Formula 1 Fanatic is a passionate and evocative history of the ultimate in motor-racing from the early 1970s to the present. It is also the story of an obsession. Vergeer cleverly interweaves the lives and deaths of such legendary drivers as Jochen Rindt, Ronnie Peterson, Gilles Villeneuve, and Ayrton Senna with the progress of his boyhood obsession. His accounts of the titanic fights between the top drivers — like the ‘professor’ Alain Prost (cool, precise and seldom failing) and the ‘son of God’ Senna (incredibly fast, but at times unpredictable) or Damon Hill (impossibly burdened by his father’s reputation) and Michael Schumacher (apparently infallible) — are only matched by the even more ferocious rivalry between the top teams. For anyone enthralled by motor-racing, Formula 1 Fanatic is a feast of recognition and nostalgia. For those who know nothing about Formula 1, it explains a mystery.