Month: October 2020

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2020’s Best Books – IN STOCK!

LONDON (Oct. 29, 2020) – Pete Lyons’s “Shadow: The Magnificent Machines of a Man of Mystery”, ($99.00) published by Evro Publishing, has won the Royal Automobile Club’s Specialist Motoring Book of the Year award for 2020.

This hefty book, stretching to 464 pages and containing 600 illustrations, tells for the first time the story of the Shadow racing team, which was active for 11 seasons starting in 1970. One of the judges, Mick Walsh of Classic & Sports Car, commented: “The doyen of motorsport journalism delivers another superb team history.” Another judge, Gordon Cruickshank of Motor Sport, added: “Entertaining and well researched, it pulls aside the cloak of mystery that Don Nichols maintained around himself and his team.”

Enigmatic Nichols — D-Day paratrooper, Army counter-intelligence officer and controversial entrepreneur — created a racing marque that seems as cloaked as the man himself. Shadow was the only US-based team to win a Can-Am championship. and one of only three to score a victory in Formula

Pete Lyons lifts the veil from this secretive man and the innovative racing cars and world-class team he created. The author draws on considerable first-hand experience: he was present for Shadow’s two big débuts, in Can-Am at St Jovite in Canada (1970) and in Formula 1 at Kyalami in South Africa (1973), and his numerous interviews for the book included six days with Nichols himself not long before the ‘Shadowman’ died in 2017.


Pete Lyons said: “Ever since October 1971, I’ve believed that motorsport could bring me no more exciting occasion than the rocket ride around Riverside that Can-Am champion Peter Revson gave me in his stupefyingly fast McLaren M8F. As of October 2020, Revvie has a rival.

“This honor so generously bestowed on Evro Publishing and me has sent my personal tach needle perilously near the red. My deepest gratitude to the Royal Automobile Club, as well as to all who helped to tell the story of Don Nichols and his compellingly Quixotic racing team. Putting it together has been a joy.”

This is the fifth time an Evro book has won a Royal Automobile Club Motoring Book of the Year award. In the inaugural year of these awards, 2014, the honor went to Evro’s very first book, John Surtees: My Incredible Life on Two and Four Wheels. The 2016 winner was Brian Redman’s memoir Daring Drivers, Deadly Tracks. The Specialist award was given to Karl Ludvigsen’s Reid Railton: Man of Speed in 2018 and to Simon Taylor’s John, George and the HWMs in 2019.

Eric Verdon-Roe, Chairman of Evro Publishing, said: “The Royal Automobile Club’s awards are the most prestigious in our field of publishing and it is a very great honor to receive one. The real credit, of course, belongs to the esteemed Pete Lyons. I heartily congratulate him and thank him for teaming up with us.”

Richie Ginther: Motor Racing’s Free Thinker by Richard Jenkins

2020 Royal Automobile Club Book of the Year

For many years, it was thought that Richie Ginther, one of Formula One’s best known drivers of the 1960s, later became an angry, reclusive and drunken bum. The classic, archetypal hero-to-zero tale. In addition to this, as a racer he was thought incapable of ever winning and lacking the inherent talent to be a success.

But as the first ever authorised biography of Richie reveals, this diminutive Californian enjoyed astonishing triumphs in racing as a driver, a mechanic and as a team manager. His 59 years on the planet also saw him overcome bullying and terrible personal and professional tragedy to live an enriched and absorbing life.

Still just one of five Americans to have won a Formula One World Championship Grand Prix, Ginther helped two of motor racing’s most iconic teams, BRM and Ferrari, to World Championship glory as well as being instrumental in Honda’s motor racing success, all of which is explored comprehensively.

With memories from his family, friends and fellow racers, this biography is also packed, after meticulous research, with an abundance of quotes from Richie himself to create as thorough and as deeply personal Richie’s life story as possible.

It’s not just the words that bring Richie alive. There are a plethora of photographs, with the vast majority of them neither seen nor published before. Insightful and moving, this refreshingly balanced and thoroughly detailed book by debut author Richard Jenkins is the definitive guide to one of motor racing’s underappreciated heroes.

Softbound | 130 pages | Well Illustrated!

