Great Read

"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…

Thirty years ago I wrote a column for Autosport about Bernd Rosemeyer, long dead before I was born, yet the figure of legend who first captured my imagination, triggering a…

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.…

I have recently spent some time with a remarkable woman, so spirited, so passionate, so bright-eyed. And she is 85 years old. We salute the first woman to race in…

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…

Has the United States ever produced a greater sportsman than Briggs Cunningham? Never mind the quintessentially American sports-racers he built out of a sense of patriotic duty. Never mind the…

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…