Polish up the pince-nez, suss out the smoking jacket, plump up the pipe and settle in for this special literary edition of motoring in The Oz. Yes, 20 readers we’re going to be blabbing about books and muttering about mags.
Of course, we’ve picked books with lots of pictures and not many words.
A constant bestseller is Adrian Newey’s 2017 autobiography, How to Build a Car. One of the greatest engineers in F1 history, Adrian designed winners for Williams and McLaren before joining Red Bull.
Of course, a cool $60m a year helped him decide to leave Red Bull for Aston Martin. Not that he hadn’t been offered big bucks before. In 2014, Mercedes wanted him, he said a quick no. Later in the year: “I travelled to visit Luca Montezemolo, the president of Ferrari, seeing him at his farmhouse close to Tuscany.
“We held serious talks and their offer was amazing. Luca wanted to give me the whole Ferrari operation, road and race car. The promise was of an almost film-star lifestyle and the most ridiculously large financial offer – well over double the already generous salary I was receiving at Red Bull”. He said no again.
We can exclusively reveal Adrian’s Australian connection. His brother Nick is a technical director in the showbiz caper and is now TD for Wicked The Musical.
Josh Robinson and Jono Clegg’s 2024 already classic, The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World’s Fastest Growing Sport, shows how Liberty Media’s TV series, Drive to Survive, added more than 70 million new fans in its 10 largest markets in two years.
In one sense the success of the reality TV show was simple. Focus on the 20 mainly attractive drivers, rather than the 20 pieces of metal.
They also discovered a new breed of fan. They are fans of “post-sport sport”. People who were perfectly happy calling themselves fans, buying merchandise and consuming F1 content who might never sit through a full Grand Prix.
Yes, another Australian connection. The man who put all the things that Bernie Ecclestone had deliberately kept off the air – footage from inside the garages and radio communications – on the screen was David Hill who had revolutionised cricket for Kerry Packer. If you love Drive to Survive, buy The Formula.
The Race to the Future: 8000 Miles to Paris – the Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century, by Kassia St Clair, is a ripper read. In January 1907, Paris newspaper Le Matin proposed a race from Peking to Paris. Five cars started. It was a time when the automobile was so new that The Economist warned readers off investing in motorbus companies, arguing the horse would triumph over cars.
As Kassia says: “1907 was one of the final years when the automobile would be considered an experimental novelty rather than a practical form of transport.” Among the entrants “were an Italian prince and his chauffeur, a former French professional racing driver and a conman”.
Le Matin’s promotion worked. In August, 500,000 people lined the streets of Paris to welcome the winners. The only disappointment was that Le Matin saw the race as the opportunity to promote French cars. The Italian car won.
I am being really careful about recommending my first favourite motoring mag, The Road Rat (second favourite is Octane.) At $120 for four issues, the world’s most beautiful car magazine is not cheap. It’s not for normal car mag readers. For a start it weighs over a kilogram.
For a second it was set up by Coldplay’s Guy Berryman. It doesn’t have regular columns, features or anything else in it except extraordinary pics of extraordinary scenes featuring cars.
The current issue is the $100m edition. It goes deep into the technology, culture, history and myth of some of the most evolved cars of all; from Ferrari 250 GTO to Gordon Murray T.50 – seven decades of cars too rarefied to be simply “supercars”. And it talks about the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and David Bowie. Weird but wonderful.
Back to the real world. This week the WSJ tells us that BMW is cutting financial targets because of recall costs and low China demand.
The recall is to address a problem with the braking systems in more than 1.5 million vehicles estimated at high three-digit million euros. Talking of brakes, Ram is recalling nearly 1.3 million pick-up trucks over a brake issue.
The Trumpster has weighed in on EVs: “The cars don’t go far enough. They’re very, very expensive. They’re also heavy. They also eat cats and dogs.”
The HAGI Top Index showed classic car market prices declined during August and were down 4.60 per cent month on month; 2024 year to date returns for the Top Index are down 2.63 per cent through the end of August and 1.03 per cent when calculated over 12 months.
Classic BMW, Ferrari and Porsche all dropped while classic Mercedes-Benz, Lamborghini went up. “Lower-quality assets were penalised quite harshly in the market including during Monterey auctions.”
Talking of car auctions, head over to Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale Fall Auction next month. You’ll see all the metal from the Men at Work, Beach Boys and Ronnie and the Daytonas’ songs: A custom modified and refurbished 1939 Ford Woody Wagon, powered by a 350ci V8 engine paired with a Turbo 400 automatic transmission (“I got a ’34 wagon and I call it a Woody”); a fully restored 1962 Volkswagen 23-window custom microbus powered by a 4-cylinder engine paired with a manual transmission. (“Travelling in a fried-out Kombi, On a hippie trail, head full of zombie”) and few GTOs. (Cue: “Little GTO you’re really lookin’ fine, three deuces and a four speed and a 389”) and a few Corvettes (Yeah, my fuel injected Stingray and a four thirteen (tack it up now), A revvin’ up our engines, and it sounds real mean (tack it up now).
Tomorrow our bet is the Azerbaijan Grand Prix will bring back more biff. Mad Max and Georgie Russell nearly came to fisticuffs last year. Verstappen thought SDL driver Georgie got in his way during a flying lap. On his team radio, Verstappen said: “F..k sake man. Just move out of the way! I bet he did that on purpose.” And then after the race MM called him a dickhead.
And don’t forget to watch pit stops: the top teams are averaging well under three seconds while the teams with room for improvement like Sauber are taking nearly seven seconds, or one thousand years in F1 time. Ferrari is the fastest in and out of the petrol stop. Bookies have Norris, Leclerc and Piastri in the top three.
If you’re out by the eco recycling green future is yours centre (Sydney Motorsport Park) this Sunday, stop by and say hello to your WART (Weekend Australian Racing Team) competing in the hard fought Mazda MX-5 Cup.
Your correspondent’s entry is widely welcome by the rest of the field with comments like: “Great, then I won’t come last.”
jc@jcp.com.au
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