On his passport, for 'Profession', it simply said: 'Gentleman'. Rob Walker was very much that, and so much more. The object of admiration for so many drivers, mechanics and team owners over the past four decades, Walker died this week, at the age of 84. Doug Nye, with Sir Stirling Moss, bids farewell to one of the greatest motor racing titans

Rob Walker has died. We don't have to believe it. That's the feeling here in Britain, as the doyen of Formula One team owners has passed away at the age of 84. How can I describe his place in the motor racing scheme of things to an international audience, many of whom will perhaps have only the most misty awareness of where Rob fitted into the scheme of things - of his place in major-league motor racing history?

Rob himself would snort derisively at this, but perhaps his place is best described as having been major-league motor racing's equivalent of our late, much-loved, Queen Mum; he was from another era, he might have become half-forgotten by some, hardly heard of by a youthful few, yet he was intrinsically adored, respected, admired by so very many more... and as long as many of us have been following motor racing, for well over 60 years, Rob Walker has simply always been there. He was a motor sporting institution.

He was not only the first private owner/team proprietor ever to secure victory in a Formula One World Championship-qualifying Grand Prix, he was also the last ever to do so.

His association with driver Stirling Moss from 1958 to 1962 - throughout which they never had a written contract, merely a handshake sufficed - was one of the most productive in motor racing history.

Stirling drove Rob's privately-owned and privately-prepared Scots-blue-and-white liveried cars to victories in Formula One, Formula Two, InterContinental, Tasman and GT racing up to World Championship level. Moreover, the Walker team's 1958 Argentinean GP and 1960 Monaco GP victories were also - respectively - the first ever achieved by the Cooper and Lotus marques, so were successes scored ahead of the factory teams themselves. What's more, Stirling's 1961 Oulton Park Gold Cup victory in the Walker-entered experimental Ferguson P99 was the only Formula One victory ever to fall to a 4-wheel drive car.

Their little team - based in the small market town of Dorking, Surrey - was the perennial underdog, thorn in the side of the works teams - a role which both Rob and Stirling absolutely relished. They were both, above all, sportsmen in the old traditional meaning of that word. They campaigned cars painstakingly prepared by such sound mechanics as 'Alf Francis', Tim Wall, Don Christmas, Tony Cleverley and John Chisman, which Rob unstintingly dug deep into his far from bottomless personal pocket to finance. And they notched the first-ever World Championship-qualifying GP victory for a rear-engined car when Stirling won the 1958 Argentine round in Rob's tiny 1.9-litre Cooper-Climax.

Rob did not make that trip - arranged as it was at the very last moment - to Buenos Aires, and his team there comprised Stirling Moss, his wife Katie, and mechanics 'Alf Francis' and Timmy Wall. Stirling ran non-stop throughout on one set of Continental tyres, nursing them through the closing laps, though they were worn clean through to the white canvas carcass and could have burst at any time.

'Alf' made great play through the latter stages of standing out in front of the pits waving a wheel at Stirling as he ripped past, convincing the rival Ferrari works team that he would come in and change tyres - something which would cost an enormous amount of time, since the Cooper used multi-stud bolt-on wheels, not quick-change knock-offs. But this was all a pre-arranged charade - Mossy had no intention of stopping unless forced to by a tyre failure (always presuming he survived such an event) - and he won.

Mere months later, Maurice Trintignant drove a sister Walker car to win the very next Championship-qualifying round of that year, at Monaco...

Into 1959, Stirling won the Portuguese and Italian GPs in Walker Coopers - in 1960 the Monaco and United States GPs fell to the Scots-blue team's Lotus 18s - in 1961 it was the Monaco and German GPs in Stirling's perhaps greatest ever drives, still in the obsolescent Lotuses. And in between times one must roll-in innumerable non-Championship F1, minor-Formula and GT victories - including Moss's memorable Ferrari double in the Goodwood TTs of 1960-61.

But on April 23rd 1962 - 40 years ago last week - Moss's frontline career ended in his Goodwood crash. Rob was at Pau that day, where Trintignant won for him. Devastated by Stirling's injuries - but later elated by his recovery - Rob continued in Formula One, campaigning Lotus, Cooper and Brabham cars for drivers including Trintignant, Jo Bonnier, Jochen Rindt, Jo Siffert and ultimately Graham Hill.

Disaster struck three times at R.R.C. Walker Racing.

