ATLAS F1   Volume 6, Issue 38	Email to Friend   Printable Version
The Bookworm Critique "THE POWER GAME"
By Ivan Rendall Published by Cassell & Co.	by Mark Glendenning, Australia

The World Championship in its present form is something of a paradox. There can be no doubting that the Championship is necessary to ensure the survival of Grand Prix racing - without an ultimate goal, the series would have no cohesion or sense of ultimate purpose. Formula One wouldn't enjoy anything close to its current global support base, and it probably wouldn't be in a position to exist on the scale that it does. In that regard, the Championship's a good thing. In the process though, the basic nature of the championship has warped the way that the drivers go about their business, mainly because the significance of the individual race has been overlooked in favour of the bigger picture. Ideally, every Grand Prix would feature a grid of drivers who were all starting the race with the intention of winning. This is supposed to be racing, after all. But as the Championship's stature increases, so does the catalogue of drivers starting the race with the intention of doing something other than charging flat-out toward the flag. There are all kinds of examples of this, the most extreme being drivers who sign contracts at the beginning of the season committing them to spending their year fighting for somebody else's cause. Journalist Nigel Roebuck has written that in a perfect world, the champion would simply be the driver who had won the most races. This idea carries a whole new set of new problems, but the attraction of such a format is plain to see. It's all academic though - the present form of the championship is what we've got, and Ivan Rendall has decided to write a book about it. Rendall has written a couple of Formula One books in the past, and this time around the English writer has decided to trace the history of the World Championship, paying special attention to the struggles of power within the sport that occurred along the way. In terms of simply telling the story, 'The Power Game' is a difficult book to fault. Formula One has a history as complicated as it is rich, and Rendall deserves praise for covering the twists and intricacies of the tale as well as he does. After opening with a brief chat about the rise to power of one Bernard Charles Ecclestone, Rendall gets on with the business of exploring the development of the Grand Prix racing before closing the book with a few thoughts on the possible future of the World Championship in the looming post-Bernie / post-tobacco issue. All the major landmarks in the sport's history, from the FOCA/FISA war of the early 1980s, to the emergence of the Cosworth DFV, are covered in fairly close detail. It's probably not possible to completely do justice to the full history of Formula One in a single 250-page volume, and in this case it's the warmth of the story that has suffered. It is not a problem that affects the entire book, but there are certainly a few patches where Rendall's enthusiasm seems to wane a little. It doesn't affect the fundamental quality of the book, but it does make it tough to read from cover to cover. There are also a few lapses on behalf of the proofreader, particularly toward the end. Some are simple typos, but there are also a couple of occasions where the author lands himself squarely in the gravel trap, such as the reference on page 234 to Alexander Wurz substituting for Alesi for a few races in 1996 (it was in fact 1997, and Wurz was standing in for fellow Austrian Gerhard Berger). There are also a few cases of unnecessary repetition - for example, we are given very similar accounts of the jailing of Colin Chapman's associate Fred Bushell for his role in defrauding DeLorean in two separate chapters. One real standout in 'The Power Game' is the quality of the photographs, particularly some of the earlier shots. The full-page photo of Jim Clark leading the field on a typically wet day at Spa is particularly striking, with Clark's Lotus throwing clouds of spray back to his pursuers as they slide through the forest. Some of the portrait shots are also great - the Innes Ireland photo is brilliant, as is the shot of Graham and Bette Hill in the pits at the 1967 British Grand Prix, with a six-year old Damon wearing a driving suit to match his father's standing alongside. Slightly more ominous is the photo of a young Max and Alex Mosley, who look unnervingly like notorious English gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray. The fact that the photos are so great though only serves to highlight another of the problems; namely, the sheer thoughtlessness of the art direction. It is staggering to think that someone would go to the trouble of sourcing such fantastic shots, and then proceed to place the captions in a bold, mustard coloured box directly on top of the image. If ever you wanted to find a way to completely destroy the impact of a photo, that's probably a good way to start - especially where the black-and-whites are concerned. It's not quite as bad as seeing a Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing painted bright green with a 'Honk If You're Horny' bumper sticker stuck on the back, but it's close. I don't want to dwell too much on the negatives though, because by and large this is quite a good book. It covers an enormous amount of ground, starting with a brief introduction to the birth of motor racing on French roads in the mid-1890s, and then really getting stuck into things with the establishment of the World Championship in 1950. Along the way, it touches (sometimes all too briefly) on a few aspects of racing history that are sometimes overlooked; ranging from contextual details like the social backdrop against which racing developed in different parts of Europe, to aspects of racing culture such as the emergence of the tifosi. It's very heavy on names, dates and places, and rather light on quotes and anecdotes, which makes parts of it a rather laborious reading experience, but there's generally enough good stuff scattered throughout to make it worth persevering. The absence of any original research or first-hand accounts might render this book a little too lightweight for the Nostalgia Forum types, but for the average Formula One fan 'The Power Game' offers a fairly good general account of Grand Prix history. The inclusion of some extremely cool photographs (ugly, ill-conceived caption boxes notwithstanding) earns the book the right to be considered for that empty spot on your shelf.

Mark Glendenning	© 2000 Kaizar.Com, Incorporated.
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