I came, I saw, I bought a Bug

On the cars in books theme, Peter Blair-Richley has drawn my attention to Norman Lewis’s autobiography I Came, I Saw (Picador, 1994). Lewis tells of buying from Arthur Baron a straight-eight Bugatti of which he says a previous owner had altered its appearance in many ways, with a boat-shaped Parisian body and the radiator badge being replaced with that from a Sunbeam.

Lewis’s entry into motor racing came when he and Baron bought the wreck of a Bugatti in which Mervyn White had been killed, a Type 51 once raced by Earl Howe, wrongly said to have held the Brooklands lap record. Baron rebuilt it and Lewis says it performed excellently at Brooldands through 1938 in minor events, but that in his debut he nearly went over the banking in a Mountain circuit race, an eventuality from which he thought no-one ever survived — but at least five did.

Yet another non-motoring book in which the Brooklands circuit is mentioned.