These Are Your Favorite Automotive Books

Wow…very hard to pick just one. I mean, there are several anthology books of Peter Egan’s writing, on motorcycles AND cars, that could fill a Top 10 list, not to mention some other auto journalist anthologies that should be ‘required reading’ for auto enthusiasts.

Someone else mentioned ‘Driving Ambition’, which is in my top 3 for sure…it is an amazing book about an amazing car built by amazing people. Someone else mentioned ‘Racing the Silver Arrows’, which is also up there…but I will list a different Chris Nixon book, ‘Mon Ami Mate’, about Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins and includes a pretty thorough breakdown of The Crash (Le Mans ‘55). It is wonderful, glorious, fun, and it brought me to tears…twice. Anyone with even a peripheral interest in racing ‘back in the day’ must absolutely read this one.

Another favorite is ‘All Corvettes Are Red’ by James Schefter…it is interesting on its face if you are into cars, but written in that ‘storytelling’ way that sucks you in. It is frustrating, too…thinking about many ‘might have beens’. But there are some good heroes in it as well: one of my biggest features in here, John Heinricy (a great racer and at the time one of the managers, maybe platform manager?), he of the title quote (which is from one of the best car and corporate anecdotes of all time…for those who don’t know, he was stuck in a meeting for hours talking about colors for the following model year. He finally had enough, slapped his notepad closed and said, “Why are we even having this discussion? All Corvettes are red. The rest are mistakes.”). A lot of the book is about corporate politics, but it does show just how difficult it can be to get a car made…we all think ‘why didn’t they just do x, or y?’ and this kind of shows how that doesn’t ever happen…plus, you get a glimpse into why changing one little thing can have a cascade effect (such as, you can’t just have a free-er flowing intake because then the hood won’t close and you can’t lower the engine to get more room because the cross-member would have to be redesigned, which would require re-engineering of the steering system which would require new parts be ordered and so on and so on). Cool stuff.

Finally, Mark Donohue’s book ‘The Unfair Advantage’ is amazing…he was a pretty decent writer (had help from a ghost writer, but still), a pretty good engineer, and a fantastic driver. One thing that set him apart was, as an engineer and just plain smart guy, he could explain what the car was doing. He and Roger Penske reinvented auto-racing, just by being smart and thinking about stuff, instead of just going ‘eh, billy-bob said this’d work’ or ‘ it LOOKS right, it must BE right’. Iterative testing and actually planning pit stops were huge game changers (seriously, other teams did testing, too…but many of them would change a bunch of stuff at once…Penske’s team did one change, retested, another change, retested, etc.). You get insight into the engineering, the driving, the prepwork, the racing, and even the human side of things…a GREAT read.

So, TL;DR – ‘Driving Ambition’ second vote, ‘Mon Ami Mate’ by Chris Nixon, ‘All Corvettes Are Red’ by James Schefter, and ‘The Unfair Advantage’ by Mark Donohue.

Corporate politics aside, the quote in the title is dead wrong. All Corvettes are yellow, clearly.