"Racing In The Rain" By John Horsman

I'm re-reading this excellent memoir.  There's no need to summarize it here; it has been reviewed in many places since it was published in 2006.  Also, the book's "insider" accounts of developing the Ford GT 40 and Porsche 917 have been touched on in this blog and elsewhere.  It's still in print.

So I will only say here that it is a delightful read.  Horsman's clear, forthright, no-nonsense writing style provides a "you are there" dramatic tension that keeps me turning the pages.  The book covers his entire career as a race engineer, from his earliest days with John Wyer at Aston Martin (alas, after the DBR1 era) into the early 1980's, after Wyer-Gulf was disbanded.

If you like to get into the weeds of Porsche 917 development (and I do), Racing In The Rain and Paul Frere's The Racing Porsches (long out of print) are the definitive narrative accounts. Horsman covers it from the Wyer-Gulf perspective, and Frere from Porsche's.  The differences are instructive and amusing.