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Certainly not a TVR Tuscan. My colleague John Fife once described the Tuscan as "400bhp in a chassis that doesn't want to know", and while there were several ways of driving these cars only a few of them involved actually staying on the track, and of these a yet smaller number could be relied on for winning races. One method, quoted by journalist and racing driver Mark Hales, was to drive as slowly as possible, and it certainly worked for him - I once saw Mark win a Tuscan race by half a lap using this method.

Marshall's technique was quite different, as I saw at incredibly close range during a test session at Silverstone. He was out in the Tuscan, while I was driving a car which couldn't look at the TVR in a straight line but was significantly quicker through the bends. Quite how significantly I didn't at first realise until he passed me on the pit straight and then set about negotiating Copse corner. I went into Copse at my car's normal speed, which was about 20mph faster than that of the Tuscan. By the time Marshall got his foot back on the throttle I was close enough to read his revcounter - close enough, too, to see that he didn't so much drive the car through the corner as pick it up and throw it at the apex, with himself still inside.

It was very dramatic, and it made Marshall a real crowd-pleaser, not only in TVRs but in pretty much everything he raced. The last time I was him competing was on television, in ITV's coverage of the 2004 Goodwood Revival Meeting. He was out in the classic saloon race in, of all things, an Alvis Grey Lady, a car so large that even Marshall looked quite petite behind the wheel.

I don't know what you have to do to turn an Alvis Grey Lady into a competitive racer, but whatever it was had obviously been done admirably. Marshall did his part by driving it - as usual = about thirty percent faster than it wanted to go. The inevitable happened and the Alvis eventually fell behind the Jaguars in the same race (but only the very quickest of them). For a while, though, Marshall was right up there, sliding the Grey Lady along the grass every time he felt he needed to. It was an astonishing sight.

He more or less died in harness, bringing a car into the pits during a recent test session and complaining that he felt unwell before finally collapsing. As soon as I heard about this I realised that I should have made amends for Castle Combe and found the time to talk to him and learn from him.

And yet I did learn from him that day. He did not win the TVR race because he had to start from the back of the grid, but he blasted up through the field to take fourth on the final lap. Interviewed later by the commentator, he explained that he had done it by following the philosophy that must have been behind all those 600 wins. "There's only one place for the car in front," he said, "and that's behind you."

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