If you’re looking for a long read, don’t be put off by the Pictorial History description in the subtitle. There is plenty to get your teeth into here, with portraits of many of the leading drivers across the two decades. These are occasionally in their own words – some unique to this book, others reproductions of interviews that appeared in period.
Right from the off – 1964 – we get Warwick Banks’s recollections of his season alongside that year’s champion driver Jackie Stewart at Ken Tyrrell’s Cooper team: “My 3st extra weight and greater height meant that JYS had a distinct advantage in our cars with only 1000cc and some 85bhp. Some 25 years later, Ken did admit that my handicap was probably worth half a second a lap!” Later, it’s 13 pages of meticulous notes on the 1972 season by long-time F3 man Mike Walker: 42 races at over 30 meetings, on more than one occasion complaining about dodgy timekeeping.
Zandvoort, 1972, with Tom Pryce, Mike Walker and Tony Trimmer talking… length?
PETER McFADYEN, NOORD-HOLLANDS ARCHIEF COLLECTIE FOTOPERSBUREAU DE BOER
There are all sorts of nuggets here. The layout and sequencing has a certain ramshackle illogical charm about it, but in a sense that doesn’t matter because, the umpteenth time you open this book, the page will fall open and you’ll realise you’d forgotten about Jean-Pierre Jaussaud making a return to F3 with an Argo at Monaco in 1977, or the short-lived Lotus-equipped Peter Sellers Racing Team (yes, that Peter Sellers) of ’66. This is something to be consumed in chunks, not read from start to finish.
If we can offer one criticism, it could have done with some more attentive proofreading, but otherwise it’s an evocative and colourful look at the era. There’s also an accompanying CD with as many British, French and international race results as the Ellards could cram in. But finding a laptop that reads such a thing these days is harder than locating a Holbay-tuned Ford MAE screamer.