Customer comments on this selection.
 Forza Ferrari
First rate photography and art direction...great stories...passionate machinery and people..an absorbing read....the only thing better would be the pictured cars to exist in my garage!
A real treasure
For anyone interested in cars, photography, and interesting stories this book is a treasure. Of the several Ferrari books I own this one stands out as both artfully done and a good read.
Well worth the price.
Lotsa Forza
A great book. Maybe I'm just partial because of the vivid five page stretch devoted to the Comp Daytona.
There are lots of Ferrari books out there, good books, filled with well researched bore-n-stroke, nuts-n-bolts facts, but I've always hungered for something a little more subjective, a little more visceral.
With this one you get visceral.
The cover doesn't look very promising, does it? With its distinctly unhistorical 599 and convoluted invocation of "The Ferrari Legend" I was expecting a bland model-by-model, race-by-race statistical history. But John Lamm's discriminating compilation does Ferrari history justice; it is told in first hand accounts by those who, (as honestly stated in the title), "lived the legend."
The number of anecdotes, photos and especially voices contained in here is staggering: you get the ubiquitous Phil Hill, but also Enzo Ferrari's personal secretary Brenda Vernor; you hear Mauro Forghieri's thoughts on Villeneuve; Andretti's on Forghieri; you get Sam Posey describing in detail his 1971 Le Mans drive in a 512M; Surtees talking about Dragoni and team politics; Gurney on going to Italy in `58 to try out for the Ferrari team in front of Mr. Ferrari; Dario Franchitti on why he loves his F40 and F355, not so much the more recent cars.
This is not another competent but impersonal coffee-table book, (Ferrari 1947-1997, Ferrari 60 Years, etc.).
Here's Steve Earle describing his experience as a teenager watching Phil Hill in the glorious 412 MI at Riverside in `58: "...you were standing in the pits, you could hear that car around the whole track...You thought, `Oh my God,! This is the most amazing car in the world.'" Then Earle describes what it was like to OWN this one-off car, and use it at the very first Monterey Historic Races, (which he organized). The book has similar interviews with a number of enthusiasts that really help flesh-out the non-competition aspect of the legend. Everyone from the life-long collector who bought his first Ferrari off the New York Motor Show stand in 1956 to the dude that crashed his Enzo on a public road in Colorado while doing 206 mph gets a chance to tell his tale.
Many of the iconic photos are from the Road & Track archives, which is great for American readers whose first introduction to the marque came via these images; they are reproduced in gorgeous detail far surpassing their news-stand quality. My favorite shot is used as the splash-page that introduces us to the decade of the 70's: Bob Bondurant four-wheel-drifting a 308 at Sears Point --you can even see Bobby's hipster sideburns flaring under the G-load.
Also, the book tastefully avoids over-emphasizing the recent decade of F1 domination. Attention is paid to the latest road cars, like the 599 Fiorano that makes the cover (wouldn't you have preferred to see a Comp Daytona?). But these post-Commendatore chapters are not the main meat of the book. The Schumacher years are dutifully recorded, di Montezemolo speaks, but you can sense the author's disinterest in Schumacher the man, whose words are nowhere to be found. And that's fine by me.
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