Description
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 Liege-Rome-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 enthisiasts has turned to 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.
Hardback. 288 pages.