Speed Reader

Now here's something that I didn't know: Giancarlo Minardi once chased Ron Dennis with a hammer. Simon Vigar's account of what used to be everyone's second-favourite F1 team (well, everyone except Dennis, perhaps) is just 10 pages old, and he's already managed to trigger one of the year's most bizarre visuals.

"I was running Miguel Angel Guerra at Mugello [ED: in Formula 2, late 1970s]," Minardi said. "He ran an extra lap after the chequered flag, although he was shown the sign with an arrow to return to the pit.

"He made a mistake. When Dennis arrived, he offended me, he said 'the same old Italians,' he even added Italian spaghetti. I didn't speak English then and there had been some conflicts between us in the Formula 2 commission meetings ... I got really upset under those circumstances, I ran after him with a hammer and they stopped me."

The question of how F1 history could have different if Minardi had managed to follow through on his moment of red mist is one that can be saved for a long night in a bar over several drinks. But the notion that 'things could have been different ...' is one that permeates Minardi's history from beginning to end.

Racing lore is full of stories about triumphing against the odds, the flip side to which is a team achieving some degree of success despite itself. Minardi managed to give the impression of doing both, often simultaneously.

It's this kind of roller coaster that might explains the team's popularity. It's often said that everyone loves an underdog, but I'm not convinced that this explains how Minardi managed to achieve minor cult status. If simply being a few seconds slower than a Ferrari was all there was to it, then there have been plenty of other teams that fitted the bill.

Whatever the case, there's no argument that there was something peculiarly endearing about the team. A visit to the Faenza factory in 2004 was eye-opening, if only because it was hard to believe that such a small group of people were able to produce a car capable of running within three or four seconds of the pace-setters while operating in what looked like a tile factory.

Anyway, on to the book. Vigar is a long-time Minardi fan, and a prominent broadcast journalist. As far as I can tell (having done quick search on Google) this is his second book; his first having been a collection of stories about idiotic criminals. He's nothing if not versatile.

'Forza Minardi' has the stamp of an enthusiast all over it, but if it occasionally lacks finesse, Vigar goes a long way toward salvaging with passion. Much like Minardi itself, in fact.

To his credit, Vigar does not allow his fervour to cloud his judgement, and he's unafraid to take issue with any of the main players in the story when appropriate. He gets tested on this quite early when Minardi, having shared his tale of attempting to reconfigure Dennis with a handyman's tool, goes on to criticise his rival's track record:

"He's had more luck than ability," Minardi is quoted as saying. "It's shocking to see what he's been incapable of doing with the budget he's had."

Vigar considers this "a little difficult to swallow", and points to similar comments made by Ken Tyrrell about Ferrari over the years, pointing out that "one can see the battle lines".

The book is more or less structured season-by-season although the chapters are quite short, rarely breaking the four or five page mark - which, when you consider that this is a coffee table-format and that a large amount of each page's acreage is devoted to photographs, doesn't add up to a huge amount of words.

Not surprisingly, there are several occasions where a little more detail would have been nice. On the other hand, given the choice between an author who has been a touch over-economical with his words, and one who decides that the key to filling pages is to go through each race one-by-one in anaesthetical detail, I'll go for brevity every time.

Besides, keeping things snappy helps the book to maintain a good pace, something that is further boosted by Vigar's interview material. An impressive cast of key players from Minardi's history share their anecdotes, ranging from central figures such as Minardi himself and Paul Stoddart, through to ex-drivers from all eras of the team's past.

The interviews provide some of the book's best moments, ranging from Christian Fittipaldi's reflections on his strange crash with team-mate Pierluigi Martini at the end of the Italian GP in 1993. Both cars managed to finish, although in Fittipaldi's case it came after being flung into the air, landing on his remaining three wheels, and sliding across the line for eighth.

Under today's system it would be the coolest world championship point ever earned, but to this day, Fittipaldi wonders whether Martini backed off:

"I dunno. I was so happy that I was alive that even if he backed off, I don't give a shit ... I don't have nothing against the guy. Would I go out for a meal with him? No, I wouldn't. I don't hate him but I don't like him."

Elsewhere, Vigar uses his interviews to good effect to play out complicated political stand-offs (a hallmark of the Stoddart era), such as the stand-off between Stoddart and the FIA's Max Mosley that almost led to the cancellation of the 2005 Australian Grand Prix. Between the recollections of Stoddart and AGP Chairman Ron Walker, Vigar manages to build a clear reproduction of a messy 24 hours in the sport's history.

The text is supported by a nice selection of images, ranging from action shots through to one of a couple of blokes from would-be sponsors Gazprom looking for all the world like a pair of bouncers standing outside an outer-suburban strip club. The only thing that lets it down is some of the bizarrely heavy-handed design work, which makes many images look like someone accidentally activated all of the filters in Photoshop at once and didn't know how to turn them off.

On the whole this a short read, but a sweet one. There are not many teams that deserve so much attention for achieving so little, but as it proved so many times in so many ways during its tenure in the sport, Minardi is the exception.