It took Archie Scott-Brown’s devoted mother almost a decade to find a surgeon both willing and able to operate on her severely disabled son, yet when he walked into the The Rose pub in Cambridge to meet fellow members of the Cambridge University Auto Club, he did so with such swagger they all assumed he was a wartime RAF pilot (a myth that Archie did nothing to dispel.) Drinking with his left hand, his shortened right arm hidden inside a battered flying jacket, his new pals had no idea of his physical impairment.

It was his membership of the club that led Scott-Brown to meet Brain Lister.

Lister, the heir to a family-owned engineering firm in Cambridge, was also a budding motor sport enthusiast and racer, but after being driven as a passenger round a local airfield by Archie in his MG TD, he realised he didn’t have the skills required to be a successful driver himself – but the enigmatic Scott-Brown did.

In him, Lister had found the Works driver for his new sports cars, and thus one...