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Porsche Racing Cars: 1953 to 1975
by Brian Long

This book looks at Porsche’s purpose-built competition cars of the modern era, cars the author considers motorsports and design icons “the likes of which, sadly, we will never see again.” Marque expert Brian Long is a trained engineer with some 40 motoring books on his resume, quite a number of which have a place in the core canon of Porsche literature. He also has strong links to the factory which itself has a commendable commitment to preserving its proud history in the form of a professionally managed archive and museum. Long says he had wanted to do this book (and its companion, Porsche Racing Cars: 1976 to 2005, ISBN-13: 978-1904788454) for decades so one wonders what he thought when Anthony Pritchard published his very similar book just a bit earlier. Remarkably, even though both authors cover pretty much the same era and the same cars, of the almost 1000 photos they show combined only a handful are common to both books! Hats off to the photo researchers and the Porsche Archive for making the effort to facilitate distinctively different books, each worthy in its own right.

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Joint Strike Fighter
Design and Development of the International Aircraft
by Gerard Keijsper

Over the last 60 years the US, European, and Russian aerospace industries spent the equivalent of many hundreds of millions of dollars to satisfy the military strategists’ dream of combining the best features of several different planes into one do-it-all aircraft. Gerard Keijper’s excellent book tells the story of how the US aerospace industry took many ideas, some good others improbable, over a quarter century of model and wind tunnel testing to create, after many iterations, a viable supersonic vertical take off fighter: the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. This single-seat, single-engine stealth multirole fighter can perform close air support, tactical bombing, and air defense missions and will be built in three versions: conventional takeoff and landing, a short take off and vertical-landing variant, and a carrier-based variant.

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Lotus Esprit, The Official Story
by Jeremy Walton

“Created and marketed against all the financial odds because of massive personal commitment from staff whose loyalty was frequently overstressed on less than generous pay, the Esprit had a particularly good human story to tell.”

The Lotus Esprit may have held a record among British sports cars for continuous production—28 years and almost 11,000 copies sold—but pick up an automotive encyclopedia today and you’ll find that this Lotus hardly warrants a footnote. And—except for a very few low-number, special models—don’t even look at a classic car price guide . . .

Originally intended to be named “Kiwi” (which would not only have been plain weird but also broken Lotus’ tradition of starting road car names with the letter “E”) the Esprit was among designer Giorgetto Giugiaro’s first experiments with polygonal “origami” designs—it looked sharp figuratively and literally. Its handling, too, was sharp but the power anemic and after only a few years a long, long string of improvements began that would lead to some 25 distinct models between 1976 and 2004.

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International Automotive Media Award: Best Book of 2009

Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed
by Michael Argetsinger

This biography consists of two books, this 344-page text version with only 40 photos and a second volume, Mark Donohue: His Life in Photographs consisting of several hundred photographs with relevant captions. Argetsinger has written a remarkable and fitting tribute to one of America’s greatest race drivers. That it has already won several awards including the prestigious International Automotive Media Award is no surprise; Argetsinger’s previous work, Walt Hansgen: His Life and the History of Post War American Road Racing was similarly praised and feted in 2006.

This is a significant book fully worthy of the IAMAs. In a full-time effort that required more than three years to complete, Argetsinger interviewed over 211 people close to the subject, and enjoyed not only access to all the family papers but those of the Penske organization as well. He also had access to the unpublished tapes made for Donohue’s own book The Unfair Advantage.

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Mark Donohue: His Life in Photographs
by Michael Argetsinger

This book is a companion volume to Argetsinger’s excellent bio Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed. Publisher David Bull clearly has his fingers on the pulse of what readers want—and are able to afford. His books are not cheap but there hasn’t yet been a case of a David Bull book not being good value for money. Still, Bull’s desire was to keep the price of the Excellence book to under $40 and, since it runs to a hefty 250,000 words, the only way to achieve it was to cut back the number of photos. So, for the reader able and willing to plunk down another $39.95 the 40 photos in that book can be augmented with this companion volume by the same author containing almost 250 photos!

