He had quite an incredible bank of motorsport impressions. “Come on Henry, something with turbo chatter!” He needed no more encouragement and you’d all be listening to yet another wonderfully realistic impression.

On one lunchtime trip, Henry insisted on doing a Group B rally car impression all the way from the Tony Gaze Building at the Goodwood Circuit to Sainsbury's five miles away. It mattered not that he was sat in the passenger seat of a road-going, completely standard Ford Fiesta ST.

Henry was all pops and bangs on the overrun, and he lived a life of absolute ‘fever’ – a word so associated with Henry that it was trending on Twitter last night. Everything with four wheels, and two, was “fever” and if there was something particularly rare and exotic in the paddock he’d suffer from “significant trouser trouble”.

This was a man totally immersed in motorsport and its rich and colourful history. The unadulterated joy you witnessed when he wandered around the Goodwood paddocks was plain to see and anyone interviewed by him always felt like they were having a friendly chat. As Jenson Button put it this morning, “it felt so natural, like you were having a good old chinwag with your closest mate”.

In the office, he was a blizzard of energy. No doubt that was partly down to the quantity of chocolate biscuits he could consume while still bouncing off the rev limiter. He had an extraordinary appetite for snacks and motorsport. Only yesterday we were joking about how a long-departed racing driver was getting increasingly difficult to get hold of for an interview.

Having been thrown out of Stowe School for sneaking off to watch cars testing at Silverstone (“how did they not see that coming?!”), he joined Autosport on the ads team before moving over to the editorial side of the office. With his interviews on the Autosport International stage and at Goodwood there were few motor racing names who hadn’t come across this mountain of a motorsport man.