The Bookworm Critique

Try as you might, it really is quite difficult to imagine Jenson Button, his racing career curtailed by war, parachuting into hostile territory as a secret agent, hooking up with Fernando Alonso, and the pair of them embarking upon a career in special operations.

Thus the story of the WWII activities of Willy Grover, winner of the first Monaco Grand Prix under the pseudonym 'W Williams' (one of numerous aliases he worked under), and Robert Benoist, a former GP and Le Mans winner, seems fanciful enough to have offered the plot line to an entire series of 1950s comic books.

Yet it all happened.

In this book, veteran F1 journalist Joe Saward has shone the spotlight on to an element of motorsport history that has been vastly under-represented up to this point. And in doing so, the lives of some incredibly brave and resilient people have been brought back to the surface after more than half a century spent sleeping in obscurity.

Here, in a nutshell, is how things played out with Grover and Benoist. Retiring from motorsport to a life of quiet comfort in France, Grover joined the British Army as a soldier and soon found himself recruited by Special Operations and trained as a secret agent. Parachuting into occupied France with instructions to set up a resistance network, he hooked up with former on-track rival Benoist and the pair went on to create a formidable group of spies and saboteurs.

Nothing is simple in situations like that, and Saward has done a great job of reconstructing what at times became an extremely intricate and frequently shifting arrangement of events, plans and relationships.

That said, he is probably better equipped than anyone else on the planet to do it because, in addition to his experience in F1 press rooms, Saward focused on espionage while studying modern history at the University of London. This story offers what is, in all likelihood, a unique opportunity to tie those two worlds together.

He had his work cut out, though. There was by no means a complete paper trail waiting to be followed, and much of what was available was classified information, which made access something of a problem for the author. Saward says that the book took 18 years to write, and given the level of detail it is easy to see why.

It's a difficult book to pigeonhole, because it serves a number of purposes simultaneously. There is an element of racing history, but it is every bit as much an account of the work done by British agents and their allies working undercover in France in an attempt to make a dent in the Nazi war machine.

It is also probably the closest we will ever come to a comprehensive biography of Grover, a man who deserves to be elevated beyond the footnote that tends to be allocated to him in most books but is so hard to pin down because he was somewhat enigmatic even when he was alive, never mind from a distance of 60 years.

There are some gems buried in the book that are a little removed from the main plot, too. The Banville hillclimb, a bizarre race that took place both inside and on top of a Paris building, deserves a story in itself. The accompanying image of two cars, side-by-side, driving into a corner on a roof six floors above the street with spectators on the outside of the apex on the edge of the building is one of the oddest racing photographs I will probably ever see!

Books like this tend to have a devoted audience rather than a large one, which makes it hard to get mainstream publishers to take in interest. 'Grand Prix Saboteurs' has clearly been produced on a tightly-controlled budget - it's no lavish coffee table item - but on the whole the quality of the research makes up for it.

A little extra proof reading would have stopped a couple of minor errors from slipping through and the manuscript could probably have done with a trip to an editor's desk to tighten up some of the writing and cut down on occasions where the same information was presented twice. But the book has more than enough going for it to redeem itself for these minor quibbles.

In an environment where so many books are serving up recycled material, it is good to see something so heavily weighted towards old-fashioned original research. It is a book that racing historians two generations down the track will be trying to seek out simply because it is so unique. Here's hoping that it finds enough of an audience in the meantime to make all of Saward's hard work worthwhile.