Product Description

In a hugely ambitious project, Gerald Donaldson has assembled a team of specialists to record the voices of the major players on the circuit today. The voices of the drivers, their wives and girlfriends, the mechanics and engineers, the team bosses, all those involved in the tension-filled emotionally charged circus that is Formula 1 are recorded for the first time. The words of legendary figures from the past have also been recorded to create a definitive yet very personal historical record of the triumphs and disasters of over fifty years of Formula 1. Over 500 illustrations from a wealth of unusual and personal sources give a totally fresh insight into this spectacular sport.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #488403 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 360 pages

Review
Early review in from F1 NEWS: 'This is a sparkling and interesting record and will please all fans of Formula One, old and new, with its fresh approach. It is certainly worth its cost...' Gerald Donaldson will be interviewed on BBC

About the Author
Gerald Donaldson was born in Canada and has been covering Formula 1 for over 25 years during which time his work as a newspaper and magazine journalist and as a radio and TV commentator have made him one of the most highly respected media personalities - 'the best' according to Murray Walker - in the sport.

Customer Reviews

An ideal book for any F1 fan
There are a number of books that have attempted to chronicle the history of Formula 1 motor racing. In my opinion, this book has to be among the very best.

Formula 1: The Autobiography is a "coffee table" book which has been edited by Gerald Donaldson, who is the author of many Formula 1 books, including excellent biographies of both James Hunt and Gilles Villeneuve. The book features the work of many notable motorsport writers, including David Tremayne, Simon Taylor, Eoin Young, Mark Hughes, Adam Cooper and Nigel Roebuck. These writers each concentrate mainly on individual decades within the sport, right up until the end of the 2001 season.

Following a chapter covering the early years of motoring and motorsport from 1890 onwards, each of the last 50 years of Formula 1 are covered predominantly using interviews with drivers, team owners, officials and other significant figures, in addition to race reports. The photographs used throughout the book are excellent, capturing the spirit of each era of the sport perfectly.

Given the immense size of the subject being covered, understandably the book does not have room to go into a lot of detail for each year, although the major stories are well represented in the book's 360 pages.

In addition, the book features very brief biographies of some of the more prominent figures that have been involved in the sport, and also a listing of the winners of each of the races that have taken place from 1950 onwards.

Whilst this book may not appeal to those who are only interested in a particular era within the sport, due to the slightly limited coverage given to each individual year, this reader highly recommends it as a well researched and eloquent description of the last 50 years within the pinnacle of motorsport.

All the best bits in one book
As a novice to the world of Formula 1 this book gently breaks you in without overloading you with technical details and (boring) racing stories. It has a healthy mix of drama on track as well as off it that serve to introduce the reader to the highs and very lows of this most dangerous of sports.

As a casual reader it immediately grabs your attention with the sometimes gruesome details of the driver's deaths. I already knew about the the likes of Jim Clark's and Jochen Rindt's accidents but the needless deaths of Roger Williamson and Tom Pryce drag you deeper into the book. (Williamson through under-equipped marshals despite David Purley's best efforts and Pryce through being hit in the face by a fire extinguisher).

I would say that much of the time spent reading this book is waiting for the next grizzly death and its details. But between the morbidity are wonderful human stories in particular Enzo Ferrari's sometimes devastating personal opinions of the people in the sport.

The book is structured in a chronological order so that no particular person becomes too dominant in the course of reading it. As a book for the uniniatiated it encourages readers to go out and seek the original texts from which it was culled which without this kind of cherry-picking would not compel me to do otherwise.

A fascinating book about a fascinating sport.

Just Another Picture Book
This book received a good deal of hype, associating it with top journalists and claiming interviews with top drivers and other F1 figures.

Unfortunately it is just a collection of photos with quotes from old racing books and magazine articles. How many of these expensive coffee table book histories are we going to see? There is no new ground covered here.

Very dissapointing. I wish that Donaldson would attempt more actual research and reporting, like his biographies "James Hunt", and "Gilles Villeneuve" of a decade ago.

Don't waste your money on this one.