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.