Hallowed. A good way of avoiding the overused word ‘golden’ to pin down a period when everything looked at its finest, at least from our later viewpoint. That half a decade of Ferrari racing that William Huon picks out here covered some of the brightest, most remembered moments in a glorious career: the ‘Sharknose’, the unsurpassable 250 GTO, two F1 world championships and a run of Le Mans victories not matched for years – and also disruption and tragedy.

Can there be new things to say about such a well-recorded period? Maybe not, but there are different ways to tell the same story and different ways to illustrate it – which is the great strength of this volume. All the images are from the archive of Bernard Cahier, a master of the art from the 1950s to the 1980s, and they are a positive banquet. Every page offers more delights: a stark high-level shot of cars on the Monza banking; Richie Ginther and John Surtees grinning at each other on the Spa grid; Willy Mairesse marching in a line of officials explaining to Ludovico Scarfiotti how he has spun away a Targa Florio victory; Phil Hill in a deckchair eating chocolate in a messy pit garage.

Ferrari 1960-1965: The Hallowed Years

William Huon

Evro Publishing, £75

ISBN 9781910505816

Immersed in the racing world, Cahier had a knack of popping up at the perfect moment – or perhaps that encapsulates a great photographer’s skill to engineer the perfect moment. And sometimes the subject creates the moment – here is Wolfgang von Trips removing his gloves after winning the British Grand Prix at Aintree in 1961, noticing Cahier above the crowd and waving halloto him. It was a time when drivers and photographers mingled in the same barsand hotels, and while there is brilliant photography today still, it can never have the genial ‘one of the gang’ atmosphere this book conveys so well.

Huon’s introduction tackles the ‘yet another book on Ferrari’ point head-on, saying, “I should like you to indulge me.” He goes on to explain that he saw these glorious years first-hand, living near the Reims circuit and travelling to many GP paddocks as a youth, inevitably for the time collecting autographs. There is a page in here with an impressive collection – Phil Hill, Tony Brooks Jackie Stewart and Bruce McLaren are just a few – and a photograph of Huon himself with Jim Clark at Albi in 1964. He watched Fangio drive his last race, at Reims in 1958, and later met our own Denis Jenkinson.

All this raised my hopes to read personal memories of the noise, the dust and the atmosphere experienced by an avid youngspectator at these legendary races, so it’s a shade disappointing not to find much of that. Still, given the large number of races and the tumultuous period covered, Huon does a fine job, covering every race in a fecund period complete with results and figures without drowning the reader, and offering pen portraits of the great drivers Enzo employed.

It’s comprehensive and approachable, benefiting from a fluid translation from the French by David Waldron, long-time Le Mans commentator, to produce an invigorating journey back to a time when the Cavallino Rampante soared and sometimes wallowed, finding its way into the mid-engined era. One for collectors, but one you’ll come back to.