Throughout the 90s, the impact of technology on people’s daily lives was increasing at a frantic pace, with such developments as the arrival of cable TV, the internet which we charmingly referred to as the world wide web and the arrival of small mobile phones- if you were lucky a Nokia with the addition of the Snake game for added kudos.

The McLaren MP4/4 is statistically the most successful Formula 1 car of all time, having triumphed in 15 out of the 16 Grands Prix held in 1988. That’s a 93.8 winning percentage and many of those victories also saw its drivers Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna take one-two finishes. Naturally, it won both the Drivers’ (with Senna) and Constructors’ World Championship titles that year. However, perhaps the number that sums it up best is 27. That’s the number of laps the car was not in the lead of a race over the course of the entire season! Come the end of the year, the car had amassed a total of 199 points, three times more than the second best team in the Constructors’ classification.

"When my father, Ken Tyrrell, first entered Formula 1® in 1968, it was with a Matra chassis, constructed near Paris by the French aerospace company. I was still at school then."

The world’s economy was not in great shape in the 70s and after the “peace and love” of the 60s, this decade was a more dour affair, with the rise of political corruption (Watergate) international terrorism (the Munich Olympics massacre) and a global oil crisis that caused problems for all the English based F1 teams when the three day working week was imposed on the UK.