Few people have made the transition from elite sportsperson to multi-faceted entrepreneur with as much skill, flair and success as Formula 1 driver David Coulthard. Winner of thirteen Grands Prix, Coulthard has also made his mark in hotel ownership, property, consultancy, film production and most famously media work, as lead TV pundit. In this book Coulthard opens the doors to the secretive world of F1 and reveals in simple, entertaining and utterly compelling terms how he has been able to master this mind-boggling variety of disciplines by applying the skills honed from his years at the top of the world’s most demanding motorsport. By recounting his own stories, and combining them with first-hand experience of stellar individuals such as Michael Schumacher,Ron Dennis, Sir Frank Williams, Christian Horner and Sebastian Vettel, Coulthard provides a fascinating fly-on-the-wall insight into F1 but at the same time offers an invaluable guide to the business of sport and the sport of business.
The world knows Paul Newman as an Academy Award winning actor with a fifty-plus year career as one of the most prolific and revered actors in American Cinema. He was also well known for his philanthropy; Newman’s Own has given more than four hundred and thirty million dollars to charities around the world. Yet few know the gasoline-fueled passion that became so important in this complex, multifaceted man’s makeup. Newman’s deep seeded passion for racing was so intense it nearly sidelined his acting career. His racing career spanned thirty-five years; Newman won four national championships as a driver and eight championships as an owner. Not bad for a guy who didn’t even start racing until he was forty-seven years old.
Special Features: Adam Carolla interviews with Mario Andretti, Patrick Dempsey, Jay Leno, Graham Rahal, and Bob Sharp / Adam Carolla restores Paul Newman’s 1985 GT-1 Championship Car / Trailer
Although the history of the car stretches for a period only slightly longer than 100 years, it is nevertheless an area with many little-known gems waiting to be uncovered. This book is an alternative look at automotive history, celebrating the nonconformist spirit and a radical approach to designing cars. Based on documented facts, this book also contains dialogues and personal details from some of the most innovative engineers of the last century, helping the reader understand how passion and restlessness drive progress in car manufacturing. Many inventions that we tend to attribute to the contemporary car giants were in fact made many years ago, and few can remember the names of those talented people that created them. This book gives them due credit, and proves that a dream always wins.
A nostalgic and celebratory look back at one hundred years of passenger flight, featuring full-color reproductions of route maps and posters from the world’s most iconic airlines, from the author of bestselling cult classic Transit Maps of the World.
In this gorgeously illustrated collection of airline route maps, Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts look to the skies and transport readers to another time. Hundreds of images span a century of passenger flight, from the rudimentary trajectory of routes to the most intricately detailed birds-eye views of the land to be flown over. Advertisements for the first scheduled commercial passenger flights featured only a few destinations, with stunning views of the countryside and graphics of biplanes. As aviation took off, speed and mileage were trumpeted on bold posters featuring busy routes. Major airlines produced highly stylized illustrations of their global presence, establishing now-classic brands. With trendy and forward-looking designs, cartographers celebrated the coming together of different cultures and made the earth look ever smaller.
Eventually, fleets got bigger and routes multiplied, and graphic designers have found creative new ways to display huge amounts of information. Airline hubs bring their own cultural mark and advertise their plentiful destination options. Innovative maps depict our busy world with webs of overlapping routes and networks of low-cost city-to-city hopping. But though flying has become more commonplace, Ovenden and Roberts remind us that early air travel was a glamorous affair for good reason. Airline Maps is a celebration of graphic design, cartographic skills and clever marketing, and a visual feast that reminds us to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
Bentley Speed 8 – Limited Edition
Motorsport Book of the Year Award 2023 (Royal Automobile Club)
Limited to 550 numbered copies
Exactly 20 years ago, Bentley won the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the sixth time. Just three years earlier, the project was born from within the brand. The later Bentley Motorsport Director Brian Gush secured the internal support of the corporate siblings VW and Audi and rolled out the Speed 8 project. There, where Bentley had established its motorsport heritage between 1924 and 1930, the aim was to revive the brand and make a clear statement. Already in the first year 2001 a small sensation was achieved with a podium finish, in 2003 the legendary double victory followed after intensive development and test work.
In this comprehensive book, former team members, engineers and drivers have their say and quite a few of them contributed their photos. Starting with wind tunnel tests, the construction of the eleven chassis, test drives and races, author Andrew Cotton covers the entire development and racing history of Bentley’s Le Mans winner of the modern era. In the course of his research he had access to all e-mails, documents and drawings of the team and he interviewed all important contemporary witnesses who were involved in the project. This standard work on perhaps one of the most beautifully designed sports cars of the modern era is rounded off with the chassis history of every Bentley Speed 8 built.
Hardcover in slipcase
Text in English
This first comprehensive history of the Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s famous launch facility located at Cape Canaveral, Florida, reveals the vital but largely unknown work that takes place before the rocket is lit. Though the famous Vehicle Assembly Building and launch pads dominate the flat Florida landscape at Cape Canaveral and attract 1.5 million people each year to its visitor complex, few members of the public are privy to what goes on there beyond the final outcome of the flaring rocket as it lifts into space. With unprecedented access to a wide variety of sources, including the KSC archives, other NASA centers, the National Archives, and individual and group interviews and collections, Lipartito and Butler explore how the methods and technology for preparing, testing, and launching spacecraft have evolved over the last 45 years. Their story includes the Mercury and Gemini missions, the Apollo lunar program, the Space Shuttle, scientific missions and robotic spacecraft, and the International Space Station, as well as the tragic accidents of Challenger and Columbia. Throughout, the authors reveal the unique culture of the people who work at KSC and make Kennedy distinct from other parts of NASA.
