[RallyVolvo]

I just found an old book by Colin Malkin on "How to start Rallying", in a free book place in Baltimore. Whoo hoo! Quite interesting actually, with wiring diagrams for various accessories and setup tips for some of the more popular british cars from the late 60's. Great pictures in it too, including one of a Land Rover 89 a foot and a half in the air!

Just wondering what other interesting vintage books on rallying are out there?


Nick Polimeni
'71 Volvo 142E
Capon Bridge, WV

I forgot, it has a pic on the cover of a sideways rally prepped Hillman Imp! Talk about unlikely things...

 

[Jonesi]

Check out http://www.vintagerally.com/ there's a section on most/all TSD books by me and a section on performance rally books by Tim Winker.

Bill

 

[Mad Mike]

>Just wondering what other interesting vintage books on
>rallying are out there?
>
>
>Nick Polimeni
>'71 Volvo 142E
>Capon Bridge, WV

Old books at the RealAutoSport, LLC International Headquarters on Coyote Trail:

- Rally! by John Davenport 1977
- Rally Navigation by Martin Holmes 1977 (Holy horsecrap batman - I just opened the book to see about the date and there is this: "Best Wishes and Happy Rallying! Martin Holmes Rolla 1978" How cool is that?)
- International Rallying by Stuart Turner 1965
- Castrol Rally Manual 2 by Peter Browning 1972
- Safari Fever by Nick Brittan 1972
- The Way To WIn by Stuart Turner 1974

Unfortuantely, the last one is pretty hammered and most have water damage thanks to the Feather River flood of early 1986 when all my stuff was locked in what turned out to be a low water storage facility in Oroville, CA.

Halley ...
Owner/Driver ProRally #86 - world's first New Beetle Rally Car
RealAutoSport, LLC
http://www.realautosport.com

 

[Eric_Anderson]

>I just found an old book by Colin Malkin on "How to start
>Rallying", in a free book place in Baltimore. Whoo hoo!
>Quite interesting actually, with wiring diagrams for various
>accessories and setup tips for some of the more popular
>british cars from the late 60's. Great pictures in it too,
>including one of a Land Rover 89 a foot and a half in the
>air!
>
>Just wondering what other interesting vintage books on
>rallying are out there?
>


Let us not forget Performance Rallying published in 1975 by Modern Sports Car Press with contributions by Gene Henderson, Tom Grimshaw et al. It was edited by some guy who keeps haunting the old fart section of specialstage.com.

Some of the pix from that book are up at www.rallyalmanac.com

 

[Glenn Wallace]

Marathon by Nick Brittan
Tricks of the Rally Game by Gunnar Palm (and Herbert Volker)
Sideways to Victory by Roger Clark (and Graham Robson)
Rally Cars by Richard Klein
Twice Lucky by Stuart Turner
Rally Cars : Given the Works (various tests)

 

[Glenn Wallace]

Bootful of Elbows by Evan Green (from memory here)

 

[Adrian Wintle]

>Bootful of Elbows by Evan Green (from memory here)

A Boot Full of Right Arms by Evan Green about the 74 London-Municch marathon - which (for those who think London-Munich isn't much of a marathon) went via Tamanrasset and such places ;-)

(you might have been confusing the title with Innes Ireland's All Arms and Elbows)

also
The Long Drive by John Stathatos about the 1977 London-Sydney marathon.

Adrian

 

[T Bier]

A few more:

'From Two-Stroke to Turbo SAAB in motorsport since 1949' by Anders Tunberg, published 1980. Worth reading even if you don't care about SAABs.

'The Guinness Book of Rallying' by John Davenport 1991. Rally history from the first French open-road races to the early Group A years.

'Rally-Ho' by Frank Proud 1971. (This is NOT about John Dillon or Ben Bradley) It is an odd little book about a Thai rally team running Corollas in 4 major asian rallies and the 1970 World Cup London-Mexico rally.

'Austin Healey : the story of the Big Healeys' by Geoffrey Healey. Some good bits about Pat Moss and Spa-Sofia in the 60's.

