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Showing posts with the label Daytona

RACER by John Andretti and Jade Gurss

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  Published by Octane Press in September of 2020. I thoroughly enjoyed this autobiography because John Andretti was my favorite race car driver - period.  I have watched auto racing for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are going to qualifications for the Indy 500. I have Janet Guthrie's autograph - not realizing when I got it that it was actually an amazing autograph to have. The sound of a single car circling the track with the roar and whine of the engine (it has both sounds at the same time) echoing off of the stands makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The history at that track cannot be topped by any other venue in the world. I attended my first NASCAR race at Michigan in 1981 with my father. The spectacle of the whole thing was amazing. It was won by my favorite driver at the time, Richard Petty. In 1986, we went to our first Indy 500 and haven't missed one since (the 2020 race doesn't count since no spectators were allowed due to Cov

Johnny Rutherford: Indy Champ by Hal Higdon

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Kids Book, but still an interesting read for Indy 500 fans Published in 1980 by G.P. Putnam's Sons Johnny Rutherford: Indy Champ is a short biography aimed at elementary/middle school aged readers. It has 123 pages of text and 2 pages of end notes and is part of the extensive series of sports biographies known as the Putnam Sports Shelf. Rutherford (by rear wing) and his car at the 1975 Indy 500. Even though I am long past the targeted audience for this book, I found it to be entertaining and informative. Higdon's roots as a magazine writer shine throughout the book - the text is lively throughout. For those who do not know, Johnny Rutherford is a three-time winner of the Indy 500 with wins in 1974, 1976 and 1980. He was known as a hard luck driver until he broke through and finally started to win. His wins are even more remarkable when you consider he raced and won against all three four-time winners of the Indy 500 (A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Sr. and Rick Mears) and

Speedweeks: 10 Days At Daytona by Sandra McKee

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Disappointing So,  Speedweeks: 10 Days At Daytona is yet another coffee table book. See, what it is is that I have a friend who knows I am a NASCAR fan so he didn't know what else to get me for Christmas so he got me 3 NASCAR books. One of them was this one and I was fairly disappointed, mostly due to the fact that the title does not accurately describe the book. Nor does it accurately describe Speedweeks, which lasts longer than 10 days. For example, the 2011 Speedweeks events have one event in early January and then really go hot and heavy for about 3 weeks beginning on January 27 and culminating in the Daytona 500 on February 20. See, Daytona Speedweeks is a racing happening. There are a dozen motorsports events, culminating in the Daytona 500. There's a 24 hour race, an ARCA race and literally a half-dozen NASCAR races. Check their website ! This book, however, focuses primarily on the Daytona 500 (90%) and barely mentions the other non-NASCAR events. In fact

Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man In Black by Ed Hinton

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Great book but there are a few errors... The title basically says it all. This fascinating book uses Daytona International Speedway and the old racing surface of Daytona Beach itself as its lens to focus on the world of NASCAR. Hinton has been a beat reporter covering NASCAR since the mid-1970s and knows all of the old stories and Hinton is able to package them so that the reader is reading one little vignette after another until the history of Daytona is told. I was reading another book when I picked up this one (a Christmas gift that I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to) and began thumbing through it. I couldn't put it down! It is well-written and at times it is laugh out loud funny, especially if you are a NASCAR fan and are familiar with the older, retired drivers. However, a couple of disturbing, trivial factual errors throw a negative light on the book as a whole. Two that I noted were Hinton's assertion that no rookie has won the Indy 500 since the 192