BUGATTI - A RACING HISTORY BY DAVID VENABLES

BUGATTI — A RACING HISTORY BY DAVID VENABLES ISBN 1-85960-834-5 Published by Haynes Publishing, £35.00

FASTIDIOUS HISTORIAN

David Venables has followed up his book on Alfa Romeo’s GP cars with this under-themicroscope look at the Italian marque’s most famous rivals of the 1920s and early ’30s. Ettore Bugatti’s flooding of the privateer market ensured that his beautiful cars racked up a bewildering number of wins — and Venables makes a manful attempt at ensuring

his account of these do not clog up the text. If he does not quite manage it, that is, in the main, a fault of the book’s layout. All the information is here — from Ettore’s driving career to the disaster that was the T251 of 1956 —but why hide, and group, the driver profiles and car tech specs at the back of the book, when they could have been used to leaven up the main text? PF