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Written by:
David Phillips
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11/29/2004 - 07:00 PM
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Shoppers beware: There are only 24 days and change left before Christmas. In the days of blue laws and before the Internet, that would have meant, what, 20 shopping days before Christmas. Nowadays, when shopping is a 24/7 endeavor, it's 24 days plus whatever is left of today, the final day in November.
That said, allow me to offer some suggested gifts for the literary-minded motorsports enthusiast. I'm not talking about the current crop of books out there, including Alex Zanardi's compelling autobiography ("Alex Zanardi: My Sweetest Victory") and "A Winning Adventure," the story of Honda's CART program as told by Gordon Kirby and John Oreovicz.
Rather, I'm culling my own book shelves for, er, vintage tomes that stand the test of time; tomes that, thanks to a host of vintage book sellers in cyberspace, are generally available to anyone with a computer and an ISP. While it's hardly a definitive list, in my opinion it includes valuable, arguably essential, reading to anyone who would be a serious student of the sport.
I would begin with two books by Robert Daley, "Cars and Speed" (G.T. Foulis & Co.) and "The Cruel Sport" (Bonanza Books). As the New York Times' European sports correspondent in the late 1950s and early '60s, Daley covered Formula 1 and sports car racing during one of the sports' most glorious and dangerous eras. Although his admiration for those involved in the sport is unmistakable, Daley is first and foremost a reporter, not a fan using his way with words as a means of acquiring entree to his heroes. Thus he wrote what he perceived to be the unvarnished truth, with little concern (apart from fundamental issues of human decency) about toes stepped upon or egos bruised.
For example, Daley's relationship with Dan Gurney turned frosty as the result of the words he wrote in the wake of Gurney's accident at the 1960 Dutch Grand Prix which resulted in the death of a spectator.
"I wrote an article about what Gurney had been through, wondering if he still wanted to go on with 'the cruel sport,'" says Daley in the "The Cruel Sport." "Gurney, reading this, was furious. Friends told me he talked of suing. He felt I questioned his courage, when I didn't mean to. A husband and father who was not an idiot, who had known fright and suffering, who had seen others killed around him, might never be able to hold his foot down again. He might be unable to through nerves; he might not want to, knowing the fragility of the machine and himself. The decision he had to make was not between courage and cowardice; he had to decide if the prize was worth the price. To throw in his hand would not be cowardice. Nor would the opposite, to me, prove courage. To get over the gray period, to come out of it faster than ever, might prove a man only insensate. A man does what he had to do. Let no man who has not been there apply pat words to it. Not cowardice. Not courage."
Strong stuff. And there's plenty of it in both the "The Cruel Sport," a coffee table book filled with evocative photos from the era, and "Cars at Speed" which tells the history of the great F1 and sports car races chapter by chapter and, thus, of the sport and its greatest drivers.
Similarly, Charles Fox's "The Great Racing Cars and Drivers" (Grosset and Dunlap, Inc.) is a history of the sport from the days of the Gordon Bennett Trophy races and the first Grands Prix up through the early 1970s. Not unlike Daley, Fox seamlessly blends tales of the cars, drivers and events into a lyrical biography of the sport on both sides of the Atlantic. Consider his epitaph on the Miller/Duesenberg era of American racing.
"Their circumstances altered beyond recognition by the economic crash and the events that followed, most of the men who became giants in the teens and twenties DePalma, DePaolo, Cooper, Milton, Hartz, and Duray chose not to race on. Lockhart's meteor-like career ended on the sand at Daytona Beach in 1928, when his Stutz Black Hawk land-speed-record car crashed and killed him... Harry Miller went bankrupt in the crash and the Duesenberg brothers split up and dropped out of racing. Together, these men had established
Like anyone who ever worked for, or who came in contact with, Leon Mandell, I had a complicated relationship with the former editor/publisher at Autoweek. In no small part, that stemmed from his unsettlingly direct manner, a manner reflected in his best writing. Some of that writing can be found in "Fast Lane Summer," (Squarebooks, Inc.), Mandell's account of Danny Sullivan's nearly disastrous 1980 Can-Am season with Garvin Brown Racing.
This was long before Sullivan hooked up with Doug Shierson or Roger Penske in CART, indeed, before his promising but unproductive F1 season with Ken Tyrrell. Instead, 1980 came at a time when Sullivan's career hung in the balance, and the early returns were inconclusive.
"In the whole shelf of racing biographies, there is one subject unaddressed: desperation. Not a racing driver of consequence has struggled upward unburdened by its enervating weight. Nor is there a driver on his way down whose ankles are not pulled by desperation's dreadful gravity.
"By the early spring of 1980, Danny Sullivan had lived with desperation for the eight years of his professional life, but like drivers everywhere he was absolutely certain of his ability. There is an unrivaled self-confidence about racers and their view of their talent. All of the serious drivers believe their driving surpasses that of their rivals, is above the level of even the greatest of their predecessors, is beyond calculation. It takes that kind of extraordinary hubris to keep drivers like Sullivan going, for their early careers are filled with rejection and failure."
And speaking of "the whole shelf of racing biographies," the gold standard by which all racing biographies have long been judged is "All but My Life" (E.P. Dutton & Co.), Ken Purdy's account of Stirling Moss' life and career in the wake of the accident at Goodwood in 1962 that cut that career short.
Purdy's job was made easier by an extraordinarily thoughtful and articulate subject more than one chapter is nothing more than Moss speaking at length, be it on how one becomes a racing driver or his failed marriage with brewing heiress Katie Molson. Nothing wrong with that.
What more could Purdy, or anyone else, add to the following:
"When I get in my car I don't think I have ever in my life considered the point of being killed. If you asked me if it was a dangerous sport, I'd say yes, obviously. But not for me. I would say the only danger to me is if something falls off or somebody spins in front of me where I can't help hitting him, or if I hit oil on the road. But if you asked me didn't I think it dangerous to the point where I might overdrive and go off the road, I'd be insulted. I mean, boy, it's as simple as that.
"It doesn't frighten me to go over the blind brow of a hill at one hundred and sixty or seventy miles an hour. I know I shall make it. I say to myself, if I say anything, that I know how to do this, this is what I have spent my life learning, the chance of anything happening is next to nil, and I'll do it.
"What's the point of living if one's not able to do at least one thing."
This is not to say that Purdy never injects himself into "All but My Life." He does, judiciously, not overbearingly. Like Daley, Fox and Mandell, he is "able to do at least one thing," and that's write about motorsports. And I would unhesitatingly recommend his book on Moss on those by Daley, Fox and Mandell as ideal gifts for the motorsports enthusiast in your life.
Enjoy.
David Phillips is a Senior Writer for RACER magazine.
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