The Bookworm Critique

When people dream of working in Formula One, they are generally fantasising about having one of two particular hardcards hanging around their neck.

The first, obviously, is that of one of the drivers, and I am willing to bet a 12-bottle case of first-growth Bordeaux that everybody who cares enough about racing to read this book review has, at least once, imagined themselves going flat through Eau Rouge. Everybody who likes motorsport wishes that they could do it, which is why the guys at Playstation and Xbox do so well out of racing games.

The other person that a lot of us would like to be is Jo Ramirez, even if we may not necessarily realise it. Sure, you might think that you want to be a journalist or something, but there is a marked difference between a job like that and being a genuine part of the machine.

Don't get me wrong, writing about motorsport for a living is a great thing, and after more than five years of doing it there has still not been a day where I have woken up and not wanted to go to work (mornings that have followed excessively festive evenings notwithstanding). But you are still on the periphery.

Sure, you can get into the paddock, and into garages, and over time you develop relationships that occasionally defy all the odds and mutate into genuine trust and friendship. But at the end of the day, journalists have very little influence on the actual sport. Nothing a media person does will make the car or driver go faster. And almost never does a journalist get the opportunity to really taste what it must feel like to win a race, or a championship - or, conversely, just how gut-wrenching it can be when things go wrong.

Someone like Ramirez, on the other hand, was about as involved in the maelstrom as a person can be without actually owning the team or driving the car. He was very much an F1 'lifer', spending close to 40 years at the Grand Prix coalface with teams such as AAR, Tyrrell, Copersucar and McLaren. As such, his is a superb choice for a life to live vicariously through a book - which is why it's such a good thing that he has penned his memoirs.

Ramirez will be well known to anyone who has been into Formula One for more than four or five years and particularly to those who were regular visitors to atlasf1.com in 2002, where the then recently-retired Ramirez began writing the column that eventually prompted him to bite the bullet and produce a book.

Even in this day and age it would be a pretty brave step for a kid from Mexico to pack his bags and move to Europe in the vague hope of landing a job in Formula One, but in the early 1960s it was just about off the scale. Ramirez, however, had the good fortune to be on the rise at the same time as a pair of gifted compatriots, Ricardo and Pedro Rodriguez.

His association with them gave him a basic calling card upon which to get himself started, but it still took a unique combination of luck, persistence, and sweat to create a place for himself in a world that would become his home for the remainder of his working life.

Ramirez's long tenure in the sport means that his story is also effectively a history of the world championship over the past 40 years, as told by someone who helped to make it happen. Everything about the book - the easy, conversational style, the humour, the fact that he appears to be smiling in just about every photo (even the candid ones) - suggests that Ramirez is a warm guy who is easy to get along with, and this quality puts a different slant on the well-worn tale of F1 since the 1960s.

Where so many accounts are told from a distance and rely on days and dates interspersed with the memories of others, Ramirez offers an amiable yet often opinionated first-hand look at the same story, with the result that even well-known events have new life breathed into them.

This was a guy who was on the scene during the years when Prost and Senna were teammates at McLaren - surely the most searing intra-team rivalry in the history of the sport. He was there when Mika Hakkinen took McLaren back to the top of the tree in 1998 and 1999.

He was up to his armpits in grease (and, sometimes, politics) when the likes of Dan Gurney and Emmerson Fittipaldi were running their own teams, with wildly varying results. He faced the awful responsibility of helping to pull the Tyrrell team back together after the death of Jackie Stewart's heir-apparent, Francois Cevert. Ramirez would, in short, be the ultimate dinner guest.

He is not shy in sharing anecdotes, which is blessing to his readers. For example, it would be a crime for the newer generation to have been denied the chance to learn about an era when Bob Dance of Team Lotus decided to take the matter of the rather rustic toilets at Interlagos into his own hands by blowing them up (using, as Ramirez so delightfully puts it, a "series of mass destruction acetylene bombs which today Tony Blair would have been proud to find.").

It would be an equally great loss not to be reminded that only 20 years ago, Formula One was such that a team boss like the infamously autocratic Guenter Schmidt of ATS could settle an argument over which wing the team should use by jumping up and down on the one that he didn't like.

And without Ramirez we would never have known that somewhere, someone has pictures of Ron Dennis on stage at an Adelaide strip club back in the days before the Australian Grand Prix migrated east to Melbourne. For all his jocularity, Ramirez has no compunction about calling things as he sees them. His views about the likes of Senna, Prost and Lauda provide some of the richest material in the book, and I do not want to spoil any of it by reproducing it here.

But perhaps some of the most revealing passages concern Ron Dennis, who seems to have been a source of considerable disappointment to Ramirez during the latter period of his career. One F1 insider recently suggested to me that Ramirez's feelings about his former boss were actually toned down somewhat for publication, but even if this is correct, there is still little room for doubt about his feelings.

It cannot have been easy for Ramirez to talk so publicly about an employer under which he worked for so long, but the end result displays a rarely seen example of candour and honesty. How many other F1 personnel have you seen admit to being asked to spy on rival teams?

Racing biographies are a dime a dozen these days, but I desperately hope that this one gets the recognition that it deserves. Where so many other books represent little more than a cynical attempt to capitalise on a famous name, this one comes from somebody who genuinely has a tale to tell. Better yet, it is wonderfully told.

My only concern for this book is that it might struggle to stand out to Joe Punter when they are surveying the sports book shelf in their local retailer and seeing a heaving mass of tomes from big-name footballers and whatever else.

If it doesn't, then that will be a great shame, because the number of racing books that have found their way to this reviewer's basement office in autosport.com Towers is closing in on 150, and this sits comfortably among the best of them. To all of you old Atlas F1 readers who emailed Jo back in 2002 asking for him to write a book: he's kept his end of the bargain; now it's up to you.

Oh, and I will prepare a turducken for anyone who can produce copies of those Ron Dennis photos...