Product Description

This text takes a look at some of the Grand Prix in the years 1996-2000 in Formula One racing. It includes Schumacher's epic crash at Silverstone in 1999. The author also looks back at his own career and discusses some of the great drivers he has known.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #493843 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
Strictly for motor racing fans, especially those who bought his best-selling memoirs Life at the Limit four years ago, because the Grand Prix neurosurgeon plunges straight into recollections of major crashes, then memories of the great drivers he has known, and finally a race-by-race account of the Millennium season. Watkins has such broad access to the motor racing fraternity that every section is an insider account, especially when he goes to the aid of Michael Schumacher in the famous 1999 Silverstone crash and recommends a heart bypass operation for Bernie Ecclestone in the same year. Most of the anecdotes are tinged with medical matters, making them all the more unusual and reducing some of the Grand Prix heroes to very basic levels. Covering safety issues as well, the motor racing doctor takes fans on the inside track into aspects and hazards they would never normally know about.

Professor Sid Watkins has been Formula 1 racing's on-track surgeon for over 20 years. Within the sport he is as well known as Michael Schumacher or Bernie Ecclestone and his stories are just as fascinating. This book is the follow-up to his highly successful Life at the Limit. The hub of the book is a race-by-race account of the Millennium Grand Prix season, seen through the eyes of a man who has not only to attend all the crashes that occur but who is forever striving to reduce the number and seriousness of them as well. Watkins has met everyone in the sport and has a tale to tell about them all. His anecdotes have you deep in thought at one moment and laughing out loud at the next. There are sections about several leading personalities of today such as Schumacher, Button and Coulthard and a retrospective section where he reminisces about former greats including Juan Fangio, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill. The final section of the book is an interesting review of the work of the Advisory Expert Group, which undertakes research and development into greater racetrack safety. Sid Watkins has forced through many changes in the face of much opposition from team owners and others, and achieved a considerable reduction in serious accidents. When one owner claimed that Watkins's improvements had cost him over a million dollars, Watkins told him to take it out of his drivers' wages. A small price for being alive at the end of the season. (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
This text takes a look at some of the Grand Prix in the years 1996-2000 in Formula One racing. It includes Schumacher's epic crash at Silverstone in 1999. The author also looks back at his own career and discusses some of the great drivers he has known.

Customer Reviews

Very Interesting
I loved this - although you would need to be a F1 and interested in health and safety otherwise it could be a tough read.
For those that are really into all the technical stuff it is great and I have to admire Sid Watkins even more after reading it, he really had to fight the system and politics of F1 to drag driver safety into such a high profile and high priority status as it is now.
Technical detail also interspersed with anecdotes of evetns during his F1 career - a great sense of humour is evident.

A clingfilm-thin follow-up to a previous worthwhile book.
Prof Sid should be worth a read. He has seen more of the action and characters of F1, closer up, than anyone - even Murray Walker or B. Ecclestone. ...

The book consists of a hotchpotch of anecdotes presumably assembled from the ones left on his editor's floor from the previous book, many of which are banal, weak and lacking any connection with F1. This last point would not matter if the stories were pithy, witty and interesting: few are.

A pointless, skimpy and garbled re-hash of the 2000 season is trotted out to fill out the mid-section and the book ends with appendices of tables of extremely erudite but arcane statistics on injuries, construction materials, design specs and other matters vital to the FIA Medical and Technical Committees but of no interest to anyone else - not even Grand Prix drivers, I suspect - least of all Eddie Irvine ...

Prof Sid is a self-deprecating fellow. The result of the modesty of his narrative is that on many occasions you feel he's apologising for being present at the events and with the characters involved: consequently, descriptions are thin, lack colour and tend either to drift to vague, aimless conclusions or just stop dead, leaving the reader suspended, waiting for a point that will never be made.

By all means buy this book for a journey, swallow it whole at one sitting for the occasional insight or humorous anecdote expressed by an evidently charming man, then leave it on the plane without a second thought, as I did. One day we will have the full autobiography of Prof Sid, hopefully guided by a writer such as Alan Henry, Nigel Roebuck or David Tremayne. Unlike this one, that book will be worth keeping.

Worth a read - but insightful it ain't
I bought this book on the d/w recommendation that Prof. Watkins was "...infinitely more interesting than most of the drivers". If that's so then drivers' accounts must be absolutely excrutiating. True, there are a few engaging anecdotes, but all too often I found myself eagerly moving to the next paragraph for the killer punchline, only to be unceremoniously dumped into a completely new topic.

Much of the race-by-race detail would already be known to regular followers of F1 while, like the previous reviewer, I felt the book had a cobbled-together feel about it, with the later sections acting merely as space-filler.

So yes, by all means read it, but don't expect a treasure-trove of enlightenment.