CLASSIC GRAND PRIX CARS:
THE FRONT-ENGINED FORMULA 1 ERA 1906-1960

By Karl Ludvigsen.
Published by Sutton Publishing.

Life in Chateau de Glendenning (or whatever) is, at this particular moment, rather pleasant. On my desk is a freshly made, super-strong cup of coffee, playing on the stereo is a CD that I finally managed to buy this morning after trudging forlornly around Melbourne's independent music retailers for a few weeks ('Vingt A Trente Mille Jours' by Francoiz Breut; difficult to track down but well worth the effort), and before me is a motor racing book that, beginning to end, was a genuine pleasure to read.

This, believe it or not, is more rare than you might imagine. Just under thirty Formula One books find their way to me for review during the course of a year, and one of the few downsides to reviewing so many books is that one is forced to take the bad with the good in order to provide a balanced coverage of the stuff that's out there on the shelves.

I have been on a lucky streak lately, and regular readers of this column will note that it has been a while since a title got an absolute roasting. Some people enjoy reading bad reviews more than the positive ones (it must be some kind of sadistic streak), but if you're one of those people then you've got at least another couple of weeks to wait. 'Classic Grand Prix Cars' was a cracker.

Ludvigsen is well known to Atlas F1 readers - among other reasons because he is one of the site's main contributors! - and over the course of the past few decades he has developed a reputation as one of the big hitters amongst English language historic motorsport writers. As the title suggests, this book offers an overview of the development of Grand Prix racing machinery up to 1960.

According to the introduction, much of the material began its life in 'Automobile Quarterly', however it has apparently been revamped to suit the book format, and spruced up with additional material. I never saw the original versions, but I can say that the text does not come across as having been adapted from articles or essays. While the material is divided up into chapters based upon decades, the various developments, their impacts, and the environments our outside factors that facilitated them flow together seamlessly to create a continuous story in which the relationship between one development and another is always apparent.

This is particularly useful for those who are attempting to grapple with the technical development of early-era Grand Prix machines for the first time. Discovering why, say, superchargers were as popular in certain circles before WW2 as legwarmers and headbands were in early 80s discos is easy enough, but trying to get to the bottom of how the developments came about, why some nations or marques accepted them while others rejected them, and how they evolved is not always so straightforward.

The engineers and designers are as much a star of this book as the drivers are, and accordingly, Ludvigsen avoids falling into the trap of allocating page after page to dry, lap-by-lap renditions of particular races. This is a good thing, not only because that kind of stuff makes me sleepy, but because it frees up more space for the miscellaneous good stuff that accompanies the main body of the text. Given the resources at Ludvigsen's fingertips (he does, after all, run a fairly substantial motorsport archive), you would expect the pictures to be pretty good, and they don't disappoint.

In addition to the regular action shots, there are a surprising amount of images that show close-ups of mechanical bits and pieces at are referred to in the text, many of which I'd have imagined would have been difficult to track down, especially for the earliest cars. These are supplemented with some great x-ray diagrams that can give the really enthusiastic technical freak a peek inside everything from the 1914 Mercedes Grand Prix powerplant to a basic cutaway of the Type 512 Alfa Romeo racer.

There are also separate boxes featuring bios of significant figures, which made for an interesting diversion, but the parts that really drew me in were the extended excerpts from contemporary reports. In most cases, the entire page – or, frequently, pages – have been reproduced directly from the original. The account of the 1908 French Grand Prix reproduced from 'The Automobile' was especially fascinating for so many reasons – the author's reflection upon the significance of German entrants dominating in France, the manner in which a double fatality was reported, the sorrowful observation that commercialism was over-running the sport … (this was 1908, remember!). Great stuff.

There are few faults that I could pick with the book. Probably the one warning would be that while Ludvigsen appears to have endeavoured to make his book as accessible as possible, there are occasions where a reader who is unfamiliar was the basics of mechanics could find themselves becoming a little lost. The degree of presumed knowledge of technical matters is not great (I'm far from being an expert on technical stuff, and I managed OK), and for the most part Ludvigsen does explain things as he goes along, but if you're an absolute beginner you might find yourself having to occasionally call up one of your more learned friends and ask something like, “Dude, what's a semi-elliptic leaf spring?”

Even so, such 'encounters with the unknown' will be no more than minor hurdles, and will not detract anything from your ability to get a lot out of this book. If you have been looking for a way in to the technical world of pre-1960 Grand Prix cars, this is the book you have been waiting for; while veteran readers should also find enough value in the contextual details that support the main text to make the book a worthwhile read.