Speed Reader

One of the many strange things about F1 is that despite being the most exclusive sport in the world - at any given time, there are a scant 22 participants; just enough for one football match - there are so many other people who think they could do it.

I don't mean other racing drivers - no doubt there are quite a few out there who could perform competently, even competitively, in a Formula One car if given the chance. Some will get the opportunity to prove themselves, quite a few more will not.

The people I mean are the ones who corner you in pubs, or at parties. It might be one of the 'back in my day' types, who believes that all the good racing ended 30 years ago and that the modern drivers, with all their downforce and electronic aids, are not doing anything much different to a kid playing on a games console.

Or it could be one of those guys who fail to see it as a sport at all - the ones with 'I drive to work every day and no one is paying me millions' syndrome. (I actually heard a sports presenter say that on the radio during the week of the Australian Grand Prix once).

They're right, to the extent that if they were put into an F1 car, some of them could probably wobble it around a circuit in some sort of fashion - provided that they could get it moving.

But would they be quick? Or consistent? Or capable of running at the car's limit for two hours? Capable of getting anywhere near the car's limit at all, for that matter? Even for one corner? And that's without taking actually racing the thing into account.

I can kick a soccer ball - I hit it with my foot, and it moves (usually not in the direction I'd expected). But there's a difference between doing that, and slamming one past Peter Cech.

Anyhow, the point (yes, there is a point) is that racing drivers are just... different. F1 drivers doubly so. And experienced journalist/PR man Norman Howell has made it his mission to find out why.

This is not the first book to attempt an understanding of the qualities that set F1 drivers apart from everyone else. Two books with a similar premise have been reviewed here in the past few years (I won't say what they were, because neither of them were looked upon favourably), and there are a couple of other related titles dating back to the 1960s.

But while Howell may not be blazing any trails in terms of subject matter, he has certainly done a better job than some of his counterparts. This was one of the most enjoyable reads to have landed on my desk in ages, and it owes much of that to the quality of the interview material.

Howell says early on that he was selective in his choice of people to draw upon for insight, and he has chosen well. On the driver front, there is particularly good stuff from Mark Webber and Andy Priaulx. Both have a natural fascination with the hows and whys of the drivers' art, and both are capable of speaking eloquently about it.

As with the entire book, Howell is happy to run the driver's thoughts uninterrupted over the space of several paragraphs, and the end results are all the more absorbing for it.

Elsewhere, there is great input from the likes of James Allen, Jackie Stewart and the ever-quotable Jo Ramirez.

Surprisingly, another star of the book is Max Mosley, who comes to the fore with some wonderful anecdotes about the likes of Jochen Rindt. Having been one of the sport's dominant wielders of power for so many years, Mosley has gradually become the face of motorsport politics; almost completely divorced from the matters of driving - in the public eye, at least.

No doubt a lot of the people in the grandstands are unaware of Mosley's past as a driver and team owner himself, and after a year where the sport was dominated by courts and suits, it was nice to see the FIA president's 'inner racer' come out. And he has some interesting things to say, particularly on the subject of fear.

One area where many similar books have fallen flat is in their failure to appreciate the full spectrum of the drivers' world, and this is another area that Howell serves well.

In addition to the fundamentals like fear, and the capacity to develop and maintain self-belief when there is every rational reason in the world to feel doubt, Howell has broadened the scope to include such issues as the physical demands (with some help from FIA medical delegate Gary Hartstein), and the question of pay drivers.

As always, there were a couple of little things that bugged me, but I'm only going to mention one - Howell's insistence on referring to Priaulx as a three-time world champion.

Sitting here right now that's entirely correct, Priaulx having claimed his third-straight WTCC crown last year. But at the time the book was written, he had only won it twice - Howell was counting his ETCC win as well, earned the year before the metamorphosis from a European championship into a world one.

I appreciate his justification that some of the rounds in 2004 were outside Europe, and that the cars and rules remained the same. But using that argument, you could also say that Fangio won six world championships because he won seven F1 Grands Prix in 1949, the year before the championship was inaugurated. At best it is confusing, at worst it's rewriting history.

But we're quibbling over details here, because otherwise, this was a really enjoyable and thought-provoking book. Don't go on a long plane flight without it.