Rare Book Review: Ferrari Monoposto
With crunch time for Seb and Ferrari this weekend, the spotlight is on the Scuderia again. Ferrari’s new focus and early wins this year reminded me a lot of the 1990 season with Prost (Vettel) and Mansell (Kimi) in the 640 which was dicing with Senna and McLaren (Lewis/Mercedes) for the world championship. Prost […]
With crunch time for Seb and Ferrari this weekend, the spotlight is on the Scuderia again. Ferrari’s new focus and early wins this year reminded me a lot of the 1990 season with Prost (Vettel) and Mansell (Kimi) in the 640 which was dicing with Senna and McLaren (Lewis/Mercedes) for the world championship. Prost chalked up victories while Nigel was questioning the reliability on his side of the garage. One book that has some nice coverage of the 640 (among the other Ferrari race cars) is Ferrari Monoposto published by Automobilia.
What’s there to like about this? Although the artwork and layout does have some similarities with the Piero Casucci’s Ferrari series with 2 page spreads of each Ferrari car with technical specifications and side profile artwork with Italian, English and French translations.
It’s a little harder to find Ferrari Monoposto now and even though there was a similar book book by Leonardo Acerbi later published to mark Ferrari’s 60 year milestone – this book is superior in my opinion.
The book divides the 50 year period into 4 key eras: 1948-1959, 1960-1980, 1981-1988 and 1989-1997.
There are a variety of photos – from race trim, to close up engineering shots to cockpits, cutaways and engines. Most of the photography in this book is excellent.
The narrative for each era is done by several writers and team engineers including Piero Casucci, Karl Ludvigsen, Mauro Forghieri and Carlo Chiti.
For only a 288 page book its physically quite heavy being a seriously bound hardcover.
Athough there a plenty of Ferrari books which provide perhaps more technical details of the cars, the presentation and production of the book give it a high quality feel.
Wow Factor/Money Shot: Photos of the 80’s era 126C1 and 126C2
Suitable for: Tifosi and F1 history fans
