Le Mans The Bentley and Alfa Years 1923-1939: Racing: The Bentley & Alfa Years 1923-1939 (Racing S.)

Good book

I have been quite scathing about most recent Brooklands books on pre war subjects, but this one is a straightforward reproduction of articles of the time, with a short introduction to each race, these being concise and rarely more than two or three pages long. None of the articles are 'post war' and mercifully there's nothing at all from the awful 'Road and Track' or 'Motor Trend'!Oddly, there are very few articles from Autocar- most are from Motor and Light Car, the latter concentrating on the smaller entrants from MG, Singer, Aston Martin, Riley, etc (there were a lot of entries from those companies in those years). The Lagonda company- bankrupt at the time- did win Le Mans in 1935 and then came third in 1939. Talbot adventures in the early 30's were also British highlights.Quite why there are only seven Autocar articles against twenty one from Motor I do not know. One advantage I suppose is that the same Motor correspondants report on successive races, giving a measure of continuity. I drop a star because of this curious lack of balance and also because the reduction in scale to fit the Brooklands format results in very small type: these books still use paper of indifferent quality and the old print has not been enhanced, so some of the articles can be quite hard to read if you don't have good eyesight or good glasses.Still, gripes aside, this is certainly a better Brooklands simply because it does a straightforward job in a straightforward way, devoting about a dozen pages of contemporary articles to each race. I paid about £12 for my copy and that is a bargain for this 180 page book.