The 5 Best Books to Read in the Off-Season

Full disclosure: Sylvia Wilkinson used to work for Autoweek. She covered IMSA racing for us for many years, and even met her life partner, racer John Morton, while covering the sport. So you could say she owes us! Ha ha. Just kidding. We owe her, for thousands of words of racing coverage that brought the IMSA glory years to life for us and all our readers.

With this book, Wilkinson, a North Carolina native, brings us the biggest names from the founding generation of stock car racing in America, from Big Bill France Sr. to Humpy Wheeler, Banjo Matthews and Wendell Scott. Each one gets an introduction from Wilkinson laying the groundwork for each character. Then, in the style of Studs Terkel, she hands the microphone over to them and we read their transcribed stories in their own words. It’s the perfect way to see them.

She’s a little afraid of Big Bill, but winds up liking him. Bud Moore talks about his friendship with a former Atlanta International Raceway ticket taker named Jimmy Carter. Wendell Scott, who would have every right to complain, winds up talking mostly about his cars and where he raced, but he also offers the unique perspective he got as a pioneering black NASCAR driver.

You don’t have to be a race fan to appreciate this book. In many ways it transcends mere racing and becomes a slice of American history, of stock car racing’s rise from backwoods dirt tracks and moonshiners to an international media powerhouse. For fans as well as the rest of the reading populace, it’s well worth the read.

Can there be too many retellings of the Shelby legend? Even by the same author? No! We want to hear this story over and over again. Tell us again, grampa, how Shelby went to Europe and kicked Ferrari’s a$$!

Well kids, it happened like this…

For those of a certain interest, Carroll Shelby rises above myth and into immortality. The lanky Texan came out of chicken farming to start a racing career, first as a driver, then a team owner, then, shall we say, as an “entrepreneur.” For those able to overlook certain financial hiccups and a few misplaced investments here and there, Shelby was a real American hero. Preston Lerner had already written an excellent book about one aspect of the legend when he penned “Ford GT: How Ford Silenced the Critics, Humbled Ferrari and Conquered Le Mans.” That book had a lot to do with Carroll Shelby’s role in the victories at the 24 Hours; this new book takes a wider look at the overall career of Carroll Shelby, specifically Shelby American, the little factory in a hangar at LAX that made everything from Shelby Cobras to Ford GTs to a few Indy cars. It’s full of details you won’t find anywhere else. From Octane Press: “…the cheat embedded in the turbine Indy Car, the oiling woes that sunk the tunnel-port Trans-Am Mustang, and details about the first Cobra built in Dean Moon’s hot rod shop in the L.A. suburb of Santa Fe Springs.”

Most interesting to those familiar with the Shelby mystique are the years when things weren’t going well for Ol’ Shel’, like the years right after his wins at Le Mans. 1968 and ’69 were full of dismal failures for both Shelby street cars and race machines, and these failures are presented in full detail. There’s another book waiting to be writ about Shelby’s last few decades. It would be nice to see author Lerner—or somebody—tackle that last third of the life of this legend, something no one has truthfully done yet.

Glen Smale is highly qualified to write this book, not least because he wrote the same book 10 years ago, Porsches at Le Mans: 60 Years. Starting with the 1951 entry by the French Porsche importer Auguste Veuillet, it goes all the way to the 2020 race that saw 10 Porsche RSRs competing at Le Sarthe. In between is the greatest dynasty in motorsports history, if you ask me. In particular, the era of the 956/962 in endurance racing was unmatched, even if subsequent entries from Audi and Peugeot were just as strong. Smale shows us all the cars, from countless variations of the 911, to the impressive but somewhat forgotten RS Spyder, and even including a 968. True fans of the marque need to have this on their coffee table or bookshelf. It’ll bring back memories if you were there for any of it, and might compel you to visit the museum in Stuttgart of you weren’t.

Miles C. Collier is well known among the elite of collector car icons. Just ask anyone at Pebble Beach or Amelia Island. In fact, it was the Pebble Beach PR professional who gave me this book and encouraged me to review it.

Collier’s new book is about the importance of seeing collector cars as touchpoints in time. Each car in his own extensive collection—The Revs Institute—represents something of the times that produced it, Collier says, and any new owner of any significant collector car is beholden to maintain and share that history. The Revs Institute also houses thousands of books and other sources of historical data on the automobile, making it a little like that seed bank in Norway. It would be too easy to just say, “Don’t over-restore your classic.” Collier wants you to understand and share with others the time in history your car represents. That’s why he has a Trabant as well as all those cool race cars.

You could find irony in the fact that, while he is adamant about preserving cars in their original state and time, he is far less interested in preserving, say, the south Florida coast in its original state. It is the real estate development of that once-pristine marshland into golf courses, marinas, and tract homes that gave him the enormous profits necessary to create such a splendid car collection.

Nobody’s a saint, and Collier does have a unique and important message to convey to you, the collector. If you are one of those Pebble Beach or Amelia car guys who have the means to amass a collection of your own, you should read this book to understand the responsibility that comes with it. And if you’re interested in the role the automobile plays in history, you should also read this book.

If you were watching a movie or TV show and thought you were watching Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Faye Dunaway, Diane Keaton, Heather Locklear, Heather Thomas, Farrah Fawcett, Michelle Pfeiffer, or Kate Capshaw, you might have actually been watching stuntwoman Diane Petersen. At least in some of the more dangerous scenes. Peterson has worked as a stuntwoman for 40 years, appearing in over 200 movies and TV shows. If you recall the episode of Magnum P.I. where Magnum’s Ferrari is stolen by a woman, that woman was Diane Peterson.

Her book chronicles all those movie and TV scenes from the perspective of the stunt team. Turns out, stunt work really is dangerous. A few of her friends and stunt performers died during filming. Car chases may have been the safest work she did.