New Book Review: Formula One Down Under – Australian Grand Prix History
Positives
Negatives
This weekend’s Grand Prix at the Albert Park Circuit marks the 37th modern FIA Formula 1 grand prix race in Australia (the earliest official Grand Prix was hosted back in 1920s). I’ve previously posted reviews of books on the Australian GP including Stuart Sykes’ “Adelaide Alive” and “Formula One in Melbourne the first 10 years”.
The latest book is Gelding Street Press’ “Formula One Down Under” which covers the race history of the Australian GP at Adelaide (1985-1994) and Melbourne (1995-2022) across 300 pages. When held at Adelaide street circuit, the Australian GP was the final race of the season and when moved to Melbourne, the race become the season opener until COVID where there was unfortunately no race in 2020-2021 and since then, Bahrain has hosted the season opener.
The Adelaide circuit during the 1980s was remembered for some memorable GP races including the 3 way fight in 1986 (including Mansell’s tyre blowout) and Senna’s heroics in the dominant McLaren (including epic pole laps in his early career Lotus JPS). Albert Park probably hasn’t seen too many epic races but Brawn GP’s dominant 2009 1-2 win was memorable. All these are featured in“Formula One Down Under”.
This book documents each GP including key moments and provides one page of basic race statistics with finishing positions, retirements and fastest lap. The race summary information isn’t as detailed as hard core F1 annuals like Autocourse but more geared towards the casual F1 fan.
The strength of the book is the photography which is more than 50% of the content. There’s plenty of excellent trackside race photos from the lens of local photographer John Morris.
For Australian GP fans, this is a neat collection of its race history to date.
Wow Factor/Money shot: Fernando’s massive aerial shunt at 2016 GP
Suitable for: Aust GP fans
