Books – Ford vs Ferrari

“Ford vs Ferrari – The battle for supremacy at Le Mans 1966” – John Starkey

I’m pretty sure everyone here already saw Ford v Ferrari the film. You didn’t 😲??? What do you mean, you didn’t see it?!? Unless you just shipped in from a colony on Venus (or Uranus), something is wrong… No, it’s not a fantastic work of art in cinematography, far from that. Well, Le Mans the film also kind of (royally?) sucked in that regard. Yet, that’s beside the point. The fact is that both are GREAT car movies. And from that perspective, Ford v Ferrari is maybe even better than Le Mans. So if you’re a gearhead or car person, you need to watch it. ASAP.

Anyway, the book is not about the film. It’s about the events that inspired the film. And in terms of a literary piece of work, it’s pretty good. The only part that I didn’t like (or better, that I missed), was the lack of coverage on Ferrari and their cars. The book is “Ford-centric”, so not much is said about Ferrari’s cars. And we’re talking about the 330 P3 (among others), which is undoubtedly one of the most gorgeous Ferraris ever. The book has a ton of photos, so more Ferrari eye candy would have been nice. Despite not much on Maranello’s cars, the author presents the facts that lead to Ford’s victory at Le Mans in 1966 in a pretty good way. Their are other books out there on those events, however John Starkey is right to the point. And shows lots of photos.

This book, fortunately (for once), is still available in paperback format, and best of all, cheap (about $20). And because of the photos, I strongly recommend the regular book version and not the e-book version. The e-book is cheaper, yet for photos a Kindle is far from great, so if you can, go for the tree-unfriendly regular book version.

Auto Union’s Silberpfeile

After I found that old Grand Prix racing video I posted a few days ago, I stumbled upon this. This one is exclusively about Auto Union’s Silver Arrows. Almost 42 minutes long, the footage is pretty good. Yet, being quite old, it is far from the “movies quality” we’re currently used to. And of course, the race noises and tires screeching dubbed over the scenes are not exactly high quality…🙄 Even so, pretty nice for the Silberpfeil fan.

Golden Age of Grand Prix Racing

Though this has been on YouTube for many years, I first saw it last night. The original documentary is pretty old (80s, perhaps?), so the video quality is far from what we expect today. Even so, it’s a delightful 49 minutes about the Golden Era of Grand Prix racing. The last third part of the film is almost solely about the Silberpfeile, which of course was the best part in my opinion. In fact, this was the first time I saw color footage on the Silver Arrows. All in all, a very nice documentary about the Silberpfeile and something on their predecessors.