Formula One Driver by Driver, Crowood Press, £15.99.

Former colleague Henry seems to be averaging about one book per month at the moment.

The latest boils down to a brief summary of everyone who had ever started a World Championship Grand Prix from its inception in 1950 up until the end of the 1991 season.

In many cases, this amounts to no more than a couple of lines. “A Swiss amateur who got a sponsored ride in an uncompetitive Williams in the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix,” hardly constitutes Jo Vonlanthen’s life story, but you get the idea. There are rather more detailed profiles of past world champions and other selected interesting cases (Laffite and Villeneuve, for instance), and the whole thing adds up to a handy reference manual, even if the facts and figures about contemporary F1 racers had already been overtaken by the time it hit the bookshops.

One or two typographical errors have slipped through undetected, and some of the photographs, in black and white throughout, are disappointing. There are superb, charismatic portraits of drivers from older generations (Marquis de Portago, Paul Frere and Patrick Depailler spring to mind), but there are too many bland promotional shots of more recent stars although, to be fair, the latter are far less accessible to lensmen than their predecessors ever were.

SA