This year they'd added another layer of Armco on the outside of the bends and joined the two bottom rows with massive steel flitch plates to stop people forcing the rails apart and this must have saved a lot of injuries when Hans Strobel came round three laps from the finish and hit one of the uprights and bounced off it and spun twice and caught fire.

There wasn't a lot of noise from the crash itself, just a low roaring as the flames bannered back in the slipstream; but some people down there had started screaming and there was a kind of whimpering noise as the first of the emergency vehicles wheelspun on the hot tarmac as it pulled away from the pits.

'Oh God,' Marianne said and buried her face against me.

'He's all right,' I told her, but of course she knew he wasn't. He'd been hurled clear but the flames had caught him and he was rolling over and over like a small quiet fireball along the guard rails with no one to help him.

Up to now we'd all been cheering him on. This was Strobel's third year at Monaco and he'd been steadily getting the hang of the gear ratios and the characteristic front-end problem as the weight came off past the Casino, and in practice he'd notched up a diabolical 1 min. 25.35 sec. just before he came in, and for most of the time it had looked like his race and in another few minutes we would have heard the corks popping but now he was rolling along the guard rails, orange and black and flickering, le pauvre, the man next to me kept saying monotonously, oh mon Dieu, le pauvre, till he got on my nerves.