Archive for Author 'John Aston', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.

Happy Lucky Days – My Life in Racing 

by Bob Evans

Racing in the the glory days of F5000, Evans showed plenty of talent but as his entertaining and candid autobiography shows, scoring points and wins has a lot to do with factors outside a driver’s control.

The Race to the Future: The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century

by Kassia St. Clair

Automobiles, electric lights, wireless telegraphy, the first synthetic plastic—everything is changing all at once. Ironic: The 8000-mile drive in 1907 from Peking to Paris happened at the same time newspapers touted “the triumph of the horse.”

Variable Valve Timings: Memoirs of a Car Tragic

by Chris Harris

Once, and only for a while, Ferrari banned Harris from reviewing their cars. So did Lamborghini. Such is the price of journalistic independence. He’s done a lot more than Top Gear. And he really does know cars.

Benetton: Rebels of Formula 1

by Damien Smith

Benetton Formula Ltd. not only changed hands or corporate identities many times, it became the only constructor to have won races under more than one nationality. This book tells the 1986–2001 history.

Il Mio Drake

by Lycia Mezzacappa

The Barber of Maranello tells all! Well, no, but the book does reveal an unknown side of the notoriously private Enzo Ferrari, not least because they saw each other six mornings a week.

Powered by Gibson—From F1 to Le Mans

by Mark Cole

The rubber has barely washed off the roads from one year’s Le Mans 24 Hours and the clock at Gibson is already counting down the seconds to the next one. That’s how it goes when you’re the world’s leading manufacturer of high performance LMP1 and LMP2 powertrains.

Roger Williamson: A Collection of Memories from Friends, Mechanics, Rivals and Family

by K. Guthrie & D. Banks

The F1 cars of Williamson’s era were getting faster and faster but neither the tracks nor safety consciousness evolved at pace. His horrific death in a fire at the 1973 Dutch GP is a chilling example of Murphy’s Law at full tilt.

Tyrrell: The Story of the Tyrrell Racing Organisation

by Richard Jenkins

This team/constructor turned out the lights half a decade ago but has descendants of a manner in the modern era: Brawn GP who almost adopted the old name, and today’s Mercedes-AMG Petronas.
We’ve now added a second review—because the book is just that good.

For Flux Sake: Beer, Fags and Opposite-Lock 

by Ian Flux with Matt James

This British driver belongs to the baby boomer generation, the last one to be able to immerse itself in racing without guilt, regret, or even a backward glance. This account of a racer’s life is endearing, frank, shocking, funny and fast-paced—just like its author.

24 HOURS, 100 Years of Le Mans 

by Richard Williams

How far can you go, nowadays, pretty much nonstop, in 24 hours? Oh, about 3200 miles—an inconceivable number a hundred years ago when this epic endurance race was first held.

The Greatest Escape

by Martin Barratt

RAF Bomber Command’s slogan was “the bomber will always get through.” But not necessarily back. Almost 45% of their aircrews died in WWII. Almost 10,000 were captured, and many kept their stories to themselves. This is one of them.

Superbears—The Story of Hesketh Racing

by James Page

Need something to do on the weekends? Got a pile of money? Why, let’s start a racing team! It’s 1972. Their caterer had better credentials than their—unemployed—driver. The opposition laughed, but not for long.

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