Description
Author: Bill Tuckey, Hardbound, 196 Pages, ISBN: 9781920683498 - First Published, 2004 - **Second-Hand book in good condition **
Just as 1903 was the start of Australia's enduring love affair with the car, so 1904 was the beginning of Australian motor sport's first century. Whdt began as a heroic and often dangerous adventure has evolved into a multi-billion dollar sport/industry that, in terms of investment infrastructure, spectator attendance and television audience, stands alongside cricket, tennis and the four codes of football as one of the biggest attractions in a sports-mad country.
The giant canvas this book spans does not flinch from recounting the deaths and injuries the sport brought upon itself. At the same time it details the way those involved gradually came to realise that it needed sensible control, greater safety for competitors and spectators, more responsibility for officials and not least, vast improvement in the conditions under which the committed competitor raced.
Thus the development of race circuits. A century takes the reader from racing cars in any available place from grassed horse tracks and cinder showgrounds through to dusty and dangerous public roads and converted airfields, and on to today's sleek purpose-built facilities with their serried ranks of VIP boxes, special street circuits like Albert Park, home of the Australian Grand Prix, and to Mount Panorama, one _f the greatest motor racing circuits in the world.
And the drivers! They march down the echoing corridors of the years, epic heroes to rank with today's legendary Peter Brock—Albert Turner, Phil Garlick, Wizard Smith, Bill Thompson, Les Murphy, Doug Whiteford, Jack Brabham, Stan Jones, Alec Mildren, Lex Davison, Norm Beechey, Bob Jane, Ian Geoghegan, Frank Matich, Dick Johnson, Allan Moffat up to today's Mark Skaife and Marcos Ambrose.
But the cars! The three Maybachs, the Chamberlain Special, Black Bess, Ferraris, Maseratis, MGs, Holden Monaros, Lotuses, Ford Sierras ... they go bellowing down through the century, stirring memories of madder, gladder days. And the book honours those who had enormous influence on the century of evolution—Harry James, Jack Day, Don Thomson, Geoff Sykes, Jack Hinxman, John Large and others.
In The Sound and the Fury, Bill Tuckey charts 100 years of motor sport with sweep and humour in a book that includes photographs that have never before been published, and stories that have never before been told.
