Speed Reader

Best Damn Garage in Town:
My Life and Adventures.
By Smokey Yunick; Published by Carbon Press.

Considering his achievements, the name 'Smokey Yunick' is not as well known in Europe as it should be, which is a shame considering what he achieved during his long career.

He fell into racing after the Second World War, just as Stock Car racing was beginning on the path that would lead to what we now know as modern NASCAR. Despite being essentially a self-taught high-school drop-out, Yunick eventually became known as one of the greatest engineering minds ever seen in American racing.

His initial speciality was engines, although he became heavily involved in design and was also one of the first to recognise the importance of the black art of aerodynamics. ("I don't know why, but I really dug aerodynamics," he wrote in this book. "Even if it took me 10 or 15 years to be able to spell it; [it] usually came out aero-dynomouse")

Indeed, Yunick was one of the first to stick a wing on an open-wheeler when he mounted a huge device on Rathman's Simoniz Vista Special Watson Roadster in 1962. The car set new benchmarks for cornering speeds at Indy, but the drag down the straights was so bad that the overall lap time was actually slower.

He was one of the leading car entrants of the early NASCAR era, and enjoyed tremendous success (including becoming the first car owner to win the Daytona 500 twice) before a falling out with the organisation prompted him to move to Indy Cars, where he ran the Jim Rathman's 1960 Indy 500-winning entry.

But Yunick's reputation for mechanical brilliance is matched only by his reputation for cunning. Put less politely, he is still known to this day for having been one of the most ingenious cheats in the history of the sport, although Yunick defended himself in his book by pointing out that he never actually broke any rules - he simply looked for things that the rules had failed to define.

"As a result of my reading of the rules, I think that by 1970, one half of the technical rule section of a NASCAR rule book was dedicated to me," he wrote. "Quite an honour, actually."

His most famous escapade was in 1968, when he built a 1967 Chevelle that was light years quicker than anyone else's, but with no obvious reason why. Inspections of the car's aerodynamics failed to reveal anything untoward, and it was only later that anyone twigged that Yunick had built a perfect 7/8th scale replica of the regular car. That NASCAR's technical inspectors still utilise body templates to this day remains one of Yunick's many legacies.

Yunick completed his autobiography not long before his death in 2001, and it is, frankly, brilliant. Stylistically, it is everything that I usually hate in a book - it's full of spelling mistakes, he interrupts himself constantly, and occasionally we are treated to the same story twice.

(In fairness, the book was originally released in three volumes whereas the currently-available paperback is just one, so that could explain the backtracking to some extent).

But in light of everything else Yunick brings to the table, the flaws are easy to overlook. If anything, they often add something extra to the whole experience. The lack of polish gives the book its tremendous character, and that is not something you find in many racing autobiographies these days.

And the sheer scope of the book is incredible. On the cover, Yunick describes himself as a 'Racer, Patriot. Mechanic, Inventor, Cassanova', and he recounts every aspect of his life with equally lurid glee - on one page he might be indulging in a graphic low-down on sneaking off with the nurses in WW2, on another you're getting the untold history of tyre development in NASCAR. It's opinionated, it's unapologetic, and it's frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

If you're not a NASCAR/Indy fan, there was still enough crossover in Yunick's career to spark some interest. Some of it comes very much from left field - prior to reading this, I had no idea that Yunick had any involvement in the distastrous Delorean project.

'Best Damn Garage in Town' is a hefty tome - it weighs in at well over 600 oversized pages, and if it were a more conventional size, it would probably run close to 1000 - so there is enough to keep you busy for weeks. It's almost lethally straight-shooting, and nigh-on impossible to put down.

Even those with a reputation for being outspoken tend to bow to politics or pride when the time comes to put their life to paper (if you've ever read Eddie Jordan's autobiography, you'll know what I mean). But Yunick cheerfully sidesteps both, and the end result is one of the most enlightening and entertaining racing books available anywhere.

"If you don't like the way it unfolds, close the lid and call [wife] Margie and ask for your money back," he writes in the introduction. "I doubt she'll refund it though. I have no intention of changing any of it to keep from pissing off major or minor players. The things we did, said or tried to do can't be changed. That's the way it was."

If only more books were like that.