 

[team blitz]

Anyone ever find a book with coverage of the Tour de France rally? I'm trying to find some sort of history of the event. Rules. Year by year results? Back in the 60s and 70s, it was ranked as one of the four "major" events, along with the Monte Carlo, East African, and the RAC Rally. It would help me enormously with one of my vintage race projects. Thanks, Norm

 

[Adrian Wintle]

>Anyone ever find a book with coverage of the Tour de France
>rally? I'm trying to find some sort of history of the event.
>Rules. Year by year results? Back in the 60s and 70s, it was
>ranked as one of the four "major" events, along with the
>Monte Carlo, East African, and the RAC Rally. It would help
>me enormously with one of my vintage race projects.

I've only ever found occasional pictures. It was an event (like the Giro d'Italia) that allowed Gp5/6 (sports racing and prototype) cars as well as the regular rally classes. Since it wasn't ever a world championship event, it hasn't had a lot of coverage.

Adrian

 

[Andrew Comrie Picard]

I'm working on completing my collection and now have most of the books above I think. Will try to compile a comprehensive list, too. My favourite reads are Safari Fever, Boot Full of Right Arms, Sideways to Sydney, and Mexico or Bust. Of course best photos by far are the Klein books which are must haves: Rally, and Rally Cars. Seven Year Twitch is good too on the English teams and management perspectives, as is that Chambers book on the BMC crews - good pictures there. I also have an amusing book on performance driving by Pat Moss-Carlsson and Erik Carlsson. Lots of commentary about what they think of other street drivers!

Just received 3 issues of Rallye magazine from 1975 (first issue - includes an "r" free sticker inside!) and 1976. Doug Woods is the Canadian correspondent. Bios of Perusse and Bellefleur WHEN THEY WERE MY AGE. Fantastic stuff. Buffum, Block, special on Harvey - can't wait to get home tonight to read them.

I just love rallying - these books are all emotive gems.

ACP
www.musketeerracing.com
Flirting with the laws of physics.

 

[joeg]

I remember reading "Sideways to Sydney" back when I was a kid.

Great book authored by a F-1 racer (Innes Ireland?)who drove a Mercedes with 2 others on a late Sixties London to Sydney Marathon event.

I found it again at a flea market last year.

 

[Adrian Wintle]

Last night I was looking at my copy of Rallying '78 (Book 0 of the Martin Holmes World Rallying annuals), and was amused by the caption beside the picture of John Buffum - An American who drives British cars.

The World Rallying annuals (and Rallycourse) provide a good history of the sport from 1977 (1982 for Rallycourse). They also have articles that tend to explain the reasoning behind some of the rules we see today (like the original intent of GpN and local homologation... ;-)). The older ones tend to be a bit hard to find and quite pricey, though.

I also have recently published books on the history of the RAC rally and the 1000 lakes - both provide an interesting look at the development of the events.

History of Rallying by Graham Robson (I think), vintage 1980-ish, is pretty good too.

Adrian

 

[team blitz]

Thanks for the reply, Adrian. I have a 1973 Ford (Boreham AVO) Competitions contingency funds announcement. It's top money pay-out, for any type of motorsport, was for a win of the Tour de France, RAC Rally, East African, or Monte Carlo. Those four rallies. They paid 2000UKP, which was a handsome sum in 1973 currency (Would buy you *two* new Ford Transit trucks plus rally team back-half conversions.) The only bigger race in France was LeMans. For that matter, good books about LeMans history are somewhat lacking too. Must be a French "thing" about the comparative lack of english-language coverage, dunno. Seems a shame, since the results pages I've seen for the T de F show an enormous number and variety of cars. Please keep your eyes peeled for me. Anything about Capris, especially in the 1972 event, which my Capri won in Grp.2 (second car overall). Looking for anything. All I have are some French magazines. Norm

 

[Adrian Wintle]

