1997 Jerez Incident: As Boring As Ross Repeating “We Were on a Break”

(Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

In the long months of winter, separating season ending race from the first one of the new season, avid Formula One fans search for even the smallest connection to the sport.

With no teams located in North America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, or South America, and the test tracks used by F1 squads being located exclusively in Europe, fans of the sport outside of Europe are forced to rely on limited exposure to the sport.  Unless a fan has much vacation, money, the opportunity to visit a test session for a weekend is like an unrealizable dream. 

The windows into that magical winter session are random F1 updates from tests, interviews with team members, and to some such windows are too opaque, too random, too spaced out.  Even in midseason, the windows called grand prix races are too spaced.

For those seeking a deeper insight into F1s world the wait for the next season, or even those seeking to occupy their time between each grand prix with more F1, those seeking to add to the already three dimensional perception of a sport, DVDs and books are really the only avenue.  

While the quality of the DVDs and their subject matter addressed is often better from one year to the next, books tend to provide a deeper insight into the sport, history, and business of Formula One.

F1 books can be written on so many pages, in so many words, but the actual ideas that they try to get across are much deeper, and can often address something more than visible at first sight.

In the last year there have been several books available to the fans on the bookstore shelves that have brought their readers an insight on many subjects of F1. 

New books are released almost every month, and thus some of them may have sat on the shelf of that Chapters, that Indigo, Borders, Virgin, HMV, or many other book stores; sometimes the story from season gone by is much more insightful on the past, present, and future, than those published at a later time. 

There have been five titles in particular that have addressed specific subjects of F1 that have brought their readers closer to the sport.

• The  Mechanic’s Tale – Life in the Pit-Lanes of Formula One
• Author: Steve Matchett
• Published in:     1999

Steve Matchett is best known as the F1 reporter, the lucky, Formula One Fans watching Speed Channel’s F1 transmission of each Grand Prix.  During the 2007 and 2008 seasons he hosted RPM - Racing per Matchett, available to F1 fans on Speed channel. 

Before becoming involved with Speed he spent 20years in the engineering business, working as a qualified mechanic for both Ferrari and BMW, before joining the Benetton Grand Prix team.  

From 1990 to his departure from the team he participated in exactly 100 Grand Prix for Benetton, which culminated in Michael Schumacher winning the F1 Drivers’ Championship in 1994 and 1995, and the Constructors’ Championship in 1995 alone. 

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