The Bookworm Critique

As a journalist who works for a news-based motorsport magazine, it is hard to imagine how we'd have dealt with a racing season like 1955. We certainly would not have been short of things to write about. The mid-1950s were a period coloured with some amazing technical innovations as the world, and Europe in particular, rebuilt itself after the Second World War and resources that had previously needed to be directed elsewhere became available to racing once again.

The Formula One World Championship was five years old, and was run to a set of regulations that encouraged some thinking outside of the box. Not all of the ideas that found their way onto a Grand Prix car were effective, and some of them were downright dangerous, but there was a diversity from car to car - and frequently from race to race - that is far less apparent now. Merely keeping track of all of those would have filled a couple of pages of each issue of our magazine - and that's before you add Sports Cars, very much a significant part of the racing landscape back then, into the equation.

But not all of the news during the season was good. Spectators along the main straight at Le Mans during that year witnessed - or, perhaps, were a casualty of - the worst accident in motorsport history. The Indy 500 was also marred by a fatality, while in Formula One, a former World Champion was killed testing a Sports Car at Monza just days after sending his Grand Prix car into the harbour at Monaco. And these were by no means the only fatalities during that year.

I shudder to think of what the repercussions would be if we were faced with a season like that in the modern era. Looking back from an early 21st century perspective, it seems amazing that motorsport survived to see 1956. Even if you sidestep the more gruesome aspects of 1955, it was still a remarkable year. Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson averaging almost 100mph while winning the Mille Miglia would have filled a few pages, and given the recent hysterics over team orders it's interesting to ponder how we'd have viewed the British GP, where Juan Manuel Fangio may or may not have allowed Stirling Moss to take a win on home soil.

It scarcely needs to be said that 1955 offers some fertile ground for another visit from a distance of half a century, and Eoin Young has clearly not been stuck for material in this book.

Tony Brooks getting a last-minute call-up to race a Connaught in Syracuse, studying for his dental exams on the flight over, and going on to win the race. Jack Brabham arriving at Port Wakefield in South Australia to race a car that he built in the corner of the Coopers garage at Surbiton. A playboy club racer being shot dead outside a club by his girlfriend (who subsequently became the last women hanged in Britain). Ferrari trialling a twin-cylinder Grand Prix engine. When you have news stories like that, who needs crap like 'Jenson: I can win in Japan?'

Young takes the reader on a fairly light, nostalgic trip back to the motor racing world of 50 years ago. This is not a historic racing book in the scholarly, Nye/Nixon kind of style, but feels more like an easygoing afternoon chat over some nice vintage port. (Or maybe brandy would be more appropriate to the era?) None of the chapters go into any serious depth, but Young still manages to get enough of the message across to give the reader a good general idea of what it was all about.

The brevity of the chapters does not necessarily preclude the odd revelation here and there, though. The chapter on the Le Mans accident offered an angle on Levegh's attempt to win the 24 Hour race solo a couple of years prior to his fatal accident that I hadn't come across previously. And this passage added a new slant to my understanding of Stirling Moss, whom I had previously imagined to be one of racing's more practical drivers. It was always reckoned that Moss modelled himself on Farina's imperious straight-arm style behind the wheel, but Stirling discounted this in 'All My Life' written in 1963 with ken Purdy.

"I copied Farina's posture, his attitude at the wheel and you'll hear it said that I did this because I knew the straight-arm was efficient. Nonsense. I didn't know anything of that kind. I took it over because I liked the way it looked. One looked better driving that way. I didn't like it at all. It felt strange, awkward. But I kept on until in the end I got to the stage where I honestly did like it ..." (p.199-200).

There are one or two small errors that have slipped past the proofreaders - the Melbourne Olympics were in 1956, not 1955 - but generally Young does not offer a lot of cause for complaint. Compared with a lot of racing history books this one is pretty light reading, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. If anything, making history more accessible might encourage a few more contemporary racing fans to take a few more looks in the rear-view mirror. And in my case, it is a timely reminder that I should take the time to try and track down a copy of Peter Ustinov's Grand Prix of Gibraltar.

It's not often that you get public service announcements from this corner of the autosport.com towers, but if those of you in Melbourne, Australia should sit up and listen. Many of you will know that the Technical Bookshop in Swanston Street is far and away the best place in the entire city to get racing books. Many of you will also know that they are shortly moving to a new premises.

Well, the current shop is only open for another week or so, and they are getting rid of some extremely good (and usually expensive) motorsport books at pretty ridiculous prices. Smash open the piggy bank, and go and grab some bargains to read.