WHO’s afraid of the big bad wolf, otherwise known as the R-word, the almost unmentionable, horrible, big, scary recession? Well, I’m not but then I’ve never been clever enough to show any entrepreneurial flair. It’s this kind of pathetic, smallminded avoidance of financial risk that has kept me poor all my life, but not broke.

Rather like the start of the Second World War, when history relates there was a so-called Phoney War for the first few months, we are now in the Phoney Recession. But we have signed up for it as a nation, whether we like it or not, and the real thing will arrive sooner or later. What will happen to historic motor sport then? Not much, I think, although this is obviously no moment for reckless adventures.

History might teach us something. Reaching over and pulling Bill Boddy’s The History of Brooklands Motor Course off the shelf (and how I love having all these books around me – there’s never a bad time to collect books and magazines, so we should all buy more right now), I see that crowd attendances at The Track dropped dramatically as soon as that catastrophic recession started to bite in 1928.

All that stuff about ‘the right crowd and no crowding’ at Brooklands was complete balls. The constant advertising in motoring magazines, through the early 1930s, of cut-price ticket offers to the spectators gave that little game away. The owners invested in sprucing the place up and improving the facilities for members, and attendances started to grow again through those years. Meanwhile, and this is the point, The Bod’s record shows that plenty of racing carried on right through the worst of even that financial crisis.

All right, I do get a bit worried occasionally but then something happens to fill me with confidence again. I admit that the first historic motor racing-related event I heard of being cancelled this year was a lavish dinner in London which had aimed to raise a lot of money for charity. Nobody was buying any tickets. That’s a pity and rather depressing but the organisers hope to run it next year.

Then I went to race at The Masters/Top Hat meeting at Mallory Park and I was struck by the number of well-heeled people I met and recognised as drivers from the past, just milling around the paddock and chatting. It turned out that they weren’t there merely to enjoy the glittering social occasion. Separately, three of them said they’d decided to come back into motor racing next year and they’d turned out to have a look while they make that all-important decision about which car to buy. Perhaps things aren’t so bad after all, I reflected.

Looking back through all the recessions I’ve known in 40 years of racing, people have moaned but our world has carried on comfortably enough. Economic conditions were not great, for example, in 1974 when I took the big chance and left a secure job, intending to set myself up as a full-time race driver. Conditions in the motor industry were more than dire in those days but my moment had arrived and I had to do it then. Well, it worked, sort of.

It’s going to be all right this time, believe me, so let’s stop worrying and get our cars prepared for the 2009 season. Only World Wars have screwed things up badly. It’s hard for us to imagine how it was in 1939-’45 but all motor sport stopped immediately and it wasn’t long before private motoring was banned as well. For some years, motor sport enthusiasts met once a month in the Rembrandt Hotel in South Kensington, just to exchange ideas and keep their spirits up, and they did not drive there. For years after 1945 there was severe petrol rationing which made any sort of motoring, let alone racing and rallying, very difficult indeed.

Things may seem grim now but the problems facing us today would appear so trivial to our fathers and grandfathers that they would just laugh at us. As those three gentlemen I met at Mallory Park showed, now is the time to start finding the right car for the great events of 2009. If you are lucky enough to own one of the outstanding competition cars of the past already, you have not made a mistake in acquiring it, looking after it and racing it. Gentlemen, start your engines. Well, get your cars ready anyway.