The true value of most great technological breakthroughs can usually only be appreciated with the benefit of hindsight. Life didn’t change the moment Karl Benz first swung his Motorwagen into life and phutted up the road in 1886 any more than anyone had the foresight to see in 1903 that Orville Wright’s antics at Kill Devil Hills would in time expose the human race to undreamt freedoms and dangers.

So when, in 1952, a 22-year-old lad known to few outside the world of motor racing gunned his pale green Jaguar up the road from Thillois to Gueux for the 50th and final time to win an important but hardly Blue Riband sports car race at Reims, it went largely unreported in the media; it might have gained greater attention if more people had realised that behind each of the car’s Dunlop wire wheels could be found a Dunlop disc brake, but it was not something that those responsible for it wanted to publicise.

And we can only ponder just how much publicity it would have garnered if the world had then realised what we know now: that those plate brakes (as then they were called) would turn out to be the greatest single innovation in braking technology since the invention of, well, brakes.