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Race Car Vehicle Dynamics
by William F Milliken and Douglas L Milliken

and

Race Car Vehicle Dynamics: Problems, Answers and Experiments
by Douglas L Milliken, Edward M Kasprzak, L Daniel Metz, William F Milliken

When I received my copy of RCVD—still an SAE bestseller—I felt like the guy at the bottom of the mountain to whom Moses handed the Ten Commandments. All the knowledge contained in the Holy Grail of how vehicles handle had just become mine. I am unaware of any other book that brings together the world’s knowledge on vehicle behavior like this one does. On the macro level RCVD deals with general principles of vehicle dynamics but on the micro level was specifically geared towards racing; it synthesizes fundamental theory and practical application. Any race team that doesn’t have a copy of this well written book is not winning as much as they could!

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Alpine and Renault
The Development of the Revolutionary Turbo F1 Car 1968 to 1979
by Roy Smith

Roy Smith has made good use of his automotive and professional experience, putting both to work in order to get his hands around a very complex, difficult, and many-layered history. On one level, to write this book seems a simple enough task: one car, one era, one manufacturer, one formula. But in reality, Smith is faced with the convergence of three car manufacturers and one hungry-for-publicity oil company, and the story, which involves sports car racing, rallying, Formula 3 and sports prototypes, begins in the early 1950s. Smith gives us a brief history of Renault, mentioning that Louis Renault had patented a type of turbocharged engine already before World War One. Then, an even more in-depth look at the work of Jean Rédélé at Alpine shows how he made use of fiberglass and good designers (Michelotti) to create a true postwar French sports car based on the 4CV and built on this to eventually win the World Rally Championship in 1973. Alpine longed to be accepted by mother Renault; and eventually was.

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My Father the Car: Memoirs of My Life With Studebaker
by Stu Chapman

North Americans have always known about Daimler, or Daimler-Benzes after these two amalgamated in 1926. However, in spite of Max Hoffman’s best efforts, it wasn’t until the company, by then called Mercedes-Benz, made an arrangement with Studebaker that it really achieved more than just a toehold for its cars in the Canadian and American marketplace.

A select group of individuals had an early hint that this particular book was in its design and production phase, and only months away from reality when author Stu Chapman, exhibiting proper snowbird behavior, visited from his not-far-from-Toronto home the members of the John Ebstein Chapter of the Avanti Owners Association International in Florida. Now Chapman’s Studebaker book is a reality. And since his book is a memoir, it will help if you understand where Stu Chapman fits into the Studebaker story because this is precisely why this book is worthy of your time and attention.

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Men of Power
The Lives of Rolls-Royce Chief Test Pilots Harvey and Jim Heyworth
by Robert Jackson

Test pilot brothers are a rarity, the reviewer knowing only of two: Belper-born Harvey and Jim Heyworth. They both worked for the same company, at the same time, and both became chief test pilot. Harvey, the elder of the two became the third test pilot at Hucknall, where Rolls-Royce had its flight test establishment, in 1936 following service in the Royal Air Force. At the outbreak of war he returned to the service and became a squadron leader in command of a fighter squadron during the Battle of Britain. In the summer of 1941 he was seconded back to Hucknall.

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Grand Prix Showdown!
The Full Drama of Every Championship-Deciding Grand Prix Since 1950
by Christopher Hilton

A nail-biter! You do not have to be a petrol head or F1 groupie to become totally engrossed in this book! But you do have to have a sufficiently long attention span to follow the written word, not skip ahead, and take time to savor the drama the author so purposefully built into his story arc. A book like this is kind of the counterpoint to “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Here, it takes a thousand words—figuratively—to paint a picture but, unlike a picture, the author can control, by his carefully considered choice of words, the impact his pacing and tension have on the reader.

Motorsport historian Hilton has a long string of racing books to his credit and especially his best-selling biographies of Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, and Clay Regazzoni show his aptitude for combining the personal with the technical.

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A Technical & Operational
History of the Liberty Engine

Tanks, Ships and Aircraft 1917–1960
by Robert J. Neal

One of history’s most famous engines, and very possibly the one with the longest active military service life, the Liberty represents an ambitious and visionary solution to what could have become an intractable problem: in the early days of engine-building, be it automotive or aero, anyone who could wield a wrench or run a slide rule had a go—lots of creativity, and also lots of incompatibility. Engines, invariably, have war-related applications and early on planners in government and industry perceived the need for standardized designs, not just to curb manufacturing inefficiencies but also to facilitate field servicing. The theory behind the Liberty was to standardize aircraft engine design by offering one engine in several sizes (i.e. cylinders) to satisfy any foreseeable need. Scalable from four to twelve cylinders—plus an experimental 24-cylinder and one- and two-cylinder models for test purposes—and with many interchangeable parts the Liberty would find application on land, sea, and in the air and after its multi-decade military career soldiered on in civilian life until even today.

