I happened upon "Starting Grid to Chequered Flag" in a used bookshop. I was sold on the book by two things: 1. It was two bucks; 2. the cover photo of someone driving a Ferrari 250 Testarossa.
I'd never heard of Paul Frère. For that, I'm now a bit ashamed, because he had quite a life. But you'd never get that sense from this book, unfortunately.
Starting Grid to Chequered Flag is the autobiography of Paul Frère's racing life, from 1952, when he began racing, to his victory with the Ferrari team at the 1960 24 Hours of Le Mans.
There's a great deal to recommend this book to any reader with a love of sports car racing, and particularly of that type of racing's legendary past. And this book is full of references to names to conjure with: Moss, von Trips, Hawthorn, Gurney, Hill... and on and on. And if you want accounts of races of the day, you are going to be more than satisfied. From the 12 hours of Rheims to record-setting sessions at Monza to Le Mans to Frère's "home" track of Spa, you hear about triumphs and tragedies.
But there are things about the book that leave me cold. One is possibly due to the fact that the book was translated from (I'm assuming) from French by Louis Klementaski, and I suspect that what seems to be a too-literal word for word translation has deboned the prose. The second is that rather than select incidents, races, or in some way select themes to organize the book, Frère chose to simply create a chronology of his racing life.
That in itself is interesting. But what there is of Paul Frère the man is severely limited. We hear of his fear of driving on wet tracks after two accidents. We hear a brief mention of his journalistic career. There's a brief mention of his wife. But the reader has to work to get a true sense of the racing life of the 1950s.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book to me was the almost chaotic sense of drivers bouncing from team to team from race to race, and some teams operating as privateers. For the 1957 Le Mans race, Frère drove a Jaguar D-type for the Équipe Nationale Belge, with the other cars in the stable being a two-liter, four-cylinder 'Testa Rossa' Ferrari, a 3.5 litre Ferrari V12, and a Porsche Spyder. I can't imagine something happening now in professional racing series.
Other characters in the book are bare pencil-sketches. Most other drivers are simply described as "the great", or "the American." Some of Frère's closer colleagues are described as good-humoured or calm. If you're looking for insight into or portraits of the great drivers of the day, you won't find it here.
The book also fails to place auto racing in the context of the times. The tragedies of Le Mans in 1955 and the Mille Miglia in 1957 are mentioned and escribed, but there's little effort to place the outcry in the wake that saw outrage against Le Mans and the cancellation of the Mille Miglia.
The time was fascinating. The people, equally so. But if you want a true sense of what made this a fascinating scene to take in, you will not be well-served by Starting Grid to Chequered Flag, sad to say.
Starting Grid to Chequered Flag was published in 1956 and 1961 in French by Editions Jaric, and by in English by B.T. Batsford in 1962. Used copies widely available online.
Speed reading: Starting Grid to Chequered Flag, by Paul Frère