The idea for the book came about in when I was chatting to a friend, Richard Hinton, who suggested I produce a book of images from my motorsport archive. I initially didn't think much of the idea as I would have to find a publisher first, then go through the design process with them and in the end not get much return for my efforts. Richard said that there was always the self-publishing route, something else I was sceptical about as I had heard horror stories about books having to be printed in China as it was the cheapest method and finding it had all gone horribly wrong when you finally received them and you now had a 1,000 books on your hands which were un‐saleable.
Richard passed me on to a friend of his, Michael Hipperson, who had gone down the self‐publishing route a couple of years before.
Chatting to him I began to realise that it wasn't as difficult as I had always thought.
Michael put me onto his designer, we chatted about what the book would consist of, what it would look like, thickness, size, etc.
After a week of these conversations I decided to put the wheels in motion and started going through my archive of images to see what was useable.
I initially thought it would be just Formula 1 images from the 1960's but after a while thought I should broaden the scope of the book (after all, anyone can produce a Formula 1 book!) and include other categories and images that I thought were interesting and rare.
So, moving on from Formula 1, was now looking at slides and negatives of Formula 2 racing in the
70's,
a set of large format colour slides from the
1962
(sportscar) Malayan Grand Prix, the Indy 500 etc.
I also made a point of looking at pictures from non-Championship F1 races, something we had a lot of here in the U.K. in the past.
I didn't want the book to be just a series of photos and captions, so I told the designer very early on that I wanted ‘other stuff’ to be going on within the book, like the ‘film strip' effect and the Hot Wheels model of the Lotus 56, which I found on Ebay. A little imagination goes a long way!
In the end I had 2,000 books printed, I'm doing everything myself, so with the help of social media and the print media I'm aiming to sell all of them, which is where you all come in!
If the sales of this first book go well, then I am going to produce a Volume 2, which, if all goes well, I hope to have available by the middle of 2019. Needless to say, please keep checking back here for updates and of course the Facebook group will be constantly updated as will my Twitter feed (I'm @tyrrell005 on Twitter by the way).
Return to the homepage.
