Great Read

As you might imagine, compiling a top-30 list of motor racing’s pivotal happenings was a headache of formidable proportions. Through a whittling-down process that involved much scribbling in notepads, email…

You have taken pole position at your home grand prix driving for what is ostensibly your national team. You then lead the race, and once a pair of pesky rivals…

These are none other than the first and last Porsches to win the Le Mans 24 Hours during the legendary Group C era. Not examples of those cars, but the…

He’s spent more than 40 years living at motor sport’s cutting edge. So why would such a man, now on the cusp of his eighth decade, even think about starting…

The Ferrari 640, with its slim lines, purposeful profile and ingenious technological innovations is the car many identify most with legendary F1 designer John Barnard. A machine that, on the…

Motor racing oddballs can really liven up our sport’s history, and the Formula 2 Israel Grand Prix is right up there. Held in November 1970 on the Mediterranean streets of…

Harsh as it may sound of a grand prix driver who scored 31 victories from 187 starts, Nigel Mansell could so easily have landed the unwanted label of Formula 1…

Forty years. Who knows where the time goes? In the midst of one of grand prix racing’s most unpredictable seasons, a friendship pivoted in one controversial afternoon into a deadly…

Perry McCarthy somehow made it all the way to Formula 1 despite starting out at 21 years old with no previous experience of competing in either karts or cars. Permanently…

For a driver–team pairing that never made a race start, Perry McCarthy's torrid Andrea Moda tale is like no other – he remembers it 30 years on

Sir Patrick Head, knighted for services to motor sport in 2015, graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from University College London in 1970 and soon after started work at…

Denis Jenkinson read the situation perfectly. In early 1962, as the dust settled following the ‘Palace Revolt’ in which a number of senior figures had left Maranello, Jenks wrote in…

Sixty years ago, a car regarded by many as the greatest road racer of all time was launched. And this month – March 1962 – it made its competitive debut…

Fifty years ago when a BRM P160 burst out of a giant cigarette packet at Paul Ricard to signify Marlboro’s first F1 sponsorship deal, smoking was synonymous with glamour –…

135 years of innovation: making of the internal combustion engine, Part 6 Just as the Coventry Climax racing effort was fading in the mid-1960s, a new contender was waiting in…

The main Dakar event might seem gruelling enough, but some are bravely taking on the Saudi stages in vintage machinery – some over 50 years old

A scheming team boss, a bitter team ripped apart by rivalry and one conflagrated Vauxhall – Jason Plato recalls how he somehow came through it to win the 2001 BTCC title