$49.95 – Order HERE

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Coming Late November:

Norbert Singer: My Racing Life with Porsche 1970–2004

$95.00 – Reserve HERE

‘The gearbox in the 917 needs to survive the 24 Hours of Le Mans without overheating. But the new cooling system can’t create any additional drag. Okay, off you go.’ That was the first task given to newly-qualified aerospace and automotive engineer Norbert Singer when he joined Porsche’s racing development program in the spring of 1970.

As we now know the gearbox was reliable, Porsche won the race, and Norbert Singer stayed loyal to the German carmaker for decades to come. To celebrate Singer’s 80th birthday, Sportfahrer Verlag will release “Norbert Singer: My Racing Life with Porsche 1970-2004. What started out as a plan to update an older book has, through many conversations between Singer and author Wilfried Müller, has grown into a comprehensive and detailed autobiography.

Across 16 chapters and more than 350 pages Singer describes the greatest era of Porsche racing to date from his own unique perspective, that of a visionary race engineer and aerodynamicist, and cunning tactician and interpreter of rules. From the 917 to the 911 Carrera RSR, to the world championship-winning 935, to the lightest (735 kilograms) and fastest (366 km/h) 911 in history. Singer also details the background of the three-time Le Mans-winning Porsche 936.

Like the Carrera Turbo RSR and the 935, Singer was the project manager for the ground-breaking Porsche 956. The car wrote Porsche into the motor racing history books. Singer successfully took the “ground effect” aerodynamic concept used in Formula 1 and applied it to two-seater sports cars. At the time it was pinnacle of Singer’s passionate search for downforce. Drivers like Jacky Ickx, Stefan Bellof, Derek Bell, Jochen Mass and Hans-Joachim Stuck achieved unthinkable cornering speeds in these 800-horsepower cars, collecting five world championships along the way.

In the mid-1980s Porsche ventured into unknown – and, as it turned out, very difficult – territory with its single-seater program in the American CART series. Singer details the tumultuous saga from the inside. A more enjoyable recollection is the artful transformation of a racing prototype into a Gran Turismo car, the Porsche 962 LM GT1, which conquered Le Mans in 1994. Continuing the GT1 theme, Singer led the development of the first mid-engine 911 in 1996, one of those cars then winning at Le Mans in 1998. It was the 16th triumph for Porsche at the world’s most famous endurance race. Singer was involved in all of them as an engineer, and most of them as a tactician and strategist on the pit wall. His detailed recollections of those 24-hour marathons make up much of the book, from his escape from the CEO, to an improvised air lift for parts.

At the end of the 1990s the man with the reading glasses always sitting low on his nose designed the groundbreaking aerodynamics on the LMP2000 Spyder – only for the car to be resigned to secrecy in a hangar. The famous Carrera GT super sports car also had Singer’s touch in the wind tunnel. As Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking said at the time, “Singer will come up with something”. After retiring Singer continued to support customer teams at race tracks until 2010, before passing his knowledge onto the next generation of engineers with a stint as a university lecturer.

Forty years of racing with Porsche, as told by Norbert Singer and written by Wilfried Müller, who is known to motorsport enthusiasts for his Peter Falk and Walter Röhrl biographies.

English Text | Hardbound w/DJ | 368 Pages | 293 Color – 172 B&W Photos | 16 Graphics & Documents

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1/18 Corvette C8 – Torch Red

IN STOCK:
1:18 GT SPIRIT – 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray – Torch Red
$149.95 – Order HERE

The idea of a mid-engine Corvette isn’t a new one. Zora-Arkus Duntov, the famous GM engineer who was deeply involved in the Corvette program, designed and introduced the first mid engine Chevrolet concept vehicle in 1959. It was called the CERV I, and Duntov used it as a testing platform for his mid-engine Corvette plans. Duntov would go on to design several more mid-engine concept vehicles with the hopes of convincing the higher-ups at GM to put a mid-engine Corvette into production, but he was never given the go ahead. 

Well, in July 2019, 60 years after Duntov’s first mid-engine concept, GM shocked the car world when they officially unveiled the highly anticipated C8 Corvette. They finally did it, GM built a mid-engine Corvette, and it looks awesome!