Great Read

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…

The sharknose Ferrari was every schoolboy's epitome of the early 1960s Formula 1 car, and it still has a place in the affections of the man who won the 1961 World…

In streaming rain on Bathurst's 190mph Conrod Straight, the yellow BMW M3 appeared to aquaplane gently onto the grass verge. It glanced the wall and crossed the track, still clearly…

Forty years after he won his first World Championship, Sir Jack Brabham is showing no signs of slowing down. He is always in demand for historic events and PR appearances,…

A large Greek called Demis Roussos topped the charts. Water was rationed as Britain sweated in the hottest summer on record. Björn Borg beat Ilie Nastase to take the first…

The name of Lotus, absent since 1994, returns to Formula 1 this year, and if that name is all it shares with its legendary forbear still I think it something…

Many of you, I'm certain, will remember him, head tilted slightly forwards, in the cockpit of that elegant gold pin-striped jet black JPS Lotus 72. Rear tyres chirping audibly as…