Rainer schlegelmilch biography of williams

by Richard Williams

“The combination of Helmut Bott’s chassis and Hans Mezger’s 4.5 litre flat-12 engine added up to nobody’s idea of the sort of fast tourer that the founders of the 24 Hours of Le Mans had in mind.”

—Richard Williams, on the Porsche 917

“Say something once, why say it again?” was the rhetorical question asked by David Byrne in Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer.

I was thinking the same when I heard that Richard Williams’ new book was about Le Mans.

Rainer schlegelmilch biography of williams

Les 24 Heures du Mans, the endurance race so famous that even lay people have heard of it, is not exactly uncharted territory when it comes to being written about. But Williams has serious form when it comes to familiar subjects—his book on Stirling Moss (The Boy–A Life in Sixty Laps) was an endearingly quirky look at the man who had risked becoming a caricature of his former self.

But, as I scanned the index to 24 Hours, I sighed as I realized that 21 out of the (oh yes) 2