MALSHER: Reading list, July 2015

Some good and significant books have been delivered to RACER offices in the past couple of months. The first of these is one that came out last year but somehow passed us by, and we’re very pleased to correct that.

The First American Grand Prix – The Savannah Auto Races 1908-’11 has been painstakingly researched by its author, Tanya A. Bailey, who is the curator of the Great Savannah Races Museum in Savannah, Ga., and the level of detail she goes into here is incredible. But then, so are the stories themselves.

You’ll often hear/read of drivers and crew members from the 1950s and ’60s remark on how racing is a totally different sport today. What this book highlights is how different the ’50s and ’60s were from the pioneering era. Take this passage, for example, about one of the 1908 Grand Prize competitors, Rene Hanriot.

The race was over and Hanriot, annoyed about running out of gas, had fuel brought up from the pits…. After refueling, he decided that rather than drive all the way around the 25-mile course to return to the Benz camp, he would simply back up to get there. However, the soldiers who were guarding the course had been given orders to keep the track clear – and that included the drivers. A group of them ordered Hanriot to stop. Hanriot pretended he was going to comply and slowed, but as he approached, he accelerated past them until he reached a second group. Among them was Captain Davant who…shot his tires out, hitting and puncturing the gas tank in the process. Hanriot later apologized for breaking the rules and gave his racing gloves to Captain Davant as a peace offering.

Well, old Davant’s idea of punishment is a lot more interesting than drive-through penalties. And this is by no means the quirkiest story in the book. In fact, the whole narrative really does show – without ramming it down the reader’s throat – how much society, as well as motorsport, has changed. The sheer complexity of getting these events up and running, particularly organizing the course construction, was a real eye-opener. People so crazy about racing as to plow through the literal and figurative obstacles of that period deserve more than a nod of appreciation from every road-race fan since.

However fine a racecar driver Sam Posey was – podium finisher at Le Mans 24 Hours, winner at Sebring 12 Hours, a Trans-Am star at the series’ absolute zenith – his talent for writing and narrating memorable soliloquies about racing is what has endeared him to many thousands of folk. Posey’s racing past, the fact he knows whereof he speaks, provides a veneer of authenticity to his words, but it’s his natural eloquence and romanticism that makes his work so enjoyable.

Where the writer meets the road, an anthology of his written work and scripts from his pre-F1 Grand Prix notes lives up to his considerable reputation. I’ve also got to say that whoever was responsible for compiling the book did a superb job as it flits from era to era, from F1 to Indy, from driver profiles to reminiscences of commentating for ABC Sports, and then the introductions Posey’s produced for Road Racing Drivers Club honorees such as Mario Andretti, Dan Gurney and Roger Penske.

Basically, this book never leaves you a chance to get bored, and were it no so handsomely produced by David Bull Publishing, it would be the kind of book you’d want to keep with your toilet brush and bottle of Simple Green. Each tale, long or short, is memorable as Posey is superb at conjuring emotive mental images from even the shortest passages. It’s hard to pick favorites, but his recollection of commentating for the Indy 500 in 1992 is very evocative, while his appreciation of Mark Donohue is downright moving. David Hobbs’ Foreword is also interesting as this pair clearly respected each other long before they liked each other.

The Americans and Brits have created some great devices when they’ve worked together. The North American P-51 Mustang is one of the finest examples, as Rolls-Royce Merlin engines – eventually built under license by Packard – turned the ’Stang from an already worthy plane into the finest fighter of World War II. The Shelby Cobra worked on the opposite principle, as Carroll crammed increasingly snarly and gnarly U.S. Ford V8s under the hood of a design that started life as the six-cylinder AC Ace, built by a little UK specialist firm on the River Thames in London.

And boy, what a lasting legacy this wonderful combo produced. In this book, Shelby Cobra – The snake that conquered the world Colin Comer takes us on the trail of Carroll Shelby’s wild yet simple idea of putting gargantuan power into a relatively light car. Surely the Cobra – not the Chrysler 300 Letter Series cars, the Chevy Impala SS 409 nor Pontiac GTO – best suits the term “America’s first muscle car.” It’s just that this little chunk of fun happened to be a sports car, too.

