There have been a lot of great racing cars, but I don’t really get very excited about things like the Lotus 72. Every time I look at an old car, I just think how dated they seem. Nothing ages as quickly as a racing car. Even when I look at one of my own designs, like the Tyrrell 022, I think, ‘How did we do things like that back then?’ So I don’t get that emotional about them.

However, I do admire the Thrust SSC. I have an interest in the Land Speed Record partly because Renault’s deputy technical director Bob Bell designed the McLaren LSR car, which never actually ran. I remember speaking to him when he was doing the project. I was thinking, ‘I’d love to work on it’, but the implications of getting it wrong are so enormous I don’t think I’d have the bottle. So I’ve got every respect for designers who give it a go.

I think any project like that is a huge undertaking, and you’re obviously going into the unknown in some respects. The Sound Barrier was a very distinct target, Richard Noble’s team were going where no-one had gone before.

The thing that I liked about Thrust SSC was that it was done in a good spirit. It was a group of blokes in a garage — not a big corporation. The McLaren would have been the all-singing, all-dancing machine, and Ron Dennis would have been throwing money at it.

Having got the Land Speed Record himself, for Richard Noble to stitch that team together, do it on a shoestring, and actually achieve it, is a fantastic story. It harks back to the 1930s, the heyday of that sort of project, which is why I think it was a tremendous achievement. Sometimes I think I would love to have worked then, or in the ’50s, when they were doing all that pioneering research into jet aircraft and so on. The approach was just ‘let’s build it and see what it does’.

As soon as you get into transonics and shock waves, it gets very complicated, and you’re doing things that are very difficult to predict. Theoretical methods do break down in that area. You’ve got huge shock wave reflection with the ground, and that’s one of the most difficult things to resolve.

Tiny errors in, for example, a computational solution where you have things bouncing backwards and forwards could mean that you are totally out at the rear of the car. The implications of it lifting up or whatever are pretty serious — you’re not coming back from that! So it was a very brave thing to do.

The risks involved are huge, but the Thrust SSC team approached it with a fantastic spirit, and good, sound engineering done on a budget. I remember following the project’s progress on the Internet at the time, and they were asking people to send in donations! It’s the sort of thing that would make a great film.

The SSC was at Goodwood last year, and it was great to go and see it. It’s a beautiful thing, though if you look at it closely, it’s quite agricultural — a load of girders with two huge Rolls-Royce jets strapped to it! But it was built to do a job, and they achieved it, and they achieved it safely, so that’s not to say the engineering wasn’t good. I’m sure the McLaren would have been carbon-fibre and everything else. Thrust was basic, but that’s all it needed to be.