Featured in the May edition of Classic and Sportscar with a complimentary report “Looks like a picture, runs like a poem, started by a worm.” So said Horstman of their charming light cars, advertising the fact they were started from the driver’s seat by a pedal which acted on a worm thread on the propshaft – no need to jump out and swing a handle.

But if that does not sell it to you, perhaps you would prefer this: “The fastest British light car.” That claim was established in the wake of the Junior Car Club’s inaugural 200-Mile Race at Brooklands in 1921, when Douglas Hawkes’s racing Horstman finished fifth, beaten only by three Talbot-Darracqs and a Bugatti.

The son of a Prussian watchmaker in Bath, Sidney Horstmann was an incorrigible innovator who almost literally reinvented the wheel.

His motor engineering career began in 1900, aged 19, and he filed a raft of patents prior to unveiling his own light car in 1913, which was lauded for its novelty, quality and sophistication.

Hors...