“There's something quite unreal about those ‘Silver Arrows', their brutally functional shapes seem more like a Flash Gordon movie fantasy than a real race car”

Yet the car and the people sat in them were very real, and unencumbered by modern safety equipment, the driver's concentration and effort was clearly visible to the onlooker, and the camera lens.

I guess a modern F1 car also shares a certain ‘unreal' quality but certainly not the obvious physical drama of being able to see the driver at work.

This is a very good thing for safety but a little less inspiring for the artist.

You just need to look at any old movie footage or still to get a flavour of the racing in the 1930's. The sight of legendary drivers such the great Tazio Nuvolari coaxing their thundering steed through a turn is truly awe-inspiring.

Well inspired as I was, how would I set about capturing this drama? Choosing to make a scale model could certainly succeed in giving a good impression of the technology, but would fail to capture the feel of the racing!

I needed to combine something of the hard lines of a scale model with the dynamics of pure sculpture….