The outpouring of tributes and heartfelt grief for Gil de Ferran, who died suddenly last week at the age of 56, was astonishing but absolutely not a surprise. The Brazilian was, after all, not only universally popular in global motor sport circles – a status which is quite something to achieve when you think about it – but also sincerely loved by the many friends he’d made in racing over the past 30-plus years.

It’s a sad irony that in the wake of such tragedy the person who inspires the emotion doesn’t get to see or hear how much they mean to the world. But for de Ferran’s family, it has to be hoped that the reaction offers at least a modicum of comfort during their time of obvious devastation. I hope it helps that they know Gil’s many friends in the racing world will miss him desperately too.

It’s also some comfort that such people who leave an overwhelmingly positive imprint on the world tend to spark associated happy memories, often about landmark occasions. For those of us over here in the UK, I know I won’t be alone this week to find all sorts of triggers for smiles that surrounded one of de Ferran’s finest moments on track, when he mugged Kenny Bräck to steal victory at the final corner of the final lap when full-scale oval racing returned to Britain for the first time since Brooklands closed in 1939.

I’m talking, of course, about the CART Champ Car race at the now sadly defunct Rockingham speedway on September 22, 2001. De Ferran’s victory at the 2003 Indianapolis 500 was surely the highlight of his racing life, and the closed-circuit record lap of 241.428mph he achieved at the California Speedway a bigger landmark. But Rockingham, as de Ferran closed on what would be his second consecutive Champ Car title for Team Penske, was also special – and must have felt almost like a home win for a man who’d become so familiar with the UK, the country in which he met his wife Angela.

What a crazy week that was. Actually, a crazy month. The weekend before I’d been at Monza for a nervy Italian Grand Prix, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Travelling anywhere was unsettling, especially for something that seemed so trivial in the terrifying and awful context we were now all living in. Then to make matters much worse, poor Alex Zanardi lost both legs on the Saturday in that dreadful accident on another new European oval: the Lausitzring in Germany.

When we pitched up at Rockingham the following Thursday, the American Champ Car teams had zero interest in another new race far from home. Understandably, they all just wanted to get back to their families. But here we all were, in a former open quarry just outside gritty Corby in rural Northamptonshire. It was hard to believe Rockingham existed at all.

This should have been an epochal occasion – and in a way it was. But in the wake of everything, inevitably it was tarnished. Especially when serious track problems reared their head. Even when it wasn’t raining, the too-porous surface on the 1.5-mile oval was springing damp patches. Thus the term ‘weeper’ entered the British motor sport lexicon – although the headache was a familiar one to the Americans who’d experienced it at other tracks back home, even at the most famous speedway of them all in Indianapolis.

Somehow I’d found myself conscripted along with friend and colleague Tim Scott as a roving pitlane reporter for the weekend – and on the opening two days we found ourselves uncomfortably busy, filling an endless stretch of dead air time given the lack of track running. We interviewed anyone who moved. Most of the drivers, including de Ferran, were generous and accommodating – as you’d expect by Champ Car’s open reputation, in contrast to snooty F1. I recall interviewing dear old Roberto Moreno three times in one day, just because every time we asked him a question he wouldn’t stop talking. Paul Tracy was less convivial. He glared at us when we approached him and refused to speak on air. “Nothing against you guys,” he grimaced, “but this place is f****** shit.” He wasn’t the only one to feel that way about Rockingham.

That was painful to hear because I’d followed the build process of this unlikely racing venue closely over the previous couple of years. The man behind it all was a brash but engaging entrepreneur called Peter Davies. A former helicopter pilot in the Army Air Corp, Davies had raced at an amateur level and dreamt up the idea of a new race track originally named Deene Raceway in deference to the quarry site he’d bought. Looking for a new angle, Davies headed west, found inspiration from the US oval scene and borrowed the name of a local castle to rebrand his hair-brained scheme. Given that Rockingham also happened to be a NASCAR-hosting oval in North Carolina, it was a gift horse just too good to ignore.

Back on a bleak Friday in the spring of 2000, I’d visited the site to meet Davies and get a tour of what was literally a ‘brownfield’ piece of land. The ebullient chief had insisted I join him for a photo, perched in a concrete drainage tube – upon which I ripped most of the buttons off my shirt. Was this ever really going to become something, I wondered? How Davies pulled it off, against all the odds, is little short of a miracle.

Sadly, by September 2001, he found himself witnessing Rockingham’s crowning glory as an outsider looking in. Davies had found the investment he desperately needed to build the track via Guy Hands, the financier who later found notoriety on higher profile projects – only to find him edged out following a combustible board meeting in December 2000. Talk about mixed emotions when CART rolled into town for that inaugural Rockingham 500.