Despite winning the Formula One World Championship and promptly retiring from the sport in 1958, Mike Hawthorn died on 22 January, 1959, driving on a public road.

John Michael Hawthorn was born on 10 April, 1929 in Mexborough, north Yorkshire , and was an apprentice engineer at the Chelsea College of Automobile Engineering before he swapped the drawing board for the driving seat.

After a brief foray into the perilous world of motorcycling, Mr Hawthorn’s father sponsored his move into club car racing, after which a family friend bought a Cooper-Bristol and invited him to drive it at Goodwood on Easter Monday 1952.

Having wowed the crowds that day and cemented his reputation in June with a fourth place on his grand prix debut in Belgium , Mr Hawthorn’s next invitation to drive came from none other than Enzo Ferrari .

He had to wait more than a year before tasting formula one victory, but in only his ninth race, he held off the reigning champion Juan Manuel Fangio in the French Grand Prix to emerge from his cockpit triumphant, and with a bloody lower lip, which had nearly bitten through despite his seemingly cocksure performance.

After a meteoric start to his career, 1954 was ill-starred: he was badly burned in the Syracuse Grand Prix and almost lost his legs, and despite recovering in time to drive at Le Mans, on the eve of the race, his father died in circumstances not dissimilar from those that were to befall himself five years later.

One year later, in 1955, at Le Mans, Mr Hawthorn, driving a Jaguar, once more got the better of Juan Fangio in a Mercedes-Benz, winning the race and setting a lap record of 122 mph, although the race was overshadowed by the deaths of 80 spectators killed by a German car that flipped over and into the crowd.

After average seasons in 56 and 57, back at Ferrari in 1958, Mr Hawthorn won only one grand prix, the French, but secured the greatest prize of all, the F1 championship, becoming the first British driver to do so in the process.

He retired two months later to get married and take over his father’s business, but on January 22, 1959, driving his race-tuned Jaguar on a wet and windy road outside London , he overtook a Mercedes-Benz, lost control of his car and hit a tree.

He was dead at 29, but having claimed the world championship only four months earlier, and in an era before the car became the star, he was assured a place in the pantheon of great racing drivers whose mastery of track and machine became the stuff of formula one legend.

Temperamental and prone to adopt a bunker mentality when he thought the press were on his back, Mr Hawthorn was nevertheless popular with his fellow drivers.

Indeed, in his championship year, he benefited twice from the actions of fellow drivers: first, Stirling Moss intervened on his behalf to overturn a points penalty; and secondly, Phil Hill obeyed team orders and let him through to take second place—and the title—in the last race of the season.

Although team orders prevailed that day, Mr Hawthorn was a racer through and through, famously and ominously declaring: “If you take away the normal hazards of motor racing, you take away the reasons for going motor racing.”