>Thanks for the reply, Adrian. I have a 1973 Ford (Boreham
>AVO) Competitions contingency funds announcement. It's top
>money pay-out, for any type of motorsport, was for a win of
>the Tour de France, RAC Rally, East African, or Monte Carlo.
>Those four rallies. They paid 2000UKP, which was a handsome
>sum in 1973 currency (Would buy you *two* new Ford Transit
>trucks plus rally team back-half conversions.) The only
>bigger race in France was LeMans. For that matter, good
>books about LeMans history are somewhat lacking too. Must be
>a French "thing" about the comparative lack of
>english-language coverage, dunno. Seems a shame, since the
>results pages I've seen for the T de F show an enormous
>number and variety of cars. Please keep your eyes peeled for
>me. Anything about Capris, especially in the 1972 event,
>which my Capri won in Grp.2 (second car overall). Looking
>for anything. All I have are some French magazines. Norm

<off topic> ;-)
Le Mans is reasonably well covered, just not in one book. From 1973(?) onwards, the Moity/Tesseidre(sp?) annuals are probably the best sources (they started in 1978, but some of the early ones covered the races back to the end of Moity's previous book). Moity also produced a book covering the post-war races until 1972. Recently, two different outfits have been producing books which are compilations of contemporary media reports of the races. One of the sets goes back to the pre-war races.
</off topic>

As for the Tour de France, the books I have don't cover it - it seems they thought the Rome-Liege-Rome, Alpine, and Marathon de Route were the important events in the 60's to early 70's timeframe. These are reasonably well covered in Robson's History of Rallying. I believe he also did a book about the Monte Carlo rally.

A couple of books that I have:

The Rally-Go-Round by Richard Garrett (1970)
(unfortunately, my copy is ex-library, and damaged)

and, of course

Rallying by Stuart Turner

also:

Twice Lucky by/about Stuart Turner is pretty good, as is the recently published book about Dennis Jenkinson (Jenks, I think).

Adrian

 

[team blitz]

Roger that on the Lemans books, Adrian. Like the Brooklands magazine reprint series, or the marque vs. marque books. Got 'em on the shelf. Those are fair. But there's no overall coverage, and very little to no coverage of the races within the race, such as Touring Cars. Couple throw-away paragraphs. What is needed are some thorough and scholarly accounts, published in English. Just an opinion.

On the Tour, if it was in the Top Pay-out Category of FoMoCo, it was a major event on par with East African, Monte Carlo, and RAC. Remember that Stuart Turner himself oversaw Ford Competitions during this period. The Tour de F was indeed a points event part of the FIA European GT Championship, along with events like Spa and Nurburgring, some road and some rally, mixed events as near as I can tell. This is frustrating to me, because I have not been able to locate much about this important event on the GT calendar. By comparison, Ford only paid 100UKP for a Touring Car road race victory, vs. 2000UKP for the Tour de F or the other 3 top shelf rally events. Must be a reason there isn't good coverage, like a conflicting event elsewhere. Dunno. Norm

 

[Andrew Comrie Picard]

I see that "World Cup Rally by Castrol" and "7 year twitch" are both on ebay right now...hope this doesn't hot it up for someone. Got 'em and I recommend them, although the Castrol book was rushed to print in 1970 and it shows. Still great.

ACP
Flirting with the laws of physics.

 

[Wink Timber]

Over 40 old rally books listed on this page:

http://www.vintagerally.com/books/rallybooks.htm

And another 40+ on TSD rallying & rally navigation at:

http://www.vintagerally.com/books/tsdbooks.htm

 

[Seth S]

>A few more:
>
>'From Two-Stroke to Turbo SAAB in motorsport since 1949' by
>Anders Tunberg, published 1980. Worth reading even if you
>don't care about SAABs.
I have an extra copy in excellent condition of 2 stroke to turbo I'd let go for $25 if anyone wants it. The other copy I have has been signed by per ecklund and simo Lampinen, you would have to pry that book from my death grip.

Seth S

 

[Andrew Comrie Picard]

Hej - Just last night opened Gunnar Palm's "Tricks of the Rally Game" for the first time. This is a really great book. The entire chapter on "Why Scandinavians are Fast" sums it up in a nutshell and gives interesting little facts about the early careers of some famous ones.

If one of my MBA classmates (or Karl Scheible) were to apply lingo, we'd call scandinavia an "incubator" like Silicon Valley or Modena/Milan.

I'll try to make an index of my books as I have a few that don't appear on Tim's list - or better - I'll see what info I can get to Tim to make his list even better.

ACP
Flirting with the laws of physics.