The Bookworm Critique

If you discovered Formula One at any point in the past 20 years, it comes as something of a shock to discover that the winners' trophies were not always as visually uninspiring as they are now.

There's nothing especially wrong with the silverware Kimi Raikkonen is holding above his head on page 43 of Bruce Jones's new book 'Grand Prix Racing Yesterday & Today' - it's a rather nice silver replica of a modern steering wheel, the mirrored finish broken only by the colours of a flag to indicate that the prize was won in Hungary.

But it looks decidedly beige when lined up against the remarkable trophy that Jochen Rindt is holding on the facing page, having just won the 1970 British GP - an extraordinarily ornate sculpture that's about the size of his torso and looks like it would take some effort to lift. It may be a touch tacky, but it looks like something worth winning and it would certainly stand out on the mantelpiece, assuming that the shelf didn't collapse under the weight.

So Kimi's trophy is kind of like the modern Nurburgring. It's quite good in its own right, but the problem starts when you compare with what is next door.

'Grand Prix Yesterday & Today' is great for these sorts of ruminations. Jones, a former Autosport editor, has picked dozens of themes that have remained a constant since the earliest days of Grand Prix racing and explored them via the use of images from LAT's vast archive.

They come in pairs - a image from the past alongside an image from the present (or at least, a more recent past) - which together illustrate just how far things have come or, alternatively, just how little some things have changed.

Choosing shots must have been a hell of a job. LAT is not exactly short of pictures, and Jones himself acknowledges that there were dozens of potential candidates for each theme. A few have been used heavily in the past but usually that's because they are worth it - the leading shot of Roy Salvadori, Carel Godin de Beaufort, Tony Maggs, Innes Ireland, Jim Clark and Graham Hill at the drivers' briefing at Monza is a good example of this.

But there are plenty of others that had been previously unseen, by me at least, and these alone made the book a pleasure to read. The images are so good that text is almost superfluous, and Jones accordingly keeps the words to a minimum.

What's there is enjoyable though, providing a context for the images as well as occasional little gems of information. I hate to harp on about trophies, but I had no idea that there was a mandated maximum weight designed to make life easier for frail dignitaries.

Possibly the one area where the text trips slightly is in the occasional slip towards nostalgia. There is nothing wrong with preferring things as they were once compared to things as they became later, but the appealing thing about the images was that they carried no weight one way or another, leaving the reader to make up their own mind.

But even this minor quibble popped up only very rarely. I'm not sure whether this is the sort of book that you would return to over and over again, but there are certainly worse ways to pass the time. It's well conceived and well produced, and worth a look for anyone interested in a slightly new angle on motorsport history.