Great Read

John Barnard's all-carbon fibre chassis McLaren MP4/1 changed F1 for good – four decades on, he recalled the design journey with James Elson

Enthusiast tastes change inevitably with each generation. Most of us grow up in motor sport entranced by the successful cars of our personally formative era. Therefore it’s perfectly natural for…

Champagne was poured over the nose according to Porsche tradition and the car the world was expecting to take the marque back to the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2000…

Austria '75 found Penske at its lowest ebb – but then a year later it fought back, with the help of John Watson, a 'magic' set of tyres and a Gillette-themed bet

There is a hoary old tale, almost certainly apocryphal, of a party being held with Brian Lister as its guest of honour. And the organisers naturally arranged for as many…

I may have been in a minority, but I enjoyed the Detroit Grand Prix from the very first race in 1982. The streets were bumpy and angular but there was…

40 years on, John Watson recalls his watershed-moment 1981 British GP win, via a flick of the vees, stolen car radio, victorious BBQ – and the revolutionary McLaren MP4

Twenty-one years ago, Ferrari returned to the pinnacle of Formula 1 achievement, adding the Drivers’ World Championship for Michael Schumacher to its second consecutive Formula 1 Constructors’ title, which itself was its…

No breed is more effective – or deadly – than the poacher turned gamekeeper. As the ‘M’ of March, that arch ‘disruptor’ of constructors, Max Mosley served the ideal apprenticeship…

It looked like nothing else on earth and cost a fraction as much as a comparable Ferrari. It wasn’t conceived with competition in mind, yet had scored its maiden race…

Roger Penske is, quite simply, a giant of the sport, a restless and extreme achiever in a fiercely competitive business. He started out as a driver before moving from the…

In 2011, Dan Wheldon came in from the IndyCar cold to take a scarcely believable last-lap, last-corner win at the Indy 500 – his then-team boss Bryan Herta recounts the story

From the outset Colin Chapman had no option but to be obsessive about the weight of his cars. He had no access to the exotic twincam engines used by such…

Back in what some like to call the ‘good old days’ racing drivers were freelancers, heroes for hire, hustling a grand prix car round Monte Carlo one weekend and taking…

For those of a certain age, the 1990s is remembered as a halcyon period of great rivalries, epic races and dramatic deciders. The decade began with the heated relationship between Ayrton…

On May 13, 1950 Giuseppe Farina took the chequered flag at Silverstone, and thus by definition won a world championship race at his first attempt, for this was the first…

The Parnelli VPJ-4 is one of F1's great coulda-woulda-shoulda stories, writes Preston Lerner. Without it, Mario Andretti would not have won the title with Lotus in 1978