That season, on the tightest of budgets, the three HWMs took part in an incredible 20 international events in 27 weeks, across France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and Britain. Heath and Abecassis commuted back and forth to each race, because they had their garage business to run. The three cars stayed on the Continent, travelling from race to race in two old vans driven by three permanently exhausted mechanics, who also had to prepare, and repair, the racers. Chief of the three, at a salary of £10 for a seven-day week on the road, was an irascible and obsessive Pole called Alfons Koveleski. As Alf Francis, he went on to become perhaps motor racing’s best-known mechanic.

Drivers, apart from Heath and Abecassis, included Lance Macklin, the Swiss Rudi Fischer, Belgian jazzman Johny Claes, the racing motorcyclist Fergus Anderson – and the 20-year-old Stirling Moss, who’d never raced anything other than a little F3-type Cooper before. Moss was sensational. The HWM’s four-cylinder Alta engine lacked the power of most of its rivals, but its all-independent chassis handled well, and Stirling’s budding genius exploited it to the full. He finished third at Reims behind Ascari’s Ferrari and Simon’s Gordini, and, unbelievably, third in the F1 race at Bari behind the 159 Alfas of Farina and Fangio. He set fastest lap in the Rome Grand Prix chasing the F2 Ferraris of Ascari and Villoresi, and was leading the Naples Grand Prix when he was pushed off into a tree by a backmarker. Claes, meanwhile, scored the first post-war win by a British car in a race titled as a Grand Prix when he won the Belgian GP des Frontières at Chimay, while Macklin was sixth in the German Grand Prix and Fischer was sixth at Berne.

In between, there were blown engines to rebuild and bent cars to repair, the hard-pressed transporters frequently broke down, one of the racers caught fire the night before a race, and one of the mechanics, plus car and van, got lost in the middle of Italy, without money and unable to speak a word of Italian. But the team made it to the end of the season, and with good enough results to have built a substantial reputation across Europe. Most important of all, once the three cars were sold off after the last race, there was a small profit to show for all that toil.