Speed Reader

"How to be a complete champion driver," mused one of my colleagues when this book appeared in the office last week. "By someone who wasn't."

It's a tricky call - on one hand, there are any number of drivers who'd be happy to end their career with a CV that included F1, the Indy 500 and Le Mans. But the flip side is that Daly is one of racing's poster boys for unfulfilled potential; one of those guys whose final scorecard did not reflect his natural talent.

This is something that Daly admits very early in the book, and the length and candour with which he dissects his relative lack of results suggests that it is something that he has thought about a lot in the intervening years.

When you finish a career not necessarily having achieved what you set out to do it's natural to ask yourself whether there was something you could have done differently. Daly seems to have decided that in his case there were a number of things, and that it's fair to say that this book was at least in part borne out of the desire to help others avoid the same mistakes.

So, can you read your way to success? Well, I don't know whether I am any faster than I was a week ago (I'm starting from a pretty low baseline), but Daly does provide a lot of food for thought for younger drivers on the rise.

Central to his idea is the concept of what he calls the 'Champions' Pyramid', which is built from the six main ingredients that he feels are vital for success. The traits themselves are not particularly revelatory - no-one will be surprised to learn that a potential champion needs desire and commitment, physical skills, mental skills, communication skills, technical skills and talent identification (by which he means whether a driver is technical or intuitive).

It's what he says about each one that is interesting. In the context of a book like this Daly's greatest asset is his experience, and he is not afraid to draw upon it, sometimes with intriguing results even for those of us who were in the bar when racing talent was being handed out.

His take on being an effective test driver is one example. Daly writes at length about the difficulty that some drivers have - himself included - in disregarding the stopwatch when doing long testing runs, writing that:

"I had to literally talk to myself during test sessions to make sure that I focused on testing a set-up rather than turning a faster lap."

Those whose hackles are raised by psychobabble might struggle to come to terms with the heavy psychological influence on a lot of Daly's ideas, particularly when it comes to compartmentalising personalities, but if that sort of thing is not to your taste then it is easy enough to wade through it and get to the anecdotal stuff.

His sources are also pretty good, ranging from leading figures in various paddocks around the world to journalists including Autosport's Mark Hughes and Autosport.com's very own Jonny Noble.

But as always there are a few criticisms, one particular sticking point being a plague of repetitions. And they're not of the 'I'm going to say this again to drum it into you' type; more the 'If I reread the manuscript I'd have realised that I wrote this in the last paragraph' genre.

Then there is the occasional section that simply doesn't make sense - at one point we learn about Rubens Barrichello trying to learn to change from right-footed braking to left-footed braking, and then a couple of lines later are told about the Brazilian switching back to his "natural left foot". So which is it?

And as a 27-year-old, I'm not sure that Scott Dixon qualifies as a "very young driver who has achieved significant success".

Also, the writing has an annoying tendency to switch tenses, frequently mid-sentence and often at the expense of accuracy - it's a bit late now for us to observe Ralf Schumacher's team leadership skills at Toyota "over the coming seasons".

Actually, the topic of Ralf's standing as a 'team player' is an interesting one. Daly uses him as an example of someone who did not pull the people in the garage around him, based on a feature by Autosport.com regular Adam Cooper and "tales that have emerged from the Williams team over the years".

Coincidentally, Ralf came up in a conversation I had with a Toyota team member at Barcelona two weeks ago, and they noted that while there had been a change in general team morale since this time last season, Ralf had actually been quite popular with the guys who worked on his car.

Whether that suggests that he mellowed as his F1 career reached its final years or saved his best for the people that he worked the closest with is not for me to say, but it was an interesting observation in light of Daly's thoughts - although whatever the case, it does not change Daly's fundamental message that it is invariably advantageous for a driver to have a good rapport with those who are fighting in his corner.

So, to buy or not to buy? The bottom line is whether this book is actually going to make a difference to a young driver trying to negotiate the gauntlet of important decisions that have to be made in the formative stages of their career.

I guess the best answer is that many drivers have spent far more money than the £16.99 cover price of this book on 'sure-fire' methods of going faster, so as gambles go, this is about as low-risk as it gets. And if it doesn't help you move a few places up the grid, then at the very least it's not a bad read.