24 Hours: 100 years of Le Mans book review

Tough brief – the whole century of the Le Mans 24 Hours in one hit, and not from a publisher you might expect. But while the mainstream format short-changes us on photos, which are small and fairly few, the advantage is you get an awful lot of hardbacked reading for your £20. Plus of course an authoritative writer.

Who is it for? Maybe too detailed for the casual reader and not well enough illustrated? But on the other hand even though you’ve read about the White House crash, the Jacky Ickx grid walk and the McLaren F1 GTR many times Williams has other nuggets to offer.

Known for his background research, he’s read widely around the core facts, explaining how and where event inspirers   and Charles Faroux met in 1922 and hatched their idea. He also suggests that the complicated Rudge-Whitworth Trophy, run as overlapping triennial competitions, was a wangle to get the ACO to commit to repeating the event. Then there is mention of a lady driver film star’s unexplained death in Cannes, why a yellow line was painted down the middle of the road for 1933, and Sammy Davis’s objection to reflectors on trees – “If we go on like this we shall have floodlighting…”

Richard has a nice turn of phrase too: “Moss made his usual jet-heeled getaway”; “the Mazda’s scream was as insistent as its orange and green colour scheme”.

Maybe it’s me but there seemed fewer of these interesting diversions in the later years – the complete racing, backed by details of the tumultuous recent regulation changes, just not so many of the historical byways. Although he does cite actor Matthew Modine saying motor sport has to stop because of climate change – one of the challenges that major races like this are increasingly facing.

After all the history Williams closes with some present-day atmosphere – the noise, the lights and the smells around the track as dusk falls, the 30 plane trees at Tertre Rouge that have seen every Le Mans race. But Audi’s Ulrich Baretzky notes there are only old people in the grandstands. “In 20 years they’ll be dead, and who will be in the grandstand then?” He’s making a point about noise, that it’s only us old folk who like to hear wailing engines, but there is a wider point too – the youth of today aren’t especially interested in cars for themselves. We just have to hope that sheer spectacle remains a draw, for there are few spectacles like Le Mans at sundown. GC

24 Hours: 100 Years of Le Mans

Richard Williams

Simon & Schuster, £20

ISBN 9781398517226