Great Read

German Group 5 saloon car race, Nurburgring, 1976 I've had a funny career. I started like gangbusters, and always came very close but never got all I wanted. So to…

Seeing it lined up, in the Goodwood paddock at the Revival Meeting, with such as the Dino 246, the 250F and the Mercedes-Benz W196, it struck me again how small is the Lancia D50, how astonishing…

Just minutes after picking up the mountain pass we come to the first hairpin. I look at my photographs of behemoth Mercedes and Auto Unions scrabbling around tight Alpine bends…

When Mateus goes to bed he settles down on the kitchen floor beside the cooker. There are seven people living in two rooms. It is hot and there is no…

Lifetime achievement awards are usually consolation prizes for people who made a career out of finishing second. John Cooper so rewarded by the historic racing world is clearly an exception.…

Teatime in McLaren’s paddock palace, The Brand Centre. ‘Team Button’ – father John and manager Richard Goddard – are having a natter. They might be talking business, but just as…

The formation finish, staged for the benefit of the cameras, has become commonplace at Le Mans thanks to a certain manufacturer from Germany. Before Audi’s domination of the event, though,…

It is purely an age thing, I suppose, this, peculiar tendency we have to forget whole swathes of people who did their stuff before a certain age. An atrophied sense…

Bonneville and the Black Rock Desert; before Daytona Beach or Pendine Sands in Wales, the Land Speed Record belonged to an exclusive turn-of-the-century holiday resort — Ormond Beach, Florida. Ormond…

Take out of the equation those pedal-to-metal laps around the old eight-mile Spa-Francorchamps or the pre-Hella Licht-S Osterreichring, and a Porsche 917 couldn't live with a Formula 1 car in…

Just as it finally seemed within his reach, a broken titanium component crushed Peter Revson's F1 dream Peter Jeffrey Revlon Revson had it all. Good looks, breeding, an attractive personality…

It is early afternoon on Saturday November 1, 1980. A call is placed to the Brabham headquarters in Chessington, Surrey. The conversation goes something like this: “’Allo?” “Ah, hello. Could…

Pick a driver synonymous with Goodwood. It's not hard: Stirling Moss — a winner at the first meeting and on 21 other occasions. But if this was 1954, and Stirling…

Karl Kling, who died recently, may never have been a great racing driver but he was certainly one who had his days. I interviewed him only once, appropriately close by…

Group Five race, Mainz-Finthen Airfield, 1978 Of course there have been a lot of memorable races over the years, especially in the days of the Porsche 962. I particularly remember…

If a racing driver has to die young, there is an almost gladiatorial rightness that he do so in his element on the track. Gunnar Nilsson was denied even that,…

When we speak of legendary partnerships in motor racing, perhaps the one that would spring first to most minds is that of Colin Chapman and Jim Clark: throughout his eight-year…