked after her and Geki’s two little girls, a two-year-old and a baby of just six months, who had been in utero at the time of Geki’s death.