Great Read

First, a few basic facts. During the 1988 season, the McLaren MP4/4 won all bar one Grands Prix, a fact which makes the team proud to this day. It is…

What is it about the Jaguar XJ13? What other racing car could have once attracted an offer of £7 million despite never having been entered into, let alone won, a…

These Lunch With.... pieces start out as long and often colourful one-to-one conversations, over a pleasant meal. But they end up in black and white, as printed words. So I…

It was a remarkable opening lap of a remarkable circuit. Rhodesia's Gary Hocking had been drawn at six, his MV Agusta team-mate Mike Hailwood at three and his good friend,…

Team personnel rubbed their hands together to ward off the frosty chill as they left their hotels for the short run to the Hockenheimring, the circuit close to Mannheim in…

Some weekends you can come back from a Grand Prix with a notebook relatively clean. There will be a lap chart in there, of course, together with notes and quotes,…

”All my life I’ve wanted to run a chippie”. So said Lance Macklin to his young second wife Gill, and thus began a new chapter in the life of a…

Think for one minute about the hardest thing you have ever done in your life. Remember if you can the sleepless nights, the mental anguish that came from your own…

"I’d like to talk about Alan [he uses the English pronunciation] Prost,” says John Watson after some thinking time. He’s like that, always has been: he’s a thoughtful man. “There…

'He truly never met a race car that he didn't like. All US racing was clamped in an AJ Foyt stranglehold' It was a great racing civilisation that America had…

Blip, blip, buzz — pause — clunk, sputter, sputter. This Lotus 'queerbox' is in perfect condition. But it's still a sod. Next lap, into the first corner, there's a confident…

Those last 10 laps were exhausting. I was checking the rev counter, listening anxiously to the engine’s note, changing gear with exaggerated care, braking a little earlier and giving the…

IN 1948 at Bremgarten a 12 year-old Swiss boy watched, entranced, as a Frenchman wove his magic driving a Gordini. The boy's name was Joseph Siffert, the Frenchman's Raymond Sommer.…

If ever you were a Lotus fan Goodwood brought it all back. In the paddock, for example, were a pair of Lotus 25s, both ex-Clark, and at the Brooks auction…

Garage Francorchamps is a distinct misnomer for the edifice greeting visitors to Jacques Swaters' Ferrari emporium. Situated in a large industrial area not far from Brussels airport, the Garage is,…

Georg Meier, BMW's newly crowned European 500cc bike champion, got the call from Auto Union in early November: come to the Nürburgring and test for us. Tall and handsome, he…

It looked like an extravagant joke, an extended April Fool's stunt played by a bunch of ex-public schoolboys with more money than sense. It ended, as everyone had predicted, in…