Great Read

1 Alberto Ascari I didn’t know Alberto that well. I can remember seeing Alberto and Fangio driving. At a corner Ascari would nearly touch the straw bale, whereas Fangio would…

Goodwood hangs in a freezing mist of rain. Inside the great house, a familiar crowd shuffles between coffee trays and long handshakes. They've come to hear the Earl's plans for…

"You go to Bonneville and you take a really heavy car with narrow wheels. We turned up with a really light car with big balloon tyres, and the first time…

When he first came to the notice of Europeans, Yoshio Nakamura was pigeon-holed with the usual 'inscrutable’ tag so beloved of westerners encountering an Asian person for the first time.…

If you’re a top Formula 1 driver, you are a driven man. As well as all those skills and physical attributes, you are motivated by abnormally high levels of determination,…

When Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were killed at Imola in the spring of 1994, a dozen years had passed since the previous fatal accident at a grand prix, and…

How good was Gilles? Well, he didn't win the World Championship. He was capable of it, no question but he was always trying to be the fastest, not worrying about…

Famous men are not always remembered for what they might consider important. Our late Lord Chancellor is recalled for his choice of wallpaper rather than his reorganisation of the judiciary, and…

Downtown, Detroit, June 6th Ii is a good thing that we can bend rules and regulations and manipulate procedures to suit ourselves, otherwise there might not have been a Grand…

The cheek of it. There is nothing wrong with a Peugeot 306 per se, but this one was a particularly tatty, extremely dusty example that happened to be wedged in…

For six days, so the story goes, he plonked himself on the sofa in the reception area at the Cleveland Graphite Bronze Company, Cleveland, Ohio. Guy Anthony Vandervell was a…

You have to go back 74 years for the first officially timed 200mph by a car. These days this pace is not uncommon, and even our trains manage 180mph when…

Consider the following. "I have to say that what I saw that day at Monza was unethical, unsporting and dangerous. It was the start of a breakdown of discipline among…

Very few Italians would be inclined to acknowledge it, but the unique competition record of the Alfa 158, the original Alfetta, arguably owes as much to the rise of National…

The finish of Le Mans is always a great occasion, but this one is special. The little green and orange Mazda has humiliated the mighty Sauber-Mercedes and Jaguar teams, not…

There’s a glimmer of recognition in his eyes as he walks towards me. We first met in 1978 when he came to England with his Formula 3 team, fresh from…

Ten years ago I wrote a not terribly good book. And while I cannot claim responsibility for its somewhat cheesy Dream Cars title, the content was all mine. My brief…