Drawing upon a gaggle of familiar contributors (Mark Hughes, Simon Taylor, Eoin Young, David Tremayne, Nigel Roebuck and Adam Cooper), 'Formula One: The Autobiography' traces the entire history of the World Championship primarily through the words of those who were there. Books based around quotes often suffer from a lack of cohesion, but this book does a good job of avoiding that pitfall by paying as much attention to each excerpt's potential to keep the story moving forward as it does to its 'quotability'.

The book is broken down into chapters arranged by the decade, with a single chapter covering the pre-championship era kicking things off. Keeping the chronological theme running, the reader is guided along race by race, year by year, with other significant events slotted in accordingly. Normally, race-by-race accounts of a season can send me to sleep far more effectively than any drug you'd care to name, but in this case it works beautifully to create a sense of continuity that helps put events into context with one another.

The work that has gone into all aspects of the book is obvious – the quotes are well researched, and derived from a combination of easily accessible and more obscure sources. Those looking for further information are helped along by the inclusion of a bibliography that includes a list of all pages upon which it was quoted from. It is a rather hit-and-miss way to go about finding information though, and it would have been good to see the inclusion of a more comprehensive and cross-referenced index.

Each chapter is held together by a series of short, concise paragraphs that serve to both provide appropriate names, dates and events, and also to link the quotes up into a single flowing story. The end result is a fascinating journey through all eras of Grand Prix racing, taken mostly through the eyes of those with their hands on the steering wheel. It's intriguing stuff, particularly the reports and quotes from the earliest days of racing – a period for which first-hand accounts are not always easy to track down.

Presented in coffee-table format, there are no prizes for guessing that a lot of space is devoted to photography. Like the text, the shots are a mix of the familiar and the previously unseen, but as a whole the book is beautifully presented. One problem that these large-format books are often susceptible to is the trade-off of style for substance - it's not uncommon to find a book like this so jammed with photographs that a three-hundred page volume can only offer twenty-five minutes worth of actually reading. Not in this case.

As well as being great eye-candy, 'Formula One: The Autobiography' is more than substantial enough to keep any enthusiast busy for quite a while (of course, the fact that it is impractically large to carry around on the bus, thus limiting the available time to actually read it, probably has something to do with it).

Selecting a highlight is difficult, although Enzo Ferrari's lengthy dissertation on Alfred Neubauer from 1954 appealed to me a lot for the way it says as much about Ferrari as the famous German team manager:

"Political motives were behind the efforts of Hitlerite Germany, when Mercedes and Auto Union cars swept the board everywhere. It was abundantly clear that this gigantic mechanical offensive was meant to enhance the German prestige and the Nazi regime. The second Mercedes offensive, after the war, was for reasons of prestige and economic policy.

"The one great figure behind both these attacks was, of course, Alfred Neubauer, who was for years my personal adversary and became a good friend of mine. I first saw Neubauer when he was driving a Mercedes in the Targa Florio race in 1923 or 1924. He was lanky, with very pale eyes, a high-pitched voice, a prominent aquiline nose and brusque manners. 'He's not a very likeable sort of fellow, this German,' I thought to myself.

"Then, in 1934, we ran into one another again. It was the debut of the weight formula, and Mercedes and Auto Union – or, rather, Germany – had come to the conclusion that the time was ripe for their offensive. And Alfred Neubauer was the new general. He had grown so stout that I hardly recognised him. And, in the years that were to come, seemingly in pace with the increasing strength of Mercedes and Germany, Neubauer grew steadily fatter and fatter and became increasingly more authoritarian and dictatorial.

"He was to be seen by the pits casting scornful glances at his rivals and barking out commands in his Wehrmacht officer's voice, whilst his staff jumped to his orders as though on a parade ground. Very soon, he was a well-known personage in our little world, generally disliked – although this did not worry him in the slightest – yet he was highly esteemed and feared for his efficiency. I thought quite often of Neubauer during the war: indeed, I could not help thinking of him every time a German mechanized column passed in front of my workshops and some officer or other alighted and started shouting orders.

"In 1954, Alfred Neubauer turned up once more at the head of a team of sleek, silver cars. And he was fatter and more dictatorial than ever. Year by year, I watched him grow stouter and stouter with increasing concern: he and Mercedes and Germany seemed to grow as though they were one, pound by pound, success by success, mark by mark.

"This unhalting process could not help making me think: 'If Neubauer doesn't stop putting on weight, it looks as though Germany is getting ready for another war." (p. 56).

This book represents one of the more accessible and engaging ways to undertake a liner journey through the history of Grand Prix racing from its inception through to the end of the 2001 season. The inclusion of short biographies of most of the major players in Formula One and a season-by-season list of race and championship winners facilitate quick fact-checking, although the lack of a proper index could make looking for specific quotes, or quotes to match a particular driver or event, a little annoying. (That said, the fact that everything is arranged chronologically goes some way toward helping make up for the shortfall).