As Lipartito and Butler show, big NASA projects, notably the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, had much to learn on the ground before they made it to space. Long before a spacecraft started its ascent, crucial work had been done, work that combined the muscular and mundane with the high tech and applied the vital skills and knowledge of the men and women of KSC to the design of vehicles and missions. The authors challenge notions that successful innovation was simply the result of good design alone and argue that, with large technical systems, real world experience actually made the difference between bold projects that failed and innovations that stayed within budget and produced consistent results. The authors pay particular attention to “operational knowledge” developed by KSC–the insights that came from using and operating complex technology. This work makes it abundantly clear that the processes performed by ground operations are absolutely vital to success.
The world will always remember Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for their first steps on the moon, yet few today hold in respect the sites that made these and other astronauts’ journeys possible. Across the American landscape and on the lunar surface, many facilities and landing sites linked to the Apollo program remain unprotected. Some have already crumbled to ruins–silent and abandoned. The Final Mission explores these key locations, reframes the footprints and items left on the moon as cultural resources, and calls for the urgent preservation of this space heritage.
Beginning with the initiation of the space race, the authors trace the history of research, training, and manufacturing centers that contributed to lunar exploration. From the early rocket test stands of Robert H. Goddard, to astronaut instruction at Meteor Crater, to human and primate experiments at Holloman Air Force Base, innumerable places proved critical to developing the equipment for exploring space, surviving the journey, and returning to Earth safely. Despite their significance to the history of human spaceflight, many landmarks face the threat of damage or destruction. Most alarming is that the rapid advancement of technology renders stations obsolete long before they are deemed worthy of preservation. Moreover, the lack of precedence for protecting off-planet artifacts poses a unique challenge for space archaeology. While NASA’s 2011 recommendations for spacefarers suggest avoiding close proximity to this cultural landscape, the authors advocate stronger routes of preservation and present models for safeguarding space history–both on Earth’s surface and beyond.
The ability of the United States Navy to fight and win a protracted war in the Pacific was not solely the result of technology, tactics, or leadership. Naval aviation maintenance played a major role in the U.S. victory over Japan in the second World War. The naval war against Japan did not achieve sustained success until enough aircraft technicians were available to support the high tempo of aviation operations that fast carrier task force doctrine demanded. When the United States realized war was imminent and ordered a drastic increase in the size of its aviation fleet, the Navy was forced to reconsider its earlier practices and develop new policies in maintenance, supply, and technical training. Not only did a shortage of technicians plague the Navy, but the scarcity of aviation supply and repair facilities in the Pacific soon caused panic in Washington. While the surface Navy’s modernization of at-sea replenishment was beneficial, it did not solve the problems of sustaining war-time aircraft readiness levels sufficient to a winning a naval air war. Fisher outlines the drastic institutional changes that accompanied an increase in aviation maintenance personnel from fewer than 10,000 to nearly 250,000 bluejackets, the complete restructuring of the naval aviation technical educational system, and the development of a highly skilled labor force. The first comprehensive study on the importance of aircraft maintenance and the aircraft technician in the age of the aircraft carrier, Sustaining the Carrier War, provides the missing link to our understanding of Great Power conflict at sea.
he fascinating story of the Milanese scooter par excellence concluded with the Lambretta DL-GP series.
This book looks at all aspects of this special scooter: its history, its technical evolution, its sporting victories, with a specific chapter devoted to the British market, which more than any other took the DL to its heart and still today considers it to be the pinnacle of Innocenti’s production.
The last model produced by Innocenti had been developed at the famous Bertone design centre in Turin which, with a few but substantial modifications managed to breathe new life into the Lambretta, making it even more sporting and elegant, sophisticated and modern. With a curious black splash on the leg shield, the new model soon became a best-seller on the crowded international scooter market.
It enjoyed enormous success in Great Britain, being transformed into a cult object for the most sporting and demanding scooterists. More than fifty years after its launch, its styling is still modern and the model is still very popular with scooterists all over the world.
April 1946: the first 15 examples of the Vespa leave the Piaggio factory. This was the beginning of a unique and unrepeatable story, that of a revolutionary two-wheeled vehicle that as well as leaving an indelible trace in the history of transportation, has become an authentic cult object for every generation that followed.
Simple elegant forms, practicality and riding comfort were just a few of the qualities that brought the popular scooter success on a global level.
75 years on from the first Vespa, this book, an updated version of the successful Vespa 70 Years, traces decade by decade the technical and stylistic evolution of this timeless icon. All this without losing sight of aspects associated with communications – ever a strong suit of the Pontedera group – and the ever-increasing interest of collectors.
The title Vespa. The complete history is complemented by the book Vespa. All the models, published in 2020, which offers in a single volume a systematic catalogue of every model and every version produced by Piaggio.
