AA

As it made its way through the Ukrainian countryside there was still a yellow AA sticker on its windscreen, another white one on its back identified it as coming from the UK.

The first stretch opened between Watford and Rugby, according to the AA, and this section took 19 months to construct including work through one of the wettest summers on record in 1958.

He occasionally invited friends to enter the bubble, because “if you do have a little bit of an audience there’s a magic that happens,” he says, “like being in an AA meeting or something.”

But he wouldn't have initially been able to do that if the AA got its way with a raft of new restrictions on young drivers like him.

And I remember distinctly that we were in Houston with the Dodgers in 1980, when they called and told me, we have a kid here who was brought up from AA San Antonio.