Tony Brooks was taking a weekend off from the final year of his dental studies in Manchester when, in October 1955, he became the first British driver to win a postwar grand prix in a British car.

The Gran Premio di Siracusa was not a world championship race, and the field was not of the highest quality, but to beat the Italian teams – and particularly the mighty Maseratis – on their home ground with his humble Connaught was a noteworthy feat, particularly since he had never taken the wheel of a Formula One car before the previous day’s practice session.

Brooks, who has died aged 90, was as surprised as anyone by the result he achieved on the Sicilian roads, but it led to a distinguished career at the top level. He went on to win six world championship grands prix – and in 1959, while driving for the team of Enzo Ferrari, he came close to capturing the drivers’ championship itself.

That he did not win it – and was widely criticised in Italy as a result – came about through circumspection. He had travelled to the last race of the season, the US Grand Prix at Sebring, in contention for the title with Jack Brabham and Stirling Moss. To see off Brabham, Brooks needed to win and take the extra point awarded for the fastest lap, with the Australian finishing no higher than third. To beat Moss, he needed to win with his fellow Englishman no higher than second and without taking the extra point.

On the first lap of the race, however, Brooks was accidentally rammed in the rear by his young teammate Wolfgang von Trips, triggering a promise to himself – following two big accidents earlier in his career caused by mechanical problems – never again to compete in a potentially dangerous machine. Now, fearing that his rear suspension had been damaged in the collision, he called in at the pits and asked his mechanics to investigate. Their examination revealed nothing amiss and he was able to resume, but could finish only third, leaving Brabham to take the title. Enzo Ferrari was not best pleased.

Tom Parker, who has died of cancer aged 33, was a singer with the boy band The Wanted, who sold millions of records around the world with hits such as Glad You Came and All Time Low; when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour in October 2020 he became an activist and fundraiser and had the support of millions of fans as he documented his struggles with the disease.

Thomas Parker was born on August 4, 1988, in Bolton, north-west England. He taught himself to play the guitar and auditioned for The X Factor talent show but failed to progress beyond the first round.

He went to Manchester Metropolitan University to study geography but was unable to set his musical ambitions aside, and took a small step on the path to stardom when he joined a Take That tribute band.

In 2009 the manager Jayne Collins, who had masterminded the rise of the girl band The Saturdays, which included Tipperary’s Una Healy, held auditions for a male version, seeing more than 1,000 men over nine months. Parker was chosen along with Nathan Sykes, Dubliner Siva Kaneswaran, Max George and Jay McGuiness to form the group that would become known internationally as The Wanted.

When The Wanted announced a hiatus in 2014, he took up DJ-ing and reached the semi-finals of Celebrity MasterChef in 2015. Three years later, he stripped off for ITV’s The Real Full Monty: Live to raise funds for male cancers.

But in 2020, after suffering a seizure, Parker announced that he had been diagnosed with inoperable grade 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumour that is notoriously difficult to treat.

Last December 2021 Parker addressed the House of Commons all-party parliamentary group on brain tumours, telling them: “I’m staggered they can find a cure for Covid within a year, but for decades on end they haven’t found better treatments, let alone a cure, for brain tumours.”

Parker married Kelsey Hardwick in 2018.

She survives him, along with their young daughter Aurelia and son Bodhi.

On 4 June 1993, a 23-year-old Australian with a cocky manner and peroxide blond hair ran up to the wicket at Old Trafford to deliver his first ball in Ashes cricket, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. Although considered a bright prospect in Australia, nothing Shane Warne had done to this point had suggested he was anything out of the ordinary. His early Tests had been unremarkable, and a few weeks previously, in a warm-up game at Worcester, Graeme Hick had hit him to all parts of the ground. Now, from a short, casual-looking run-up, he bowled to Mike Gatting, who was on four. “Two-thirds of the way down the pitch the ball dipped into the leg-side, opening Gatting up like a can of beans, before ripping diagonally across his body to clip the outside of off-stump”, reported Mike Selvey in the next day’s Guardian. “Gatting stood his ground, not in dissent or disappointment, but in total, utter disbelief.”

The “Ball of the Century”, as it became known, turned Warne into a “cricketing superstar”, said Mike Atherton in The Times. And he remained one throughout his career, which ended 14 years later with the leg-spinner having taken 708 Test wickets, then more than any other bowler in history. But Warne wasn’t just the “greatest leg-spinner in the history of the game”, he was also one of its biggest personalities, a “force of nature” who “lived his life to the full, fitting more in one year than many others would” in a lifetime. That was why his death from a suspected heart attack last week came as such a blow. It seems inconceivable someone “so full of energy, so fizzing with the enjoyment of life’s rich possibilities” should be dead at the age of just 52.

Warne was born in 1969 in the Melbourne suburb of Ferntree Gully, said The Daily Telegraph. His father, an insurance consultant, and his German-born mother were both “natural athletes” who encouraged Shane and his brother Jason to try “all kinds of sports”. Warne’s first love was Australian rules football, which he dreamed of playing professionally. He only took up cricket seriously in his late teens, after being rejected by one of Melbourne’s biggest Aussie Rules clubs. It soon became apparent that he “possessed an extraordinary capacity to spin the ball”, largely due to his phenomenal upper body strength: something he attributed to a period as an eight-year-old which he’d spent dragging himself around in a cart, after breaking both legs in an accident.

Once Warne hit his stride in the Test arena, his impact on the game was incalculable, said Matthew Engel in The Guardian. He joined an already formidable Australian team and made it “overwhelmingly stronger”. And he “single-handedly revived the discipline of leg-spin”, which had become “almost a lost art” in a sport dominated by fast bowlers. Combining his prodigious spin with “rare consistency for a wrist-spinner”, Warne would “attack right from the start of a spell”, said Vic Marks in the same paper, staring down batsmen in a cocksure manner and often sledging them mercilessly as well. Under such pressures, batsmen would often cave in psychologically, resorting to “desperate acts of foolishness”.