Category: Le Mans

Le Mans 1968

Found this one yesterday. All in all, 33 minutes of very nice footage of the 1968 race. As a bonus, it has an English voice-over narration (the original film is in French). And best of all, this time there isn’t that typical gut-wrenching seizure-inducing awfully terrible elevator music that you hear a lot in many of the 60s and 70s documentaries.

PS: This is the third nice film I found about the 1968 race. While from some years you can’t find zilch, for some reason 1968 was prolific.

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.