Against All the Others: Porsche’s Racing History, Volume 1 – 1968
by Randy Leffingwell
“Even a cursory reading of motorsport history confirms that a car’s potential is not determined by engine size and output alone. Among the many other calculable factors are the car’s weight, how efficiently it punches a hole through the air, how well the tires are handling that weight . . . and so on. Less certain is the human factor, in driver choice and pairings, skills in the pits, and the intangibles brought to the proceedings by a savvy team boss.
Still, comparing the numbers is a clear illustration of the disparity Porsche endured with its endurance racers.”
In a nutshell, that’s Racing 101, and it serves as a handy précis for all the factors this book will shine a light on.
The excerpt above is lifted from a sidebar that answers an obvious question raised by the book title: who are all those “others”? Before you even take a breath to moan about “yet another Porsche book” clamoring for your attention, realize that this one is not so much about race cars, which are indeed well-covered in the literature, but races/events, which, in their totality—from regional to international—have not been covered fully or with a consistent methodology. And that approach will require multiple volumes (14?) to be published over several years!
Big book (11 x 12″) = big photos. The reproduction and printing are excellent, the typography is intelligently chosen and works consistently (font size, caption styles, different levels of heads etc.). For the bookmaker there is much to praise here. If there is an odd choice it is that the cover boards are white, which won’t stay that way for people who take the dust jacket off.
If you’re warming to this project, further consider:
-Leffingwell
-432 pages
-$99
That price-to-page ratio is just about as consumer friendly as one could imagine, and for a high-end David Bull production no less. As seasoned an author as Leffingwell obviously needs no introduction—and one can only wish him good health to not tire of the burden of doing the Sisyphus work such a mammoth book project requires. He’s already been at it a decade; readers familiar with the David Bull story of recent years will of course be mindful of the effect the company founder’s death in 2021, when this book was half-way done, had on pending projects.
Most events will have custom maps by motorsports journalist Peter Higham. Coverage may be as brief as a paragraph or many pages long.
Just to quickly delineate the scope: this first volume doesn’t begin at the beginning of the Porsche motorsports story but about mid-way through, because this will be a relatable point of entry for the non-specialist reader who will recognize names and events that still have currency today. Also, and in more strictly historical terms, the successes of 1968, and the years it builds on, took Porsche to a whole new level (think 917). Subsequent volumes will then expand the scope another 30 years, to 1999, and one will take a look back to 1875 (the first race proper being 1899). Plan your shelf space accordingly.
You can gauge the level of magnification by studying the Index—20 densely populated pages of intelligently sliced and diced entries. It is so useful that you’ll probably wish it was a removable insert so you didn’t have to wrangle this oversize 7 lb behemoth so much. The 35-page Bibliography (divided into interviews, books [even non-racing ones], articles) is no less impressive, daunting in fact because it represents many thousands of dollars worth of source material that would take years to read. There are endnotes as well.
An example of an entry (left page) seemingly unrelated, entitled “France at Peace.” It has to do with cobblestones . . . which have to do with driving . . .
If you question if this book really fills a gap, consider that none other than Porsche Archive’s former chief Dieter Landenberger and photo manager Jens Torner are the ones who nudged Leffingwell to write it because they already had a solid relationship from earlier projects and because he would bring an international perspective to the task. You can safely assume that he must have hit the mark because this book now bears the Edition Porsche Museum imprint. And thanks to the “special relationship” it is also a given that Torner, who intimately knows the hundreds of thousands of images and artifacts in his custody, would have steered Leffingwell to choice illustrative material—drawings, diagrams, notes, documents—that have not been widely seen before.
All the books in the series will follow a common approach: a recap of the previous year; a season preview; commentary in chronological order, in two parts (Jan–Jun/Jul–Dec) on “the racing year” which doesn’t just mean events but any other matters of relevance (people, tech, testing, news of the day etc.); and a season review, possibly augmented by a mid-year review if the material calls for it.
Something that sets Leffingwell’s approach apart is that he captures the dynamics of the story by juxtaposing the stream of ongoing innovation by teams, drivers, and organizers with Porsche’s response to that. The book sometimes has an almost diary, real-time feel to it, further enlivened by hundreds of quotes, that realistically reflects the trial-and-error if not chaotic aspect of motorsport development. This is the beauty of a book that doesn’t have to economize space but, in the hands of a writer who is a master of his craft, can develop detail and nuance as well as a particular, immersive tone.
If the whole series is pegged to run 5000 pages, and this one book is almost 500 . . . the head it is a-spinning.
Since starting in 1995, David Bull Publishing had the goal of producing the highest-quality motorsports books; their very first one won an award, and many others since then have as well. Their “understated elegance” and “unmistakable quality” Leffingwell praises at one point is evident here in spades, not least the staggeringly good proofreading.
Copyright 2024, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info)
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