Porsche 908: The Long Distance Runner Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Porsche 908: The Long Distance Runner? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Porsche 908: The Long Distance Runner. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Porsche 908: The Long Distance Runner ReviewThe book tells the story of the design and development of all versions and details the 20-year racing history in the hand of first factory and later private hands. A full set of 1968-1988 race statistics for the 10 major series is so thorough that it even lists the reasons for DNFs. The race history takes up five of the 10 chapters with the three primary years, 1968-1971, getting a chapter each and the years 1972-1984 bundled into one. The special Bergspyder hill-climb version gets its own chapter, as do the two 914 road cars that carried a 908 engine. The chapter of driver profiles lists 19 men, apparently in order of season they drove/won for Porsche during the core 1968-1971 years (not easy to tell because there is quite a bit of overlap here). Most of the profiles are accompanied by period photos of the drivers. There are no lists of specs or modifications nor is there an index.
The main text is augmented by eyewitness reports, anecdotes, quotes and the like. The writing is concise, maintains a brisk pace, and conveys an enormous amount of fact--not an easy thing to do without disrupting the flow of the narrative. If there is anything to say about the writing it is that, stylistically, it is uneven inasmuch as the main text strikes a distinctly different tone from the chattier style of the photo captions. The reason for that is that the book was written by a group of authors, each with a particular specialty. Not that the book or the book jacket would tell you any of this. . . . Even the authors themselves do not know why the publisher arbitrarily singled two of them out for a jacket blurb, and even that doesn't say what one of the two did on this book. Födisch had the contacts to racers, manufacturers, teams, and photographers of that period; he and Neßhöver did many of the interviews. Rainer Roßbach handled layout, photo selection and preparation, print preproduction, most of the subtitles and some parts of the main text. His brother Dieter wrote a large part of the main text. And Harald Schwarz provided the statistics. As a team they have collaborated in varying configurations on several projects.
The photos deserve special mention. Many of them are from the Porsche archives, and many of them have not been previously published. Most of them show the cars at work, and the paddock/pit photos give a nice flavor of the very different conditions then. There are not a lot of photos of the running gear or frame, not even in the Technology chapter (slim pickings for the model builders among the readers). Some of the photos are a bit grainy, although less so in the German version. And, this being racing, some simply are unsharp. Racing photos can never be too large and none of the ones in this book are unseemly small. There are also quite a few racing posters.
The sensible use of design and typography can add layers of clarity to the written word. Readers with an eye for such things will find the layout uninspired. The use in the race results tables of an italic serif font, with zero or negative letterspacing/kerning, violates every rule of good typesetting and severely compromises legibility.
Readers who have a choice between the English and the German version are urged to consider the German edition. It is more than 1.5 inches wider, 2.5 inches taller, shows all the photos the authors selected (the English version cut some and substituted several), has a more sophisticated design and layout as well as better paper and print quality--and at 49.90 Euros (ca. $71) costs less!
Full review at speedreaders.info. Copyright 2010, Sabu Advani.Porsche 908: The Long Distance Runner Overview

Want to learn more information about Porsche 908: The Long Distance Runner?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now