The more you think about it the more daunting the whole thing seems, but if anybody would be up to the task then I guess that Simon Arron and Mark Hughes would be the men. Both are heavily entrenched in the Haymarket publishing empire as writers for the British publications Autosport and Motorsport News. Even more crucially, they have free access to the gigantic LAT image archive, which is probably the one thing that ultimately made the whole endeavour viable.

Right off the bat, the authors fess up and admit that 'The Complete Book of Formula One' isn't actually complete ­ there are still a couple of dozen Grand Prix participants, primarily 1950s and 1960s privateers, who were so camera-shy that they have even apparently slipped through the cracks of LAT's nine million-plus image bank.

Far from treating this as a stumbling block, the authors have invited a little bit of audience-participation in the hunt for those final elusive images. Readers who might happen to have access to a picture of a driver/car combination that is missing from the book are invited to upload it to the publishers website for inclusion in the next edition, in exchange for a free copy and a spot on the 'roll of honour'. (Tell the grandkids about that one).

In theory, it's actually a rather cool and completely sensible idea to throw the search out to the general public, however it might not work so well in practice given that when I went to check the website out I was unable to access it. Hopefully the problem was just a one-off glitch. Anyhow, back to the book. Despite the 'twin author approach' (which is reminiscent that 'twin guitar' thing that large-haired hard rock bands liked to do in the 1980s), this book is very much about the photographs ­ and with a shade under 3700 images to play with, it couldn't have been done any other way. The image reproduction sometimes falls short of the standard that you'd normally expect, and is particularly evident in some awful pixelation problems that usually stem from the photo scanners having needed to zoom right in on a particular driver in a group of cars because it was the only available representation of that subject.

Bearing that in mind, those sorts of issues are understandable. The inconsistent quality of the colour reproduction, however, is rather more mystifying. This afflicts images that date right up to the present day, and seem to come from nothing more than somebody getting the colour balance or contrast out of whack while preparing the photos for publication. These kinds of issues are less excusable, particularly for a book that is still priced towards the higher end of affordable.

The text very much plays a supporting role to the images, but still does a good job of contextualising things by taking the reader through each year of the championship season-by-season from 1950 to 2003. The season reviews are dealt with in no more than three or four paragraphs each, but this is ample to provide the reader with a nice linear picture of how Formula One racing has evolved over the past 54 years. While the main body of the text serves to inform, the amusement factor comes from the one-liners that lie buried in the captions. Maybe it's just my sense of humour, but any book that identifies Ascari in a group shot by his 'chianti gut' is OK by me.