This means that while pelting around the track, he will be relying on a hopelessly out-of-date technology when he presses the middle peddle. "The going forward bit is all right, it's just the stopping that's the problem Drum brakes get very hot, you see. They will work for the first three laps, but after that you are praying."Like its chief executive, QinetiQ is a bit of a contradiction. It was born out of the old Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which itself began life 50 years ago with the aim of using science to fight the Cold War, and is credited with inventing carbon fibre and the liquid crystal display.

And while in his day job he runs one of the UK's biggest technology groups, which specialises in pushing the boundaries of science, at the weekend he gets under the bonnet of his 50-year-old Jaguar XK120 and then blasts it round a race track. This weekend he will be rolling up his sleeves and preparing his Jag for the classic car season, which begins at Silverstone on Saturday. Sir John Chisholm is a man of contradictions. Standing in his office round the corner from Buckingham Palace, the chief executive of QinetiQ is immaculate. His suit is pressed, his shirt crisply ironed and his hair is neatly combed to one side.

But take a look at his fingernails - they are chipped and oily like an engineer's. After a compromise deal, hopes are high that the Bill will at least allow auditors to negotiate proportionate liability in return for increased responsibility and transparency. The Bill also introduces a criminal offence of knowingly and recklessly giving an incorrect auditing opinion.Big FourThe biggest accountancy firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic have responded aggressively to the financial scandals that hit the profession, and accountancy firms have been put under the microscope As a result, the way they operate has fundamentally changed.