Review by Pete Vack
Photos from the book
According to the PR, Neal Bascomb is a national award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of a number of non-fiction narratives. His work has featured in several documentaries, and optioned for major film and television projects. His latest is Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car beat Hitler’s Best.
Bet you could see that one coming.
Bascomb’s story of Rene Dreyfus, Delahaye and Lucy Schell culminates with the 1938 Pau Grand Prix, as Dreyfus, driving the Million Franc Ecurie Bleue (Lucy Schell) Delahaye 145 fairly squarely defeats the Mercedes Benz team. This was a great victory for the French, Ecurie Bleue, and for Delahaye’s designer Charles Weiffenbach. It is also a great story, ripe for re-telling and in the light of the success of “Ford VS Ferrari”, a possible contender for tinseltown’s attention.
But woe to the popular author who dares write a serious book about our favorite subjects. He is damned if he writes an entertaining and bestselling book that takes liberties to make it marketable, and damned if he sticks to the technicalities while the plot goes flat. And if he gets things wrong, he is damned again.
With Faster (why that name, already used by Peter Manso for Jackie Stewart, A Racer’s Diary) Neal Bascomb sticks to the technicalities and creates something less than a page turner. But much to his credit, Bascomb has a thorough grasp on not only the highly technical nature of the sport but the history and personalities and politics that dominate a very complex era and, remarkably, we found no mistakes. He does so because, though admittedly not knowing a camshaft from a carburetor before he began, he hit the books, contacted the right people, went to all the necessary places to get the details, and even had a quick ride in the fearsome Mullin Delahaye 145, “…zooming through the orange groves of California in the 1938 Delahaye 145 at speeds that still make me tremble.” Then it was on to France, Germany, and Monaco to see the actual race venues. “It’s one thing to watch a race on the Nurburgring or through Monte Carlo, it’s another to drive these same stretches, then walk them on foot.”
And again to the author’s credit, the book is a fine example of research, sourcing materials, and annotations. It boasts a complete bibliography and an excellent index.
And therefore perhaps we expected a bit too much. Several of us who have read it felt that the book was a bit too easy to put down. In our case, we would leave the pages of Faster to fact check by re reading the Caracciola autobiography (only to recall how dreadfully lacking it is) and the conversely superb My Two Lives, the Dreyfus autobiography written with the late Beverly Rae Kimes, only to become immersed in those books while foregoing Faster. We also made note of the rather copious lifting of material from both of these books by the author.
Caracciola and Charly, right, Dreyfus wih the Grand Prix Delahay at left.
We urge you to get a copy, and you will enjoy it. However, it is easy to be distracted by the somewhat misleading PR blurbs on the inside dust jacket and associated material hyping the book. Naturally, the publishers need to get the attention of the would-be readers and must be dramatic. But to tell the readers that “Hitler attempted to completely erase [the results of the Pau Grand Prix] from history” is a carrying things a bit far and is based on rumors, as noted by the author himself. From the perspective of hindsight, that Dreyfus was half Jewish with a familiar Jewish name looms much larger in importance than it actually was at the time, according to Dreyfus himself. But these elements make for a good story and one wonders what Hollywood will do with it. But in the book itself, while Bascomb does not let us forget that Dreyfus was half Jewish, he does not play up to it, and only mentions that the Nazis may have been interested in finding the Pau winning Delahayes.
What may be more interesting and revealing is the story of Lucy O’Reilly Schell, put together from a variety of sources and well told. She was an American, a feminist, a successful rally driver and above all, the first and only female to run a Grand Prix race team, a fact which was then simply ignored and today long forgotten. Bascomb went after her story and kept at it. He writes, “In the automotive world, private collectors often corner the market on archival material, including company documents, interviews, photographs or personal papers. At first, I was rebuffed by these collectors… Charm offensives and a lot of follow-up finally gained me access to many treasures scattered about the globe… Fortunately, the reward was never-before heard interviews with Rene Dreyfus, personal histories of Lucy Schell, grainy video footage of 1930s Grand Prix racing, and rarely seen blueprints and production figures from Delahaye.” A book about Lucy, Laury and Harry Schell should be in order, but one wonders if there is enough material to be found anywhere to fulfill the task.
Ultimately, reading Bascomb’s book should lead one to buy and read the wholly satisfying Dreyfus autobiography, My Two Lives. One gets a much better picture of those years, written without a movie contract in mind. The problem is that while the new book, Faster, can be had for under $20, it’s going to take another $100 to get a hold of a copy of the Dreyfus book.
Faster by Neal Bascomb
2020, Houghton Mifflin
ISBN-13: 9781328489876
344 pages
Find online at Alibris or Amazon
Bravo! Pete, your review in bang on! I confess I did read Faster cover to cover (but not in one sitting) and not exclusively. I like to have two books going at any one time. Faster was interrupted by Donna Leon’s latest Trace Elements (A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery) and Leon should be on any Italophile’s must read list.
I got frustrated occasionally with Bascomb’s clear lack of understanding for “the mechanical” – a specialist content editor could have easily put that to right. Do you want my number? – and partly because of it, the massive “gap” between the French and German cars was not explicitly clear enough. The “Hollywood clear coat” I found less invasive.
My hope is that Bascomb’s (predicted) success with this excellent book will provide more future investment in such stories from the London and New York conventional publishing power base. We could all use more of that.
I liked it. you can get an idea of my perspective by knowing that my master’s thesis was on chronological character development in f. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories