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