Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #478075 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Customer Reviews

Superb photographic reference
Now this is a weird one. Respected journos Simon Arron (at Motorsport News and Autosport for many years) and Mark "brother of Warren and the bloke who should have Nigel Roebuck's job" Hughes (also of the Beano) have teamed up to produce the ultimate photographic reference book on F1.

They attempt to show a picture of every car/driver combination that's ever competed in the World Championship, and a portrait of every driver - and apart from a few very obscure ones in the 50s, they succeed pretty well. (About 30 missing out of something like 3500 driver/car combinations, many of these F2 tail-enders who only ran in one GP and none later than the early sixties).

The book's organised year by year, with a nice photographic survey of the year's championship, and then pics of the driver/car combinations in championship order. If Fred Bloggs drove three different models of car in 1966, then they show you Fred in each of the three. You can't accuse them of being less than comprehensive. Now, there's not much new you can show about most of the famous ones, but this book really comes into its own the further down you get - it's all here, private owners of customer or ex-works cars, extra works entries, one-offs, no-hopers, chancers, special-builders... there's pics of everything from AFM to Zakspeed in here. Most of the pics are very good, but some of them, probably out of the need to use substandard material to cover everything, have been fairly crudely digitally enlarged.

Possibly not of interest to pure Bernie-era F1 fans, but anyone interested particularly in the 60s and 70s when there were all sorts of weird and wonderful characters popping up in bizarrely-coloured cars (check out the chocolate brown and orange Brabham John Watson used to drive!) for odd races in strange privateer cars this is the book. It's also a great photo-essay on how the F1 car has evolved over the past 50-odd years.

Somewhere between coffee-table and anorak, with appeal to both ends of the spectrum.

I've spotted two errors. Pete Lovely's 1971 Lotus 69/49 hybrid is described as having a 4-cylinder Cosworth engine; in fact it used a DFV V8. On the same page (!) obscure one-off March rent-a-driver Max Jean is mis-listed as Jean Max, although this mistake is very common!

Good in theory, bad in practice
This book features pictures of most of the 750+ F1 drivers, during races or practice sessions, and the various different cars they drove throughout the years. What this book does not feature is pictures of the F1 drivers who did not qualify for a race. Plus it does not feature drivers who started the race, as they were too obscure to have pictures of them, readily available. Another negative comment is that each of the pictures are exactly 4.75cm by 3.4cm in size each! Really, really tiny and of little use, although, if you decide to count how many pictures there actually are, you could understand that it's cheaper for everyone if they were made small. Quite a few of the pictures are also extremely pixellated. The book must have been rushed to have ended up looking like this. Slightly disappointed, but there are some real gems in there.

An aficiando's dream
It is a very thorough piece of work. It allows you to see complete Formula One grids have looked like over the years at a glance. Each driver/car combiation picture comes with an accurate note of the races competed in. It is great to be reminded of combinations like John Watson in a JPS Lotus. The reviews of the seasons offer some sensational pictures including an emotive one of Jackie Stewart whispering in Gilles Villeneuve's ear on the Imola podium in 1982. The reviews are brief and the lack of teams from some years due to non qulaification is frustrating but overall it is an impressive referance book.