This book was first published in 2011 under the title Cobra Fifty Years, so many fans out there will be familiar with it, but this is the Collectors Edition with updated material. For first timers, be assured that the $75.00 price befits a glossy 272-page book measuring 9.75” x 12” and packed with almost 400 superbly produced photographs (period and modern). In fact, if this was merely a picture book, I’d probably still say it was worth every cent. But for me, who finds endlessly staring at Cobras a little like gorging oneself on pumpkin pie – you’ve got to know when to stop or you might tire of it forever – the real allure of Comer’s work is the text, both the main narrative and interludes with and about such luminaries as Peter Brock, who styled the much-adored Daytona Coupe bodies for Le Mans, and Don Roberts, who’s campaigned Cobras on track for 45 years. Nor does Comer stint in his praise of Phil Remington, later to become Dan Gurney’s right-hand man, who was given the task trying to tame the Cobra by taking its basic ingredients and mixing them with his engineering expertise.

While it’s fair to say the author is an obsessive – the picture of his wedding day is proof – that certainly isn’t a criticism. To me, that just means he’ll have been a perfectionist in his fact-checking, surely one of the biggest minefields when writing about valuable and cherished classic cars. In other words then, this may be the only Cobra book you’ll ever need to own, and the fact that the late Carroll Shelby himself penned the Foreword to the 2011 edition would suggest this is the definitive work on this hallowed beast. Get it here.

Do you ever repeatedly read someone’s name over the years and eventually think, ‘Damn, I bet he/she has some great stories to tell.’ ? Well, one of those figures for me is Tyler Alexander, and God bless David Bull Publishing for giving him the platform in A life and times at McLaren. The first thing to note is that Tyler’s life has been so packed that even despite 450 editorial pages, there are times when he really has to put the pedal to the metal to get through all his work. It’s dispiriting but predictable to note how much more the sport’s politics intrude on the fun as the book rolls on. You may even want to read the chapters in reverse.

As well as having a very straightforward writing style, Alexander is candid throughout the book. Take, for example, this extract regarding the 2008 Belgian Grand Prix, when Lewis Hamilton was penalized for passing Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari, dropping him from first to third place in the results.

It seemed Lewis was meant to wait until he had gone around the next corner (La Source) after the incident before attempting to retake the lead. Where the hell did that rule come from, anyway? It was nothing more than a crock of shit made to validate the thinking of those who perpetrated it. In a previous race, a mistake that usually warrants a 10-second drive-through penalty was punished by issuing a fine, thus enabling the car that made the mistake to still win the race. And now it was the same car that was “given” the race win at Spa thanks to Hamilton’s surprise penalty. Our thinking was that it would probably be better if the rules were made before the race rather than after it.”

However, I’ve got to confess that it’s the pre-1990 years that intrigue me most. Working for someone as smart, driven yet kind as Bruce McLaren sounds like a dream, one that got shattered way too soon, of course. Same goes for Peter Revson, one of Alexander’s close friends in racing, and Johnnny Rutherford, who became McLaren’s Indy car spearhead for the majority of the ’70s. But it’s good also to read some positive assessments of the late Teddy Mayer, a man not often showered with compliments, but who certainly could not have overseen the major success the McLaren marque enjoyed in F1 and IndyCar throughout the 1970s without being a very sharp businessman.

And there in the middle of it all, was Mr. Alexander….until he and Mayer felt obliged to leave as the Ron Dennis/John Barnard/Project Four-era of McLaren took firm hold. Working for Mayer Motor Racing Indy car team, then the ill-fated FORCE/Haas F1 project and then Newman/Haas Racing, the qualities that made Alexander such a fine engineer and also a team manager were on full display and it was little wonder that Dennis wanted him back at McLaren for 1990.

The book contains several anecdotes where Tyler leaves us hanging, mentally screaming, “What happened then?!” or, “Exactly how was that nightmare resolved?!” But I think that’s just his way. Maybe the key to TA’s longevity in racing is his ability to play a problem down, rein in his ego and not turn into a schemer, unlike some of those he encountered. He saved his ambition for the actual racing side of racing.