Driving the $30m Ferrari 412P: 'It was easy!'

And my particular problem – for that young man was me – was what on earth to put on its cover. Because while we were now an historic racing magazine, I was adamant that we weren’t just going to be seen as a repository of stories from times gone by. Motor Sport was going to be as active as possible, putting some of the world’s greatest racing cars in their proper contexts by driving them today. So I needed a brand new image for that cover, and it needed to be of a car that was beautiful, instantly recognisable to anyone with the merest enthusiasm for old racing cars, and it needed to be being driven by a true great.

It was quite a combination of requirements and, having come from a world where I’d spent my life testing modern road cars, I had no connections in the world of historic racing at all. But I did know that our advertising manager had just hired the son of the late Adrian Hamilton, one of the best known dealers in the world of historics, with a contact book bulging with the names and numbers of those who owned the world’s finest road and racing cars. Perhaps he could help.

‘Of course old bean,’ he said, greeting me like a lifelong friend though we’d never even met at the time, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

Which is how shortly thereafter I found myself at the Longcross test track – then a facility for testing army vehicles, now part of a sprawling studio system where everything from Bond to Star Wars gets filmed – watching the 412P being unloaded with none other than Richard Attwood standing next to me. We’d never met before and I found his desert-dry delivery, plus the fact he’d won Porsche’s first Le Mans quite intimidating. But he drove the car, told me all about his time racing it, what a wonderful thing it was and what a shame it had been that the factory refused to let the customers race on equal terms. I had my story.

Then it was my turn. I’d omitted to mentioned to Adrian that I’d never driven anything like it before, had no idea what to expect and was as out of my depth in such a car as a drowning man dropped into the Pacific directly above the Mariana Trench. But as well as being possibly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and sounding like it was powered by angels, I discovered the car was exactly as described by Attwood. It was easy.

That day was the start of so many things. It was the start of my life track testing racing cars – I don’t know how many I’ve driven since but it will be a number best measured in the hundreds. It was the start of a friendship with Richard that endures to this day – only last month he was holding his hand out for a tip having opened the door of the Porsche 917/30 I’d just driven up the Goodwood hill. And it was the start of a new and, happily, successful era for this title.

And for me, it marked a turning point in my life. Before I got the job I’d tried to make it as a freelance journalist, failed entirely and was financially on my knees when the possibility of editing Motor Sport arrived. I did the job for four years during which I took all the credit for everyone else’s hard work before going freelance again, bolstered by having that on my CV. It is a world in which I have somehow survived ever since. And when I think back to the moment my working life turned around, I think it was with this car, chassis 0854, one of just two true Ferrari 412Ps in the world and now residing with its new owner. I hope it is as lucky for them as it was for me.