Great Read

Jean Rondeau did not always play by the rules; anyone who had the nerve to test pukka Le Mans cars on the public roads was bound to be a little…

We coasted up the pit lane, the Aston Martin DBR1 and I, engine now silent. Helmet in the passenger seat, I listened to the utter silence in my ears that…

The scene: the Glen Motor Inn, Watkins Glen. The date: September 1979. I am sitting at a table with a couple of colleagues, and studying the menu, unable to make…

As I drive, each July, from Frankfurt airport to Hockenheim, it is my invariable practice to pull off into the rest area by the Langen-Morfelden crossing on the autobahn towards Darmstadt. At…

If Jerry Grant hadn't been plagued with bad luck, he wouldn't have had any luck at all. A perennial target for outrageous fortune's slings and arrows, he saw victories slip…

Rivalry is one of the prime tenets of motor sport. But in the case of the long defunct Gnoo Blas circuit in Orange, 177 miles west of Sydney, motor racing…

The thing may have looked the part, but there was no way it could win the Le Mans 24 Hours. Not first time out anyway. The world's fastest street machine…

Ambition is a funny thing. For some it burns so bright it sears a lasting scar on their personalities. Others look as if they don't have a scrap of it…

The image is clear in my mind's eye: a ball of first-lap spray containing two Williams-Renaults, Karl Wendlinger's Sauber, Michael Schumacher's Benetton and Ayrton Senna's trim McLaren MP4/8 tagging on…

Formula 1 in 1973 boiled down to Lotus versus Tyrrell: Lithe and balanced 72 versus stubby and twitchy 005-006. But were either the best car of the season? Silverstone that…

So here it sits. McLaren M6A-1. Not McLaren’s first effort at building a sports car, nor even its first Can-Am car - that particular honour fell to the M1B -…

There was a lot to think about. But Bruce Leslie McLaren — boss / designer / engineer / tester / racer — preferred it that way. Three years of his…

Emerson Fittipaldi's language dates him, reminding you of a time in motor-racing more violent and dangerous, yet also gentler, less hard-nosed. 'Dice', for example, is a favourite word of his,…

Österreichring, austria, August 13, 1972 It is easy to forget that the permanent race-track, in the hills overlooking the village of Zeltweg, was opened only three years ago. Even before…

As US Air Force One touched safely down, STP Pontiac number 43 raced past it on the parallel back straight of Daytona. Its driver was in the midst of one…

Even before you meet Mario Andretti, the bare statistics tell you this man is unique. In a full-time career lasting an astonishing 35 seasons, he was a winner in F1,…

So many victories slipped from his grasp that Nigel Mansell could perhaps fill this series on his own. Indeed he could single-handedly keep The Championship That Got Away going for…