The W196 initially appeared with an attractive streamlined body, in which form it won the 1954 French and Italian GPs, and 1955 Italian GP, all at high-speed venues. But the car was not easy to place through corners and the open-wheeled variant was favoured by lead driver Juan Manuel Fangio.

This version won six world championship races, helping Fangio to his second and third world titles, and scored a remarkable 1-2-3-4 at the 1955 British GP.

The straight-eight engine, with its desmodromic valves and mechanical fuel injection, was in its own way a work of art and was powerful and reliable for the period. But aesthetically the W196 was not on a par with the Italian opposition it regularly defeated.

In sweltering heat at the 1984 Dallas GP, however, it held together. As other cars wilted or were thrown into the barriers by their drivers, Keke Rosberg kept his head, helped by a water-cooled skullcup, and charged through to a dominant and famous victory.

The last Cooper to win a world championship grand prix was not as ungainly as it looked. The Maserati engine, based on a V12 design tried in the 250F the previous decade, seemed almost to spill out of the rear but, in a 1966 season when only Brabham got its act together for the move from 1.5-litre to three-litres, the T81 – complete with wide-open nose – was competitive.

Jochen Rindt was a consistent points contender in the Derrick White-designed T81 and was a fine second in the Belgian GP, before 1964 world champion John Surtees joined Cooper having fallen out with Ferrari.

Surtees was a fighting second in the German GP and won the season finale in Mexico after starting from Cooper’s first pole position in five years. In between he might have won the US GP had he not spent quite so long ranting after a clash with Peter Arundell as he tried to lap the Lotus. Cooper only just failed to pip Ferrari to second in the 1966 constructors’ table.

Surtees was gone by the start of 1967, but new recruit Pedro Rodriguez won the first round at Kyalami in a race of attrition. Thereafter other cars, most notably the Cosworth DFV-engined Lotus 49, moved things out of the T81’s reach, but it was still good enough to secure another third place for Cooper in the teams’ standings.