Grand Prix Century — The first 100 years of the world's most glamorous and dangerous sport

by Christopher Hilton

It began at 6am on Tuesday, 26 June 1906, when the first of 34 pug-like cars prepared to go onto an immense, stone-strewn circuit outside Le Mans. At the instant that Lorraine-Dietrich accelerated away, the great, astonishing, frightening, heroic 100-year dynasty of Grand Prix racing was bom. The sport which millions of people worldwide watch on television today is the direct, unbroken descendant of that.

This book tells the whole story - from there to here - in a continuous narrative of living detail embracing many men, great and small, recreating a host of the most thrilling races and exploring in plain language the stunning technology. Woven into the text are the winners of every race since that dawn in 1906, through to the Grand Prix that completed the century - by a coincidence in France. It was won by a young Spaniard, Femando Alonso.

Here, competing again, are the pioneers with their moustaches and goggles, who drove brutally primitive machines up to the First World War. Here are the good chaps of the 1920s and the sinister 1930s, when Hitler decreed that German cars must conquer the world - and got Mercedes and Auto Union to do it. Here, driving those cars, are the ltalian maestro Tazio Nuvolari, the tragic Bernd Rosemeyer and Dick Seaman, the man lost between England and Nazi Germany. And here are the monstrously dangerous tracks they risked their lives on.

Post-war we see Juan-Manuel Fangio raising the art of driving to new heights, Stirling Moss who pushed him so hard, Mike Hawthom who drove in a bow tie. Here are the 1960s and a new generation: ambassadorial Graham Hill, shy Jim Clark, forward-looking Jackie Stewart - a generation that melted into the 1970s. Then there was Alain Prost and the man who might have been graced by God, Ayrton Senna. The next maestro was the youngster who really wanted to be a footballer, Michael Schumacher. And so it goes on.

Buch, Hardcover, 15,5 x 24, cm, 496 Seiten, 33 farbige und 49 s/w-Abbildungen, englischer Text
Einzelstück - Zustand: neuwertig