The Last Road Race By Richard Williams
Phoenix, 2005
US$9.99
There aren’t that many good books about motor racing, particularly those that treat the sport as serious history. Richard Williams’ The Last Road Race promised to be different.
Williams profiles the 1957 Pescara Grand Prix, a duel between titans like Stirling Moss, Juan Manuel Fangio, and Jack Brabham. According to the dust jacket’s breathless blurb, the race “marked the end of this era in motor racing … over public roads on the Adriatic coast in a three-hour race of frightening speed and constant danger.” The book garnered glowing reviews from the likes of the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. I was expecting great things.
Alas, I was disappointed. It’s not all Williams’ fault; he’s a thoughtful writer and an able researcher who knows his motor racing. Despite the book’s blurb, the 18 August 1957 race at Pescara, an Italian village on the Adriatic Sea, simply wasn’t all that interesting. The event was without incident, starting safely and finishing without injury or loss of life. There were no close calls, no inspiring pursuits through the Italian countryside. Moss won going away in his Vanwall, outclassing the entire field of Maseratis, Coopers, and a lone Ferrari.
So why devote a whole book to one rather boring grand prix? Williams explains, “The race at Pescara marked the end of certain philosophy in motor racing. No longer would massed-start races, on open roads from town to village and back again, be organized in that ad hoc way, without permanent facilities or even the vaguest notion of safety precautions. … Pescara was an adventure -- and as it turned out, an unrepeatable one.”
The problem is, the facts don’t support Williams’ thesis. Road racing did not end at Pescara. Nearby, on Sicily, the Targa Florio lasted until 1973. As Williams himself admits, road races continue to be run on public roads to this day, in places like Le Mans, Monaco, and Pau. In China, Macau hosts a race through its streets annually. As recently as 31 July of this year, a street race was held in San Jose, California.
Nor was Pescara part of an ongoing grand prix tradition. Instead, the race was something of an exception, organized at the last minute as a replacement for cancelled grands prix in Belgium and Holland. Enzo Ferrari didn’t even bother sending an official team. The race was more afterthought than adventure.
Still, many of the great teams and drivers participated. Pescara might have served as a case study of this pivotal era in motor racing, when sturdy front-engined beasts driven by enthusiastic amateurs were being superceded by delicate rear-engined thoroughbreds driven by dedicated professionals. In much the same way, a routine 1982 Brewers-Orioles game formed the centerpiece of Nine Innings, Daniel Okrent’s masterful analysis of major league baseball.
Sadly, at 152 pages Williams doesn’t leave himself much room for investigation. He managed to secure interviews with Stirling Moss, Jack Brabham, Tony Brooks, and Roy Salvadori. He had access to Tony Vandervell’s correspondence and Denis Jenkinson’s diaries. He drove the roads that make up the course, mostly unchanged today.
Yet the most telling detail Williams can uncover is an observation that fireworks from the Ferragosto holiday kept Jenkinson awake at night. Although some 200,000 spectators witnessed the race, Williams doesn’t bother to interview a single one of them. We learn that Moss liked the course and Brabham didn’t, but there’s precious little about how each driver attacked it, certainly nothing that puts us in the cockpit with them.
In fact, Williams doesn’t get to the race itself until page 107, and he’s finished with his account by page 120. The actual event merits a scant 13 pages -- an anticlimax.
How much more compelling this story might have been had Williams chosen to structure his account around the race itself, digressing to expand on incidents as they developed. At the very least he could have taken us through a lap in-depth, discussing the options available at each corner and the limits of the machinery. For instance, we’re informed that Moss and Fangio were masters of the four-wheel drift, but Williams never bothers to explain this or any other driving technique or racing tactic.
In the end, this is a dry, rather bloodless account of an activity inherently charged with drama and risk. It’s well written, and what research Williams does present is solid. My main complaint is that there could have been so much more. Williams has squandered a priceless opportunity here. One lap of Grand Prix Legends contains more atmosphere than this entire book.
Readers looking for lively accounts of motor racing’s heroic age might try Denis Jenkinson’s classic The Racing Driver, Robert Daley’s The Cruel Sport, or Peter Stevenson’s Driving Forces. As for gaming the book, the aforementioned Grand Prix Legends is still the finest simulation extant of Formula One before the advent of aerodynamics and modern tire technology.
