You’ve probably known someone at some point who was obsessed with sports statistics, like the number of rushing yards gained per down by the old Frankford Yellow Jackets or some such. That’s a headache. This book by James O’Keefe, on the other hand, is exceptionally useful and much more attractively presented than we ever might have anticipated.
The Winners Book was described to us as O’Keefe’s lifetime goal, and we believe it. It’s an accurate compilation of winners in major auto racing series going back from 1895 to the present day. That’s an enormous number of races, enough to encompass more than 22,000 individual entries, including series we’d barely heard of, such as Japanese Formula Libre and the Argentine Sport-Prototype Series. It all spans nine major chapters (the last for motorcycle competition) and 576 pages. We’ve already used our copy several times. It’s published by Racemaker Press of Boston (617-723-6533; www.racemaker.com), which produces racing histories for discriminating readers and has a photo archive of 500,000-plus images. One is shown below, what we believe to be a NASCAR Pacific Coast Late Model pace lap from Riverside during the 1960s. The “bullet” Thunderbird was a popular West Coast stock car, and in about the fifth row is a Buick Riviera stock car, the only one we’ve ever seen.
