Never in the history of racing has there ever been a person better at sniffing out good coffee than Ricardo Divila. Like the rest of us he could be found lurking somewhere near either an Italian team or tyre company at a race track if his team had been remiss enough not to bring a proper coffee machine itself. Even when he wasn’t connected to a team but was at a track just to scan and search for a new way to get to Le Mans to try to win it he still knew enough engineers and team members that he could find coffee. What was a measure of him was that he knew a lot of people, young engineers and old hands and each were happy to help him in his quest for caffeine.

Others will write about Ricardo’s life as a Formula 1 designer and engineer, about the Copersucar programme with the Fittipaldis or will write about his exploits in Japan with Super GT. Some may even write about his attempts to win Le Mans overall with Nissan. Some who knew him will write about the trepidation to answer a Skype call from him in the summer; there was every chance that he was on video and in his underpants.

However, I’ll write about what I knew and that was of a brilliant mind, a high intellect and a humour that transcended pretty much all situations. He was fascinated by anything that was unusual. Anything that was out of the ordinary and would distract Ricardo from every day engineering would prick his interest and he would quickly find out who was involved (normally someone he worked with) and then would head off to find out what he could. There was another driving force behind him and that was the desire to teach.