Atmospheric motor racing fiction

I see from Eoin Young’s column in Autocar that he finds the new F1 novel, Flat Out by Colin Dryden a “cracking good read”. He tells us how this latest opens: “Alex Bastyan, GP driver, elbow and let his gaze wander over his team-owner’s wife who was lying naked beside him in the best suite of the Hotel Hermitage in Monte Carlo”. If that kind of thing turns you on I’m told that Edwina Currie and filly Cooper do it much better, or worse…

Real motor racing is so fascinating that I have found that fiction about it has little appeal. The only book of this kind which I have really enjoyed was Speed Triumphant, a translation of Pierre Fisson’s masterful Les Princes du Tumulte (Putnam 1951). In it, Jean-Pierre L’Archange drives for Gordini’s Simca description of the races and a long haul to the circuit in one of the Gordini transporters is wonderfully done, the and he doesn’t get killed, being content to dead-heat with Farina at Berne