Young blood
GIVEN ALL THE pressures of life in our modern age, most of us don’t need another reason to feel inadequate. But it’s hard not to do so when you look back a hundred years or more and realise just how young people were when they achieved what to us would be lifetime goals.
Nowhere is that truer than in the world of motoring. Percy Riley was 16 years old when he built his first car, which incorporated the industry’s first mechanically operated inlet valve. Ettore Bugatti was 18 when he produced his first quadricycle. Stanley Edge was 19 when he designed the engine for what would become the Austin Seven on Herbert Austin’s billiard table.
But for sheer teenage chutzpah, few can compare with Adrian Squire. His name may not ring many bells today but Squire had one of the most remarkable stories of any of them – a schoolboy who followed his dream and turned it into reality when he was in his mid-20s, only to have it almost immediately snatched away from him.
Like many of us, Squire spent his schooldays doodling car sketches in his exercise books. The difference between him and us was that Squire had absolutely no doubt that he would turn his sketches into reality. Aged 16, just after leaving Downside School, he produced a hand-written brochure of the car he wanted to
