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Why John Surtees was a maverick

Motorsport has been paying tribute to John Surtees in the last few days - the late, great champion of two wheels and four was more than just a colossus of a competitor

Forty years ago things were done differently in Formula 1, and even by the standards of the day John Surtees did them differently again. One day, in November 1978, I got a call from his secretary, asking me to visit John in St Thomas Hospital. At the time we didn't even know he was laid up.

"It's my legs," he explained, "and it goes back some years. Seems to be a combination of the injuries from the Mosport Can-Am shunt in '65, and some Avgas burns I got from the Cooper-Maserati in Mexico the year after." John being John, of course, he forebore to mention that this last was a race he had dominated.

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