Rob Walker! Met him once! He owned Pippbrook Garage, just down the road from my schoolfriend's house. There was a service road ran down parallel to the main A24. One day Peter and I were hanging out (like yer do when 15!) when a car nosed off the main road and drifted past down the service road to the garage. What a car - a Ferrari 250 Lusso, with a ROB2 plate! We legged it down the hill and stood watching as the car took fuel, shyly talking to the man who had been Stirling Moss's entrant. I remember the poor guy on the pumps didn't really know which orifice to put the nozzle in! There were stories from other local motor sport enthusiasts of Walker F1 cars being given shakedown tests on the A24 between Dorking and Leatherhead - a very driveable piece of road in those days - but I never saw these myself.
In the Moss era, Alf Francis, a Pole, was the chief mechanic. His daughter was at our school, and, again, I met him once or twice, by which time he was working for the Count Serenissima. They took a car to the 1966 LM test weekend, but Motor Sport said it wasn't very fast. I think there was a link with Colotti gearboxes, one of the products of that era.