Mexican rising star Ricardo Rodriguez and Rhodesian former racing motorcyclist Gary Hocking both crashed fatally in Rob's Lotus 24s, at Mexico City and Westmead, Natal, South Africa - and while his first Lotus 49 was being stripped at Dorking after Swiss driver Jo Siffert had crashed it in practice for the 1968 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, it caught fire - totally destroying Rob's racing shop, and sending much of his treasured memorabilia and records - and that preserved set of Argentine GP-winning Conti tyres - up in smoke. Yet he dug still deeper, his team rebounded, and back at Brands Hatch in a fresh Lotus 49B, Jo Siffert won that year's British Grand Prix...

From 1966 to 1969, London stockbroker Jack Durlacher helped support the team, and in 1970 Brooke Bond-Oxo sponsorship took over, as Graham Hill made his comeback in Rob's Lotuses after career-threatening leg injuries sustained the previous year at Watkins Glen. From 1971-73 Rob joined forces with John Surtees in his F1 team, and in 1974 Rob joined the one-car Yardley McLaren operation with Mike Hailwood driving, until his career-ending Nurburgring crash.

Rob later contributed his time-keeping skills and management experience to the Embassy-Hill, Hesketh, Penske, Copersucar-Fittipaldi and Wolf teams, and briefly in 1975 Rob Walker Racing reappeared as he and Harry Stiller ran a rugged newcomer named Alan Jones in an elderly Hesketh 308...

Rob had been contributing charmingly gossipy insider race reports for the American monthly magazine 'Road & Track'. Two generations of American F1 fans were nurtured by his writing. Both the Californian editorial team and their readership adored him, as he exuded British charm and knowledge and humour - and class...

Robert Ramsay Campbell Walker was born on August 14th 1917. His father Campbell, orphaned as a child and raised in Australia by his maternal grandparents, was heir to the Johnny Walker whisky fortunes. Rob's mother, née Mary Marshal Ramsay, came from a family with business interests in tea and rubber trading. Cam Walker died in 1921, aged just 32. Rob's mother subsequently married the much older Sir Francis Eden Lacey, long-time secretary of the MCC, the world's premier cricket club, and Rob and his three-years older brother John grew up on the extensive Sutton Veny estate near Warminster in Wiltshire, which his stepfather and mother had bought as their new home.

The house at Sutton Veny extended to over one hundred rooms. There, Rob was taught initially by a governess, before being despatched to the boarding school at Sherborne. He was, by his own admission "...academically hopeless. I could never even master joined-up writing. I have printed everything out longhand all my life..." - as his later editors will testify. But he was a fine sportsman, a natural ball player, tall, lean and athletic - and then came his interest in fast cars.

He "caught the bug" aged just seven when he was taken to see the 1924 Boulogne Grand Prix. Briton B.S. Marshall won the preliminary Voiturette event and Mrs Marshall happened to be seated in the grandstand beside young Rob, explaining every move. When two French Chenard-Walcker cars dominated the main race Rob was fit to burst. First his new friend's husband had won one race, and now cars named 'Walker' had won the main event. It was all too much. For the small boy this involvement by association was an intoxicating experience - and it shaped the man.

At Cambridge University - well, normally AWOL from lectures at Magdelene College there - Rob aspired to follow the wonderful example of fellow Cambridge undergraduate Whitney Straight. In similar vein he would also live life absolutely to the full. Qualified as a private pilot he was promptly banned for life after lapping the Cottenham horse-race course at zero feet, taking all the jumps in a Tiger Moth biplane on full throttle... Trying to prove that his Delahaye coupé - which had four speeds in both forward and reverse - was just as fast either way, he rolled it spectacularly at around 60mph... backwards.

He made his competition debut in a supercharged Lea-Francis in the Lewes Speed Trials, and late in 1938 bought a magnificent ex-Prince 'Bira' 3½-litre Delahaye 135 Course on hire purchase. In this 135mph machine he contested his first motor race, at Brooklands. In his second race he spun and was hauled before the stewards. At a later Brooklands meeting he won a handicap race. Having placed 5-bob on himself to win at 5:1, he took 25-shillings off the bookies.

'The Bentley Boys' had been his boyhood heroes. He dreamed of racing like them at Le Mans, and in 1939 he co-drove the Delahaye there with Ian Connell who - as the more experienced driver - took the first four-hour stint. Rob took over at 8:00pm - suitably "dressed for dinner" in an impeccable dark blue pinstriped suit and tie, but with rope-soled plimsolls on his feet.

