Description
By: Geoff Goddard, Doug Nye .
Motor racing is the most glamorous and visually exciting of all sports - an action-packed, hazardous melee of men and machines pushing and being pushed to the limit. Today, with safety of paramount importance, sadly this excitement cannot always be fully conveyed by motor sport photography, but in days gone by - when the photographer's 'track pass' took him literally within feet of the action - the results from the camera were often breathtakingly spectacular.
This book features the work of one of the very best of the 'old school' of motor racing photographers, Geoff Goddard. It is a tribute to a motor racing heyday, the era when the greatest names of motor racing - Fangio, Ascari, Moss, Hawthorn, Clark, Hill and Stewart - competed for the spoils. Arranged roughly in the form of an old-time racing season, this book records some of the greatest moments of Formula 1 and long-distance sports car racing from thirty years of competition. The images range from Goddard's earliest racing snapshots, taken in 1948, to pictures of the last Continental Grand Prix he covered, at Zolder in 1977.
Track Pass reflects the evolution of top-class motor racing from the spirited technological sport of the early Fifties into the highly commercialised, multimillion dollar business-cum-TV spectacle of the late Seventies. Here are great photographs of all the classical circuits of Europe, from the majestic Nurburgring to the daunting Spa, from the rural Dundrod TT course in Ulster to the mighty Targa Florio of Sicily. These pictures were taken before so many of these old courses were sadly emasculated, or swept away by the modern, sterile autodromes which dominate modern motor racing today.
More than 300 of Geoff Goddard's stunningly evocative photographs are accompanied by an entertaining and often controversial first-hand text and detailed captions compiled with top motor sport writer Doug Nye. Track Pass will appeal to anyone with an interest in motor racing, old or new, as it brings a 'Golden Age' vividly to life in the very best of words and pictures.
