Friday January 19, 2007

The Last road race - Richard Williams

I got this book as one of my Christmas presents from Santa this year. It is a brilliant book on the 1957 Pescara Grand Prix race. The track is a triangle shaped course on the Adriatic coast and just under sixteen miles long. Williams starts the book with the drivers arriving at the track , not in jets/helicopters as they do now but in all sorts of transportation. The race would be another challenge between the Red cars of Italy and the Green of Britain - now challenging the domination of those cars with the likes of Vanwall, Cooper . It was also a conflict between Sterling Moss and Fangio with the former now being able to match the Argentian's pace on the track.

Williams then spends time discussing the place itself and then the two English drivers still alive who both drove at the race Moss and Brooks. In Moss's house are two steering wheels both damaged during dramatic crashes; first in 1960 at Spa the second which ended his career at Goodwood in 1962. He was now driving for Vanwall who although having a fast car had one that was slightly fragile at certain tracks. Brook's house was adorned with racing pictures one taken at Spa where he won for Vanwall in 1958. The book then covers two the sets of cars the Reds and the Greens. For this race only one Ferrari was entered and this was a privateer as Enzo Ferrari was refusing to take part due to the pressure of the attacks on him and his team due to the number of his drivers who had been killed that year. He was even considering withdrawing from the sport for ever. Fangio was in a Masarati there were works and private entries with those cars. The Green cars were reaching their ascendancy, they were challenging the dominance of Italy at last. Vanwall led the charge funded by a rich industrialist Tony Vandervell who eventually withdrew from racing when the body count got to high for him. Alongside them but behind them on the grid where the Cooper cars built in a two story garage in Surbiton - the cars were light but lacked the power of the other cars but were still getting points paying places at Grand Prix races.

So the scene is set and the practice starts. The Ferrari claims pole with Moss, Fangio behind it. Musso in the Ferrari initially leads the race but the partisan crowd is soon disapointed when Moss takes the lead and wins the race. By lunchtime the straw bales are being moved out of the way to re-open the roads to normal traffic and the asphalt that carried Moss and his peers at breathtaking speeds of 190Mph plus are now the home of more sedate traffic. Tony Brooks says that unlike modern races where everyone leaves as soon as the race was over then drivers and others met for dinner and talked - he blames the lack of meeting and communication between drivers that causes the problems we see in modern day Formula One.

At the end Williams takes us through the drivers of that race and many lost their lives in cars. Moss was never to win a championship loosing out this year by one point. A final quote from Williams on the drivers of that era They were no angels, most of them , but they lived by a set of values that included honour, patriotism and an acceptance of mortal risk. Even the most famous of them was not overwhelmed by their celebrity. They kept a sense of proportion that allowed them to maintain normal relationships with the rest of humanity . Great book.