The picture of jubilant race drivers raising oversized champagne bottles into the air is only too familiar. But the life of a race driver has always been dictated by losses, setbacks, confrontations with technical defects, accidents, disqualifications and problems of an unknown nature. Like life in general, it is difficult. And that is what this book is about. The first tears that Swiss journalist, columnist and author Max Kueng (born 1969) can remember shedding were on December 16, 1982. It was a Thursday, the day it was announced on the radio that Colin Chapman had died. They were tears of sorrow; Chapman was the founder and the genius behind the Lotus Sports and Motorcar Specialist, which was the focus of Kueng’s interest at the time. Kueng had collected automobile magazines since he was a child and had never missed a single Formula 1 television broadcast. “Cars saved my childhood,” Kueng said. “As a fat, unathletic boy with glasses, I didn’t have any friends—not counting the pile of automobile magazines. Back then I knew everything about cars; that earned me a certain respect, even with the densest, meanest and most brutal town youths. They left me alone instead of constantly beating me up. I am grateful to cars for that, still today.”
