A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “Roar From the Sixties: American

Championship Racing” by Dick Wallen.

Price: $125 from Dick Wallen Racing

Classics, P.O. Box 10561, Glendale, Ariz. 85318-0561.

If quality were measured by the pound, this book chronicling U.S. Auto Club championship car racing from 1960 to 1969 would be an instant winner. It weighs seven pounds.

For those who love to reminisce over the days when A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Parnelli Jones and Bobby Unser sat upright in magnificent racing machines where the public could watch them work, it is worth every ounce.

Wallen’s photographs are the reason for the book, pictures from every imaginable angle of racetrack, garage and car, but the glue that holds them together is Bob Schilling’s narrative. Every race, from the opener of 1960 in Trenton, N.J., to the season finale of 1969 at Riverside International Raceway, the Rex Mays 300, is there in detail. The Rex Mays race was a promotional disaster, of which Schilling wrote: “The Indy cars wouldn’t return to RIR until 1982, and not long after moved to the streets of Long Beach, now named for an imported car rather than an American racing hero.”

The ‘60s were years of transition. Drivers at the start of the decade were graduates of sprint car, midget or modified racing, the cars had solid axles and four-cylinder engines, and the owners were hometown folks such as J.C. Agajanian, Bob Wilke and Gene White.

By the end of the decade, the drivers had an international look, cars were “spidery creations,” some with no cylinders at all, and teams were corporate owned.

What makes the text more than a mere summation of racing statistics is Schilling’s insertion of national events coinciding with race dates. For instance, the day Mario Andretti won at Trenton in 1969, Neil Armstrong made one giant leap for mankind.