Both sports unite man with machine. (And road, come to think of it). Both have similarly quirky, although very different, fitness demands. Both cater to the slightly odd concept of busting your gut for someone else's benefit - on one hand you have all those US Postal mules just about killing themselves to ensure that Lance Armstrong has the easiest possible run through the Alps, on the other you have Rubens Barrichello deferring to Michael at the first crackle of the radio. Neither sports are immune to the 'unfair advantage' which in F1 comes at the end of a laptop, and in cycling comes at the end of a syringe. And perhaps because of the very particular demands that each make of their participants, both have a strong sense of their own history, and as many fireside tales as you'd care to hear.

Like this one. In the early part of the 20th century, Eugene Cristophe was at the top of the cycling world. Having spent a month in hospital and losing two years of racing after riding through a snowstorm in the 1910 Milan-San Remo race, he bounced back in the 1912 Tour de France to record a lower overall time than the winner. Unfortunately, he did it in a year when the results were decided on the basis of an obscure points system. Undaunted, Cristophe won a number of the major lead-up races to the 1913 Tour, and went into the race as one a red-hot favourite. And until the Tour reached the Pyrenees, Cristophe was delivering on his promise, running strongly amongst the leaders only to have the front forks on his bike snap while he was blasting down the Tourmalet. At the time, Tour rules dictated that the riders had to undertake all repairs to their bike without outside help. So Christophe got up, dusted himself off, and lugged his bike 10 kilometres to the town of Sainte-Mairie-de-Campan.

Bloodied and exhausted, he found the blacksmith, waved the guy aside, and under the watchful eye of some Tour officials, set about forging some new forks. Two hours later, and having lost four hours overall, he was on his way - only to be penalised a further ten minutes because, with the bike in one hand and the hammer in the other, he had committed the cardinal sin of allowing the blacksmith's son to pump the bellows. He rejoined the Tour last, but eventually fought his way back to finish ninth.

The war got in the way then, and when the Tour resumed in 1919, Cristophe was back for another go. This time, he made history by becoming the first rider to don the new yellow jersey that had just been introduced by race organisers to distinguish the overall leader. But then, between Metz and Dunkirk, it happened again - a grind, a shudder, a lurch, and Cristophe was again staring incredulously at a pair of broken forks. He kept trying to win the Tour before finally giving up in 1925 as a 40-year old.

Cristophe is thus remembered as a rider who was as blessed with skill as he was cursed with bad luck - much like Chris Amon. The unfortunate cyclist's story sounds like one that deserves to be told in greater depth, however thanks to Eoin Young, we don't have to wait any longer for Amon to get the same treatment. That Amon never managed to win a world championship Grand Prix is a statistical anomaly that perhaps surpasses Stirling Moss's failure to take a title. And it is highly unfortunate that it is this with which Amon's career is now primarily associated, because it does no justice to his undoubted talent behind the wheel.

The absence of a GP winner's trophy on the Kiwi's mantlepiece has been discussed to the point of exhaustion, and there are any number of theories to explain where things went wrong. Sheer misfortune is one of the most popular, and it should come as little surprise to learn that it is the main gist of this biography. The idea that one can, to some extent, determine their own fortune is also touched on, but not to the same degree.

While some of Amon's near-misses, such as winning the Argentine GP in a year that it wasn't a championship round (1971), or suffering a spate of mechanical problems in a season that could otherwise have seen him not only win races, but challenge for the title (1968), were very obviously beyond his control there were others that could have been of his own making. Once again though, this should not be allowed to detract from just how good Amon was behind the wheel, and Young's book does an excellent job of reminding us. Written with the full co-operation of Amon (and supported by a lot of interview material), this is about as close as we'll probably get to hearing the story out of his own mouth. The anecdotes fly thick and fast, and finding one worthy of reproduction here was about as hard as opening the book to a random page and seeing what turned up. And this description of a blown tyre while racing for Ferrari at Le Mans was it. It's lengthy, but worth it:

"There was a sort of jack, a torch, and a wheel hammer to knock the centre-lock spinner off. The first thing I discovered was that the batteries in the torch were flat, but there was plenty of cars coming past with their headlights blazing so I had light on and off - occasional illumination at 200 mph.

"I got the jack out and started to crank it up. It actually worked after a fashion, and the next step was to get the wheel hammer, wait for a blaze of headlights, and take a shot at the centre-lock wheelnut. I swung at it and the head flew off, disappearing into the night and the track-side ditch. So I'm crawling around in the ditch looming for the head of this bloody hammer at one in the morning … I was obviously going to have to drive it back to the pits somehow, so I packed the kit away, got back in, fired it up, and drove away relatively slowly down the straight - but I was probably still doing 100 mph and the tyre was disintegrating, flapping wildly. There were sparks showering back from the suspension upright, and I assume what eventually happened was that a fuel line was knocked off one of the pannier-type fuel tanks just in front of the rear wheels. The whole car just went up in flames - BOOF! I had been tooling down the right-hand side of the track anyway, and I aimed it for the ditch. It was getting bloody warm by that stage, so I jumped out, thinking I had almost stopped, but I was probably still doing 50 mph and I ended up somersaulting down the ditch while the Ferrari rolled another 100 metres along the road before it came to a stop not far from a marshall's post.

"The marshals could see the flames from the car, which was now well alight, and they came running. There were four marshals and three Gendarmes, and they soon had the fire out and were searching frantically for the driver - me. They were looking around in the ditch, wondering where I was, and I remember walking up the ditch, feeling a bit battered, and tapping a Gendarme on the shoulder and saying, 'Here I am.' Poor guy. He bloody nearly died of fright." (p. 99-100).

Such reflections are weaved neatly into the text, producing an engaging and accessible picture of an intriguing career. And the story is helped along by a strong selection of images, the highlight of which is an utterly sensational shot of the hero drifting a Ferrari at Oulton Park (although the funky overhead shot of the two GT40s in pitlane at Le Mans was, for my money, a strong runner-up).