It was July 1971 and I was heading home up the M1 from London in my very first car - a classic maroon and white Ford Anglia 105E rustbucket. It was a few days before practice started for the GP at Siverstone and I decided to look in to see if there was anything going on. There was.
No problems walking straight into the paddock and up the stairs to the top of the pits. Graham Hill was down below with the white lobster claw Brabham. He seemed sullen, barely able to raise a smile even when the famous Amateur Photographer photographer, (whose name now escapes me) lined him up for some pictures with scantilly clad young models. I wondered then if he was a Jeckyll and Hyde character as he seemed so different from the guy I had heard being so funny on numerous occasions. I suspect that Rodriguez's death in a sports car in Germany a few days before had caused his mood. There was obviously some sort of filming going on. I can't remember seeing the camera on Hill's car, but I was very surprised to hear an audio tape of high pitched racing engine revving and gear changing coming from a box on the car as it sat with engine off - that must have sounded very phony if used as the pretend background noise for the footage being shot (wonder whatever happened to that film?)
Others I saw were Henri Pescarolo and Derek Bell. Numerous other less well known people as well.
But the thing that has kept me curious these last 43 years was Pescarolo's F1 March. This was the one that was half cigar, half hunchback, with a wierd cigar shaped wing on top of the rounded nose. The model of car that first revealed Petersen to the wider world at Monaco.
I examined the car in detail in the paddock - nobody looked at me twice. All four tyres had an engraving saying "Direction of Rotation" with a little arrow pointing the direction. However for every single tyre, the arrow was pointing the wrong way. I felt like pointing it out to some of those involved (though as I remember I was the only one anywhere near the car) but thought there must have been some good reason. After all, getting one tyre wrong might be a mistake, but getting all four wrong suggested some sort of logic, if not collusion.
The only sense I could make of it was if it mattered not a jot which way round the tyres went on (in which case why state a direction on the tyre?). The car would I guess have two pairs of matched tyres. So if the Front Left was put on the "wrong" way, then so inevitably would the Front Right. Similarly with the back pair. So there would be a 1 in 4 chance that they would all be pointing the wrong way, assuming the guy fitting the wheels gave not a jot and the wheels + tyres had all been "correct" before fitting to the car.
The great beauty of this forum is that there will be someone out there in cyber padddock land who will know the answer, or perhaps even better I might be disbelieved, and that always leads to some entertaining bitching. But I tell you I saw it with my own eyes.