Fast forward more than 100 years and it’s obvious the Blitzen is still incredibly fast, qualifying in third position for the S.F. Edge Trophy. “We just wanted to beat Duncan [Pittaway] in the Fiat,” Collings explains. “It has a huge cone clutch with a leather lining. I maybe did 30 miles in Germany last week testing. It’s slightly over-geared, with the 28-teeth sprockets, so coming into the chicane I can’t go slow enough. Off throttle, I have to try and slow the tick-over of the engine because the engine won’t tick-over slowly enough for me to go round the chicane, which is horrible. You kind of get used to it. Driving on the road is lovely.”
Is it difficult to do less than 60mph on the road in a car designed to break records? “So… First gear probably does about 50mph… I think on these sprockets we were going up a hill in third in Germany last week doing 90mph, and the hill was quite steep… It would be very interesting to see what kind of speed we were doing down the Lavant Straight.”
Collings talks us through a few of the car’s other features, including a small mixer control (the single-jet carburettor is “a bit like a hose pipe, and if you leave it on rich too much it gets really, really unhappy”), a hand fuel pump and a push-on handbrake before pointing to a small pile of daffodils by the pedals. “My vase broke, that had the daffodils in… I’m Welsh and I thought I’d have some daffodils in the car. Well I don’t know where it’s gone, but I’ve still got the flowers, so that’s good.”