How do I start to describe it? Maybe with the intangibles. The atmosphere is utterly eerie. It isn’t huge in here; not much bigger than a tennis or basketball court, but racking means huge flight cases and complete cars can be stacked three or four-high, and there’s a mezzanine level up some steel stairs at the back where the Formula 1 cars are all on one level. That’s where I go first. I count 38 cars up here, mostly complete, other than their nose-wing sections which are removed and hung on the walls to avoid damage and make the cars easier to move.

Not that they’re moved much. The place is oddly, weirdly still. The shafts of light from the glass panes in the roof show the dust in the air and make the polythene sheets covering each car look like ghostly shrouds. F1 cars aren’t meant to be quiet and motionless; the contrast between this place’s graveyard calm and the noise and kinetic energy that 38 F1 cars ought to emit is so great that you find yourself playing their soundtrack in your head to compensate. Visually they’re as good as ever when you lift a corner of the plastic: short and fat-tyred and mostly in that genuinely iconic orangey-red and white Marlboro livery. And that’s before you notice the names on the sides of the air intakes: Senna, Senna, Senna, Senna, Prost, Senna, Senna.