Author: Marcus Chambers, Hardbound, 288 Pages,ISBN: 9780947981945 This Revised and Expanded Edition Published in 1995 (1st Edition 1962) - A competition Manager Recalls an Historic Era of Motorsport

WORKS WONDERS is a top competition manager's nostalgic view of a golden age of motorsport – the Fifties and Sixties. It was a time when you could buy a car from a manufacturer's catalogue, take it to a tuning shop, stick a set of numbers on the side and go racing or rallying with it. If you were good enough, you might even beat the works drivers in similar cars; and if that happened, there was a good chance you would be invited to join them for a future event.

A measure of professionalism had entered what previously had been essentially an amateur sport, but it had not been allowed to corrupt it. As always, winning was the ultimate objective, but it was not the tense and humourless business it would later become because in those days there were fewer commercial pressures on drivers to perform out of the car as well as in it; there was still time to have fun on the way to victory.

Those were the days of the great rallies like the Monte Carlo, the Alpine, the LiegeRome-Liege and the Acropolis, and it was a vintage time for the classic endurance races like the Le Mans 24-Hours and the Sebring 12-Hours. It was also a time when groups of enthusiasts would band together to tackle world time and distance records with production cars, and it was a time when motorsport was more accessible than ever before or since.

During this period Marcus Chambers was centre-stage in International motorsport as the competition manager, firstly of MG, then of BMC and finally, following a short period in the retail motor business, of Rootes and Chrysler.

His drivers scored some of the greatest successes of the period, including an epic victory by Pat Moss and Ann Riley in the 1960 Liege-Rome-Liege in their brutally quick Austin-Healey 3000, and the sensational win by Andrew Cowan, Brian Coyle and Colin Malkin in the 1968 London-Sydney Marathon with a Hillman Hunter.

In this major expansion of his earlier book. Seven Year Twitch, the author tells an  absorbing story of an incident-packed competition career and recaptures vividly the unique atmosphere of the sport during the period when it provided many examples of outstanding personal achievement against the odds and was enhanced by a deeply etched code of sportsmanship and mutual assistance between competitors and rivals in times of difficulty.

In recent years the interest of many thousands of motorsport enthusiasts has turned towards what is now known as Historic rallying and racing, making it one of the fastest growing sectors of the sport in terms of both active participation and spectator interest. To see once famous cars back in action again has been the focus of their fascination; in this new book they will learn more about what it was really like in their prime.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcus Chambers, who was born in 1910, has been involved in motorsport for much of his life. As a driver he competed at Le Mans in 1938 with an HRG, and became the team's chief mechanic from 1947-49, after having spent the intervening war years with Coastal Forces in the RNVR.

He joined the MG Car Company as competition manager in 1954 and almost immediately took on a similar role with the British Motor Corporation, of which MG had become a part. After seven busy and successful years, he resigned to take up an appointment as service manager with Ian Appleyard's garage group, but within three years had been enticed back into competition management with the Rootes Group, soon to become part of the Chrysler Corporation.

During the Sixties he became closely involved in the sport's administration at both National and International level, then spent five years managing former competition driver John Sprinzel's garage businesses before retiring in 1975. In recent years the growth of interest in the

Historic rallying and racing scene has enabled him to re-establish many of his earlier connections with the sport, with which he continues to enjoy a close and active interest.