Competing journalist Gordon Wilkins wrote: "I could just see the white stripe in Rob Walker's blue suit as my headlights caught it going down the straight at 125mph." Connell drove midnight to-dawn and when Rob took over he had changed his lounge suit for informal Prince of Wales check, because "it was the proper thing to do." The Delahaye's pedals had burned Ian Connell's feet so badly that Rob drove the remaining 12 hours, plunging those rope-soled pumps in a bucket of water at each pitstop. They finished eighth.

Rob joined the Navy on December 6th 1939 and would serve six years without ever firing a shot in anger. His pre-war flying ban ignored, he flew Gladiator, Skua, Roc, Swordfish and Fulmar aircraft until his night vision was judged defective and he was grounded.

He survived the torpedoing of the cruiser HMS Cleopatra off Sicily, and the effects of clambering athletically out of a landing Swordfish while it was in mid-bounce, probably still some 12-15 feet in the air, after "rather too much gin." He was scooped up from the runway in battered condition, and the Medical Officer who patched him up reported: "Multiple contusions and abrasions; patient partially anaesthetised at time of accident."

Rob was a wonderfully plummy, cool raconteur all his long life, and his naval stories were legion. For instance - Moss is encouraging me to include this - at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys once, he recalled having to provide character witness for a rating apparently caught in flagrante with a sheep: "...his defence was that it had been a foggy night, and he thought it was a Wren in a duffle coat."

Hear something like that at the dinner table as just one of an apparently inexhaustible stream of gently-delivered, ineffably good natured bon mots, and you will understand how exhausting, side-splitting, an evening with Rob could be. Yet throughout his frontline racing involvement his natural good humour never diluted his eagerness for his team, his cars, his drivers to excel.

He married Elisabeth 'Betty' Duncan in 1940, and one promise he made her was that he would never race cars again. Postwar he kept his word - of course - while still driving in one-car-at-a-time events such as speed trials and hill-climbs up to 1957, using the Delahaye - which he long retained - GP Delage, Connaught, Coopers and a Mercedes-Benz 300SL.

He launched the Pippbrook Garage business at Dorking in Surrey, where he based his R.R.C. Walker Racing Team to run cars for drivers including Tony Rolt, Reg Parnell, Peter Walker, Peter Collins, Roy Salvadori, Tony Brooks, and Jack Brabham. When Roy Salvadori first test-drove a Formula 2 Cooper-Climax and declared that with a little more power it could frighten an F1 car on a tight circuit, Rob dug in his pocket and funded the F1 'special' project for Monaco '57 (where Jack Brabham pushed the broken car home 6th) which led directly to development of the cars which clinched the Cooper World titles of 1959 and 1960.

The elegant, always impeccably dressed figure of Rob would wield the stopwatches, expertly manipulating three at a time, while Betty normally kept the lap chart. Rob's courteous affability cloaked an intensely committed and capable efficiency - 'professional' was the right word in period, but today it doesn't suit - having become associated with behaviour altogether too grim, too stiff, too chill, and too devalued.

During the Moss years, when Polish-born 'Alf Francis' was his chief mechanic, Rob would always defer to his opinion on what to run and where to race, as Stirling recalls:

"What nobody appreciates is that his manager running the Pippbrook Garage business had to keep his books straight throughout this entire period, and so he would always charge Rob personally for every hour that Alf for example spent working on the racing cars - and that would come to over a hundred hours most weeks, so Rob was absolutely paying through the nose not just for supply of cars and engines and gearboxes and parts from the manufacturers, but also for every hour that the team was functioning as a team. And he was not, he really was NOT, a multi-millionaire in the American sense, like a Jim Kimberly or a Briggs Cunningham. He was wealthy, sure, but he had by no means a bottomless pit of money with which to indulge his hobby...

"Rob had a great respect for Alf and was always rather wary of him - because Alf was an amazing character who was always prone to explode, and Rob absolutely appreciated his ability and left things to him. If I'd say 'what about doing this race at Roskilde?', Rob would say 'ask Alf' - and if Alf thought it was a good idea, then Rob gave him absolutely free hand, and picked up the bills...

"He wasn't allowed to buy the manufacturing team's latest equipment, we could only get year-old stuff essentially, but I relished the extra buzz of being able to win with it. Essentially, although everybody loved him - the manufacturers weren't daft... because they knew that any car run by Rob for me was going to be beautifully prepared and very competitive with their own works cars. Betty was very supportive, and a great lap scorer - one of the greatest contributors to what the team achieved.

"Rob - I always called him 'Ram' after his middle name, Ramsay - was a terrific friend...

"And I know that I am going to miss him terribly..."

It enriched us all...