As readers will appreciate, major magazines are printed in one go but individual features are prepared well in advance. For that reason, this month’s article on 50 years of the British Touring Car Championship was signed, sealed and delivered two days before the news of the Biggin Hill air crash came through on that terrible Sunday in March.

The five people on board that ill-fated Cessna Citation were killed instantly when a loss of power caused them to crash into a house in Farnborough, Kent. The pilot and co-pilot were taking three members of the Apex Motorsport team to Nogaro in France to test the Jaguar XKR GT3. One was a 25-year-old graduate technician, Chris Allarton, who was just one week into his new job with Apex. His outstanding start in life was tragically ended.

The names that made the headlines first, of course, were those of Richard Lloyd, 63, the former race driver and Apex Motorsport principal, and his friend and colleague David Leslie, 55, still a top driver and the man set to test the Jag. Both were senior BRDC members with long and distinguished lists of personal achievements in racing. It’s hard and very painful to accept that we shall never see them again.

Ex-F1 World Champion and current BRDC president Damon Hill said: ‘I knew them both and I raced for Richard at Le Mans. They were lovely guys. You wouldn’t find anyone with anything bad to say about them.’ These were not mere platitudes: after the loss of his father Graham Hill, Damon of all people must have appreciated the situation more keenly than most.

He was telling the truth about Richard and David with absolute precision. They were modest men, not given to ugly self-promotion. They were both the kind who go about quietly getting on with their work, and doing it very well indeed. It is only now they have gone that the depth of their achievements will begin to sink in.

As you’ll see in our feature starting on page 56, Richard was one of a select group who brought their Historic Touring Cars to Rockingham Motor Speedway in March to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what we now know as the BTCC. As ever with him, the Chevrolet Camaro he brought along was prepared to the highest standard. For 30 minutes that day I sat in the car with him, chatting and taking my notes before driving it myself. After that Cessna went down a few days later we could, in truth, have pulled the feature apart and rewritten it, but we decided to leave it mostly unaltered and, instead, to add this separate tribute.

Richard was a good friend of 40 years’ standing. We got to know each other through racing, and in 1974 and ’75 we both achieved the results required to be elected to the BRDC. Back then, in the winter, we’d travel together to St Moritz to ride the Cresta Run. Through those same years, we were both also accepted as members of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, which we agreed was probably slightly harder than getting into the BRDC.

Richard was always the best company, dignified and intelligent, never one to lose his temper in my experience and the possessor of a quiet yet subtle sense of humour. In his racing activities, he was a perfectionist. You could see that in his cars and his driving, in which he was fast but the least likely of all to make contact with another competitor. When the big American cars were ruled out of the BSCC/BTCC by the 3-litre limit of 1975, he soon set up GTi Engineering, the cleanest and neatest race-prep business I’d ever seen, and produced a series of race-winning Group One and Group Two VW Golfs, one of which I shared with him occasionally.

In the early 1980s, GTi Engineering ran the Canon Racing Porsche 924 Carrera GTR programme. When possible, we shared that car and enjoyed considerable success, most memorably a fifth overall and first in class in the 1000Km on the old Nürburgring in 1982. His later successes, running the 2003 Le Mans-winning Bentleys, and his many achievements outside motor sport will no doubt appear in the official obituaries, but I wanted to add this personal tribute to a friend who was, quite simply, an absolutely first-rate man.

How appropriate it was that he should have engaged the immensely talented David Leslie to help with the new Jaguar programme, and how truly terrible it is that they have gone.