Beyond nuts and bolts to grace and glamour

The world of automotive journalism is small, and, candidly, it could stand to be a lot smaller. Year after year I am amazed by the number of authors who can take the lively subject of the automobile and inject it with Thorazine.

Automotive enthusiasts have no one to blame but themselves. In place of perspective, we prefer statistics: How often did Mario Andretti race at LeMans without winning? Instead of drama, we prefer data: What were the valve clearances on the original Mopar’s 440s?

A handful of books that hit stores this year easily surpass the standards of most buff-book writing. Their authors practice a kind of anthropology that tells us about ourselves through our relationship with automobiles -- our folly and heroism, death and sex, genius and excess, all as through a rearview mirror, darkly.

Three of these books deal with racers and racing before the modern era, a line demarcated by the emergence of mid-engine cars, aerodynamic design and, most of all, effective safety equipment -- years of living dangerously. The first is Miranda Seymour’s “Bugatti Queen: In Search of a French Racing Legend” (Random House: 326 pp., $24.95), about the life of Helle Nice, once called the Amelia Earhart of racing. For a time between the world wars, Nice was the most celebrated female race driver, a French postcard pinup turned showgirl who parlayed her athleticism and a very practical attitude toward sex into a career at the peak of European motor sports. Seymour’s shoe-leather reporting has saved Nice’s story from oblivion and given us a splendid portrait of gall and glamour in the death-haunted world of grand prix racing.

Phil Hill began racing in 1952 (about the same time Nice left competitive driving) and in 1961 became the first American driver to win the Formula One world championship. Hill’s racing career and the gorgeous Ferraris he drove to victory are profiled in “A Champion’s View” (Dalton Watson Fine Books: 192 pp., $80), a coffee-table-style book with photography by John Lamm of Road & Track magazine. Prepare to feel a little heartsick paging through this book. The images of the Ferraris -- sleek red predators that seem forever to have the scent of prey in their noses -- underscore how tame and uninspired modern cars appear.

Hill was at LeMans in 1955 when the worst accident in racing history took place. Pierre Levegh -- forever known by the mordant nickname “Lucky Pierre” -- lost control of his Mercedes-Benz 300SLR and crashed into the barricades in front of the packed grandstands. Portions of the car scythed into the crowd, killing 81 people. The horror of that day is described in Brock Yates’ riveting “Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing’s Glory Years” (Thunder’s Mouth Press: 244 pp., $24.95). The same fateful year, the great American oval-track star Bill Vukovich was killed when his Hopkins Special collided with Roger Ward’s car on the back straight at Indy, and actor James Dean was killed in his Porsche 550 Spyder near Cholame, Calif.

Yates, one of the great yarn-tellers among automobile journalists, conjures these stories with affecting grace and authority, as if he were there, and often he was.

That same year, a mechanical cousin of Dean’s Porsche was beginning to make its presence felt in parking lots all over America. The VW Beetle, resurrected from the ashes of the factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, began its slow march toward ubiquity. More than 22 million Beetles were built between 1941 and just a few months ago, when the VW factory in Mexico issued its last “classic” Beetle. Designed by Ferdinand Porsche, it was originally known as the KdF-wagen, a car for “Strength Through Joy,” intended to be a “Volkswagen,” the Nazis’ people’s car.

What a long, strange trip it was for the Beetle, from a vehicle for Hitler’s social engineering to the chariot of American anti-establishment grooviness in the 1960s. This pilgrim’s progress is chronicled in Phil Patton’s effortlessly smart and entertaining “Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World’s Most Famous Automobile” (Simon & Schuster: 254 pp., $25).

From most beloved to most bemoaned: Eric Peters offers “Automotive Atrocities! The Cars We Love to Hate” (Motorbooks International: 128 pp., $19.95). This picture book of dishonorable mentions is broken into three chapters: “Fake Muscle Cars” (the 1976 Dodge Aspen R/T, for example, or the 1981 DeLorean DMC-12); “Egregious Economy” (1985 Yugo GV, 1975 AMC Pacer); and “Loathsome Luxury” (1974 AMC Ambassador, 1980 Chrysler Imperial, 1987 Oldsmobile Toronado Trofeo).

This book is a hoot, well stocked with full-color visions of ugliness. But beware: You may find your favorite ox gored. I drove a 1976 Datsun B-210 for more than a decade. What’s not to love? *