The Stylish Life Grand Prix
Texts by Elizabeth Smith
“What follows in these pages is the essence of Grand Prix—glamorous destinations and novel experiences, larger-than-life characters, adrenaline-fueled fashion, and audacious innovations. It’s wheel-to-wheel Grand Prix style—a dynamic, high-octane formula that encapsulates the fastest, most exciting, and most glamorous sport in the world.”
That quote, that cover photo (French singer Françoise Hardy), that book title . . . what do you think this book will be about?
What are they doing? Discussing the movie “Grand Prix”! And “they” are director John Frankenheimer (l) and driver Jack Brabham. Who needs storyboards when you can use toy cars.
There’s no easy answer—because this is not the type of book to which this type of question can be usefully applied.
That comment may well annoy the book’s author, designer or publisher—to be clear, nothing about this book looks unintended or random—but any one of them could have taken the obvious step of doing the reader the favor of explaining themselves. Consider the following two photos. They are in the same chapter, mere pages apart but conceptually worlds apart, so what does the author want to tell us here?
If you know your stuff you’ll recognize the race cars, yes? Clue: on the hood of the no. 14 car is a partially visible stencil: “Thin W__”. Open, the book is 18″ wide, large enough to reveal such detail, if you take the time to look for it.
No specialist nerd knowledge required to come up with a backstory to this shot. We’re in Monaco, if that helps to appreciate the photographer’s wit. And, come on!, this is not a composition that just falls into your lap.
The book does have an Introduction, by Elizabeth Smith to whom the text is credited, but she too offers nothing that would manage expectations, nor does the book say anything about her. Somewhere in the press material the word “curated selection” pops up which may put people in mind of an influential American museum curator and art historian of that name, but this is not her (she has the initials A.T. in her name).
Sherlocking the matter we find that the E. Smith of this book is a ghostwriter, editorial strategist, and project manager which is on the one hand entirely relevant to bookmaking (speaking of a different kind of bookmaking, she’s a boxing enthusiast too!) but on the other hand has a whiff of generalism in regards to motorsports, and that, in turn, will make our kind of reader, ahem, skeptical. So let’s say this: the texts, and even more so the photos, swing quite a bit, from the hyper-specific deeply historical that may well stump even old hands to unavoidable surface-only commentary. Unavoidable because the book consists largely of photos, also unavoidable because this book is the now fifth in a “The Stylish Life” series (golf, tennis, skiing, cocktail parties) so has to have a compatible flavor/scope/level of magnification.
The book is divided into four chapters—Destinations & Events; People; Fashion; Art, Design & Culture—each containing several entries a few sentences or paragraphs long. That there is not much to say about them does not imply any sort of flaw but merely that brevity is self-limiting.
Doesn’t the guy on the right look like . . . Tom Cruise Mapother IV? The scene is given as “Pocono, circa 1988” so this is not a movie set because “Days of Thunder” wouldn’t come out for another two years. He is described as a “racing enthusiast” here, which he kinda was, driving for the Newman-Sharp team. Fun fact: if it really is Pocono 1988, Cruise put his car into the wall during the Sports Car Grand Prix. Adding insult to injury: if you know your motorsports you know what SCCA stands for, but did you know some wags read that as “See Cruise Crash Again”?
The choice of photos is really quite surprising; many are way off the beaten path and thus either bespeak impressive insight into the subject matter on the part of the photo editor or implausible luck of the draw. (All photo credits are corralled onto the last page of the book, never pleasant to work with.) All images are captioned, and in their phrasing the above question often arises as well: what type of reader is this book aiming for, novice or expert? Example: in many cases people are identified by name, but in group shots you’re not told who’s who, meaning the assumption must be that the newbie won’t care and the expert doesn’t need to be told.
An entirely un-obvious shot to put into this sort of book. The caption tells us that Trintignant, Behra, and Rosier are in this 1954 photo, en route to Argentina. Big names. But which of the seven men are they?
The caption for the left page tells us we’re looking at “a spirited debate between drivers Phil Hill and Dan Gurney.” How likely do you think it is that the girth of the fella on the left fits behind a race car steering wheel? Good thing he’s not Phil Hill. (There are very few obvious snafus in this book; color us impressed.)
It is in the nature of the type of book we consider for a SpeedReaders review that a book is akin to a tool, it has a specific job to do, and it does it either well or not and in that sense it can be meaningfully analyzed using shared and ideally obejctive parameters. An observation worth making is that the text and the photos have no specific, organic, interdependent connection. Each is on a trajectory of its own. Again, not a flaw, especially considering that one and the same person wore both the Editorial Coordinator and the Photo Researcher hat so this is not a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. If you haven’t already skipped ahead and checked who the publisher might be, it is German art house teNeues. They specialize in just this sort of book, always a little unorthodox, always imaginative, always executed with high production values.
One thing that can be said without ambiguity, and in a wholly positive way, is that readers with bibliophile and photojournalism leanings will find lots to engage with. Do spend some time on the photos we chose here, and if you count yourself an expert, be honest about what detail you do and don’t recognize. We predict there will be some long pauses!
The book is so current it even includes a still from the yet to be released racing movie “F1”.
Copyright 2025, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info)
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