Jean-Pierre Wimille - A bientot la revanche

ByJ-M Paris & William Mearns

ISBN 2-9516357-5-3

Distributed by Menoshire, £39.50

This is the first full life of France’s great and too often overlooked GP and Le Mans winner. The authors’ close contact with Wimille’s wife has brought much intimate detail, including their WWII spying ex-ploits. Her scrapbooks and personal photos provide a unique depth to a action-packed story of long-distance flights, wartime resistance alongside ‘Williams’ and Robert Benoist, and Wimille’s bizarre streamlined road car project, as well as the racing and record-breaking. Lavishly illustrated, this is an engrossing read, with two big problems: many pictures are badly pixellated, and the all italic English text is often hard to read when printed over a photo. In a weaker book these would be serious flaws; here, however, they are tolerable. It has been worth the wait GC