“…It is very easy to sit on the fence and criticise – notoriously easy,” he goes on. “You can always find faults in what the other people are doing, but at least they are doing something. All Mr Jenkinson seems to do is lament the past and the drivers who have served their time in it. Few of them, however, are alive to read his writings.”

The letter, inevitably, continues. Jackie repeats his “fence-sitter” accusation to our man, having claimed unconvincingly that he didn’t care what Jenks thought or said about him.

“There is nothing more tragically sad than mourning a man who has died under circumstances which could have been avoided had someone done something beforehand,” he writes. “It therefore always angers me to hear people who oppose an effort to make our sport safer… Such men to me are hypocrites, the only consolation being that in years to come they will probably be looked back on as cranks.

“Whatever Mr Jenkinson thinks, I am a racing driver who loves his sport. The sadness that I have seen and experienced, which could have been avoided, only makes it more detestable to me that your magazine is prepared to project within its pages the sort of thinking that is negative to efforts of others to make motor racing claim fewer lives.”

Crikey. Remember that ulcer, Jackie…

So what had Jenks written to provoke such ire? As the afternoon slipped further away, I turned to Continental Notes in the June issue.

“John Young Stewart – World Champion”, reads the headline in bold type. In the first line Jenks describes his subject as “a certain beady-eyed little Scot” – and the rant begins.

“…his pious whinings have brain-washed and undermined the natural instincts of some young and inexperienced newcomers to Grand Prix racing and removed the Belgian Grand Prix from Spa-Francorchamps,” writes Jenks about half way through. He ends with this: “Can you really ask me in all honesty to admire, or even tolerate, our current reigning World Champion Driver?”

No wonder JYS felt a little aggrieved. Can you imagine such correspondence between a journalist and a driver today, in print for all to see? No, me neither.

In following years, a mutual respect and admiration grew between Jackie and Jenks. But their trenchant disagreements 40 years ago stand as the prime example of changing attitudes in motor racing, spearheaded by Mr Stewart and parried by Mr Jenkinson.

Now, 40 years later, it’s easy to judge. Jackie was, of course, right. But we have to remember the context of the times. Life was as valued as it is today, but the acceptance that death was a price racing drivers should almost expect to pay was a deep-rooted attitude that divided a tough sporting world. To some extent, it always will.

The argument came back to me as I re-read Fittipaldi’s words to Rob on our latest pages. Emerson tells us he almost quit three times in the early 1970s because of the danger and death that surrounded him. He loved motor racing, but it scared him, just as it did his friends and rivals.

Except he didn’t know it then, because to admit it would have risked ridicule. In some ways, that made men like Jackie Stewart the bravest of the lot.