Secret lives of the F1 circus ringmasters

The phrase "weird and wonderful facts" in a publisher's press release is not one calculated to make a reviewer's heart sing. All too often it signals a cut-and-paste job designed to cash in on an event of the moment: whichever World Cup is looming, say, or in this case the start of the F1 season.

Happily, The Grand Prix Companion is the work not of a cuttings merchant but of Alan Henry, who has been watching the F1 circus from the inside for 34 years and 538 grands prix. Much of the material stems from Henry's friendships with the good, the bad and the very quick. The image of the young Frank Williams flipping his Fiat 500 on its side and emerging from the driver's door like a submarine commander lives in the memory, as do the revelations of one F1 big cheese, Max Mosley, about the biggest cheese of all, Bernie Ecclestone: "I learned all the tricks of the trade from Bernie... if anyone wanted to adjourn a meeting for a private discussion, Bernie's strategy was to force the other side to leave the room so he could rifle through the wastepaper basket and read the notes they'd written to each other while negotiating."

Interspersed are more statistics than you can shake a stick at; did you know, for instance, that 108 F1 teams have folded since the world championship was inaugurated? Henry does, and what's more he knows all their names as well.

Fans of Henry's journalism might feel a trifle short-changed by the number of his past articles he reprints here, and a sterner editor might have thinned out the forest of exclamation marks, but these are minor blemishes. Henry sounds a thoroughly amusing companion, and he has written a very entertaining one as well.

Published by Icon Books, [pound]9.99

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