Great Read

The winter of 1957-58 must have been an interesting time for John Wyer and David Brown, the men charged with determining the future direction of Aston Martin’s racing endeavours. Some…

The race which was particularly exciting for me was probably my first Grand Prix win for Lotus in Japan in 1976. The weather conditions were dreadful, some of the drivers…

Michael Burn is 92, a former Times correspondent, poet and playwright. But when Henry Birkin met him he was a young student who had never written anything. A mere three…

Howden Ganley’s Formula 1 career began with BRM in 1971 and ended against a barrier at the Nürburgring in 1974, both legs broken. In between he might have won the…

May 1982. Monaco Grand Prix. Six drivers swap the lead in less than two laps. Alain Prost is heading for victory when his Renault goes off before the swimming pool.…

By his own admission Robin Herd "vacillated and wavered" over which path to follow after leaving Cosworth in 1969. He could either take Bernie Ecclestone's shilling and design a car…

If you ask me, the blokes on the board at BMW lost their nerve. “We communicated our 2009 target four years ago,” said Mario Theissen in Valencia at the roll-out…

The race that everyone remembers and was certainly my most famous win was the 1971 Italian Grand Prix. That was the last of the Monza slipstreamers, before the chicanes, and…

It was Tony Vandervell's impatience as much as anything else which created the machine which won the inaugural Formula 1 Constructors' Championship in 1958. He had, like other notables in…

As the song says about love and marriage, they could have been made for one another. Henri Toivonen and the Group B rally cars of the mid-1980s seemed to share…

It may not be immediately obvious what this Cooper-Maserati T86 is doing on these pages, other than going rather fast and looking gorgeous. Look at its race record and while…

Hegemony in Formula 1 — if you're clever enough to achieve it in the first place — rarely lasts for long. Like breakaway riders in a cycle race, most teams…

Win the World Championship, and you become a hero for life. Damon Hill, Nigel Mansell, Keke Rosberg, Alan Jones, Jody Scheckter, James Hunt: unforgettable names who won the F1 title…

For some, like Cosworth's Keith Duckworth, Formula 1's turbo era was a crazy aberration. When F1 's return to power had arrived in 1966, the rules included a provision for…

I have particularly fond memories of Clermont-Ferrand in 1972 - I thought I could walk on water that day. Clermont stands out as almost a perfect day - I had…

One day, somebody will write a great full-length biography of Ayrton Senna da Silva. Let’s hope it won’t take the couple of centuries for that someone to compile the balanced, well-informed…

The inaugural Mexican Grand Prix of 1962 should have been a celebration. The country's racing prodigy, Ricardo Rodriguez, was to perform in front of his adoring countrymen. These people, who'd…