Great Read

Between this year's Australian and Malaysian grands prix, Mrs C and I used up a free week with our first visit to New Zealand. On our travels around the wonderful…

No racing driver has ever survived such a big accident. And it’s unlikely that a grand prix car will ever again be allowed to run flat out into an earth…

Appropriately, it is November 29 as I write, and – just as in 1975 – there is a thick crust of frost on the windscreen of my car. That evening,…

Once again the Grand Prix teams of cars and drivers came together to pit their skill and endurance against the fabulous Nurburgring, for the German GP is seldom a split-second…

Lorenzo Bandini... Such a mellifluous name for a racing driver, it always seemed to me, like Clay Regazzoni or Johnny Servoz-Gavin. And they all looked the part, too. Bandini was…

When Colin Chapman was invited to the 1962 Indianapolis 500 by Dan Gurney, the Lotus founder surveyed the front-engined 'dinosaurs' on show there and famously remarked, "All you've got to…

How would a 1906 Renault or a 1939 Mercedes fare against last year's McLaren MP4-21? How would they relate to each other? Would a current car have as big a…

Since Hans Tak kicked off Mercedes-Benz's rally career by winning the 1954 Tulip Rally with the light, powerful, spaceframe 300SL gull-wing, the Three-Pointed Star has been in and out of…

In the end, it is just a car. You sit with a steering wheel in your hands. You change gear by shifting a lever fore and aft, working your way…

Whenever I am in Italy, I visit my old friend Romolo Tavoni at his home outside Modena. Tavoni is now 85, in poor health and in receipt of hospital treatment,…

When people ask me which I think is the most impressive vantage point on any circuit I have visited, my answer unfailingly surprises them. Eau Rouge at Spa? Suzuka's 130R?…

When the 1985 season started I didn't have an F1 drive. I was still looking at F1, hoping to get back in. In the middle of the season I got…

Kids can be so greedy. Surely the spectacle of Gilles Villeneuve dragging half his Ferrari around Zandvoort and Alan Jones notching up a third straight win in the new-fangled Williams…

In the UK at least, the frenzy surrounding Lewis Hamilton’s World Championship win last November spread far beyond Formula 1’s normal audience, and for a few days his name was…

Moments from the life of Keke Rosberg. The 1982 World Champion has always been a fine story-teller — and well able to tell a tale against himself. Rosberg's sense of…

A 'retro' interview this month. Recently I came across a tape, recorded in November 1981 with Frank Williams, and on a whim slotted it into the machine and began to…

Complacency: a strong word when aimed at brittle motor racing people.  But... "Why change it when we're winnin'?"  Sounds complacent, doesn't it?  Well, at the dawn of the 1960s John…