The Cruel Sport - Grand Prix Racing 1959 - 1967

Text and Photography by Robert Daley, Hardbound, 222 Pages, ISBN: 9780760321003 - 2005 Edition of 1963 classic - 2nd hand book in very good condition

The mid-1950s through the mid-1960s were the glory years of Grand Prix cars and Grand Prix drivers, the men themselves and the lives they lived at speeds that reached 170 miles per hour and more.

The Cruel Sport depicts this era incisively and dramatically. In those days, most Grand Prix races were conducted on public roads bordered by houses, walls, curbs, bollards and lampposts, by trees, by embankments that could launch a race car three stories into the air. There were no big purses, no advertising decals.

The drivers were unknown away from the circuits. They raced because they loved it. The risks were enormous, the profits small. Sometimes they crashed and died. It was a time, alas, of too many fatalities.

Originally published in 1963, The Cruel Sport was an instant classic, a highly respected document of grand prix racing's most passionate and treacherous era.

Unavailable for decades, it is now revised with the addition of never-before-published photos; long profiles of Jimmy Clark and Jackie Stewart, drivers not yet prominent then who became dominant figures a year or so later; and updated photo captions.

Additionally, author Robert Daley looks back over 40 years in two long essays, the first a prologue that attempts to put into modern perspective Grand Prix racing as it existed then; and the second a more personal epilogue that again compares the then with the now.

The Cruel Sport offers a special view of a fantastic racing era forever lost