Personally, I'd put it 30 years or more earlier, when MMC was building comparatively inexpensive, light, good performing sports cars that normal chaps could buy, modify and compete in.
By the turn of the last century the cars had changed into expensive luxuries that, notwithstanding the fact that they were vastly better built and greatly more performant, were positioned into a market which required that the purchaser had a sum equivalent to 3 or 4 times the average income to be able to afford to buy them.
But having said that, would I prefer a 1970's 4/4 or a 2000's 4/4? Unquestionably the latter
