Automotive category: 1940 books

ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION (1958): Biographical sketches of 37 of the most famous Grand Prix and sports car racing drivers. Included are all of the old-time greats as well as those who have made names for themselves in the past few years.The author touches on each man’s background, his temperaments and...

Motorbooks’ Speed Read series celebrates the world’s premier performance car manufacturer in Ferrari: The History, Technology and Design Behind Italy's Legendary Sports Car†‹. From the first complete car Enzo Ferrari constructed in 1940--the Auto Avio Costruzioni 815--to the masterpieces...

Piers Courage was a brewing family scion from Great Britain. He began his racing career in 1961 after befriending fellow driver Jonathan Williams and racing team manager Frank Williams. Piers was only 28 when he was killed at Zandvoort, the Netherlands in June 1970. His fatal wreck was a result of...

Peter Collins was one of a triumvirate of English drivers who were at the pinnacle of sports car and Formula 1 racing in the late 1950s. The other two were Mike Hawthorn and Stirling Moss. Collins married an American actress, the daughter of an assistant to United Nations' Secretary Dag Hammarskjold....

No other Hollywood star has been so closely linked with cars and bikes, from the 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback he drove in Bullitt (in the greatest car chase of all time) to the Triumph motorcycle of The Great Escape. McQueen's Machines gives readers a close-up look at the cars and motorcycles McQueen...

In the late 1950s, a young John Morton was transfixed with sports car racing. His dreams of competition eventually led him to enroll, in 1962, in the Shelby School of High Performance Driving. In a bold moment after the last class, Morton asked Carroll Shelby if he might come to work for the newly...

When Lee Iacocca brought his Fairlane Committee together in 1962 to explore the possibilities of a new kind of car for young, forward-thinking families, no one could have predicted quite how successful this car would eventually be. Finding a styling void in the swiftly growing baby boomer market,...

The first generation of Sunbeam Alpine was produced in 1953–54 and was named after the prestigious Alpine Rally which ran through the mountains of France and Italy. The name was resurrected in 1959 for a new model, the principle subject of this book. It was launched in July of that year on the French...

In the new edition of this classic text, Brian Laban brings the story of the AC Cobra up to date. In the early 1960s, a flamboyant Texan, Carroll Shelby, dreamed of a special kind of sports car, a marriage of European style with lusty, affordable American V8 power. He took his dream forward and he...

This book is a collection of stories written by enthusiasts about their quest to find these extremely rare and valuable muscle cars. Lost Muscle Cars includes 45 intriguing stories involving some of the most significant American iron ever created during the celebrated muscle car era.

In the 1950s, cruising swept the nation. American street became impromptu racetracks as soon as the police turned their backs. Young people piled into friends� cars and cruised their main streets with a new sense of freedom. Pent-up desires after the hardships of World War II plus a booming economy...

Hot Rodding began in Southern California in the 1930s and had spread throughout the United States by the mid 1950s, spawning the sport of drag racing and the advent of the Detroit "muscle cars" of the '60s and '70s. Hot Rod Magazine and the National Hot Rod Association promoted the formation of responsible...

Jo Siffert combined determinism, youth and great speed as a promising sports car and Formula 1 driver coming along in the early 1960s. He began racing F1 cars in 1962, soon purchasing his own British Racing Motors (BRM) car. He served as driver as well as team manager. From modest means the Swiss...

When Ford wanted to add some spice to its new Mustang pony car in the mid-1960s, it turned to the talented, colorful, and opinionated Texan Carroll Shelby, who was then building the high-performance, Ford-powered Cobra racing sports car . The result: the Shelby Mustang GT350, perhaps the definitive...