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The Daily Mirror World Cup Rally 40
The World’s Toughest Rally in Retrospect
by Graham Robson

Any time you need to carry oxygen with you, you know you’re in for a trying time. Then and now the 1970 World Cup Rally is thought to be the toughest-ever rally. Six weeks, 16,000 miles, three continents, 17 torturous stages, elevations of up to 16,000 feet. London to Mexico by way of South and Central America. At one point the organizers worried if there would be enough cars left to see the rally through—of 100 starters, 23 finished. That its place in history has not been eclipsed has more to do with geopolitical issues (c.f. the 1973/74 fuel crisis, border-crossing restrictions, safety and regulatory concerns, funding cutbacks) than a lack of sporting ambition. There were other marathon rallies in that era—London-Sahara-Munich or London-Sydney to name a few—but the sheer scope, the quality of the drivers and the cars, and the physical and logistical demands make the 1970 WCR a thing unto itself. And Robson was there, as a traveling controller, except for the two weeks the cars were crossing the South Atlantic by boat and he rushed home to attend to his “regular” job at Chrysler UK who were probably wondering if their new hire had his priorities straight.

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The Bahamas Speed Weeks
by Terry O’Neil


At six years in the making, this book took almost half as long to compile as the event itself lasted—13 years, starting in 1954. It is the first and to date only book to chronicle an event whose importance on the motorsports calendar is difficult to peg. It was a serious racing series inasmuch as it attracted all the big names of the day but people came to party just as much as they came to race, especially in the early years. Must be the weather. Or the umbrella drinks. Or the fact that the points didn’t count towards any championship series. Except for the US motoring press of the day—no wonder given the proximity to the US mainland—worldwide coverage was scant, probably because the press too couldn’t make up its mind how serious to take Speed Weeks. Consequently, record keeping was haphazard and what “official” records were kept had been largely destroyed over time.

O’Neil’s primary challenge, then, was to do some major house-keeping and gather the data from whatever sources could be found (mostly newspapers and magazines), weeding out discrepancies, and filling in some of the gaps through interviews with participants.

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Driving Forces
The Grand Prix Racing World Caught in the Maelstrom of the Third Reich
by Peter Stevenson

The pre–WWII German Grand Prix cars remain among the most fascinating of machines for vintage motorsports enthusiasts. There is a shelf full of books on GP racing in the 1934–1939 period, but such was the horror of the World War immediately following that most authors have chosen to concentrate on the machines and race results, treading very lightly on political events. This book takes a different tack and looks at the human side of the story and the tension between the technical engineers who just wanted to race and the social engineers of the Nazi regime who wanted to rule the world.

Stevenson’s book reads like a novel (and has all the makings of a good movie if only a script reader discovered it!), with lots of fictitious dialogue, thrilling the reader with the personal struggles of the two principals, Rudi (the Rain Master) Caracciola and Bernd Rosemeyer, as they and the rest of the racing world were swept along by events that brought fame and fortune, but extracted a terrible price in the end.

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Route 66: The Empires of Amusement
by Thomas Arthur Repp (Photographer)

Considering the avalanche of Route 66-related books on the market it is inevitable that there is some overlap in what the various books cover. Some are little more than blatant copycat rehashing of long-established, oft-repeated fluff and their main purpose in life seems to be to cash in on a certain wave of uncritical nostalgia.

It is reassuring to note that Repp’s book was received positively by the inner circle of established Route 66 writers such as Michael Wallis (Route 66: The Mother Road) or Jim Ross (Oklahoma’s Mother Road). Sort of like going to an ethnic restaurant and seeing “natives” there. Presumably they know what’s what and their presence legitimizes the joint.

Repp does cover a new facet, especially in terms of the photographic record, but it is rather on the fringes. His focus is on the carnival folk that set up shop along certain parts of Route 66. What the book doesn’t say, what none of the reviewers say, but what ought to be clarified nevertheless is that the circumstance that entertainers sought out Route 66 has more to do with necessity being the mother of invention than any intrinsic quality of Route 66.

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