Sometimes things just don’t turn out as they should. If you had been in the grandstands at Le Mans one lap into the 24-hour race of 1962, you’d have had every reason to believe you were witnessing the birth of a new and glorious era for British sports car racing in general and one of its most revered marques in particular. For out of the chicane, past the pits and into the curve that led to the bridge came Graham Hill’s Aston Martin with the rest of the field – Ferraris, Maseratis, Porsches, the lot – nowhere.

It was not to be. Although there was one shaft of light at the end of the dark tunnel that is the story of the Aston Martin Project cars, the general thrust of this tale is that which seems so often to define the British approach to sporting endeavour, one that ends with that all too familiar ache for what might have been and even what should have been, rather than what actually was.

Hill was driving Aston Martin DP212, a nomenclature that followed standard Design Project prototype naming policy at Aston Martin. Known alternatively as Project 212, the car was an experimental toe-dip back into the murky waters of racing abandoned after the world sports car championship and Le Mans win three years earlier and prompted by the knowledge that racing at the weekend helps you sell in the week.