May’s Book: Crashed and Byrned
April has been a hectic month for me. I tried to cut a few corners and ended up leaving myself a mountain of work to do. I’m just catching up with The Podium backlog now and I am excited to annouce May’s book of the month.
This month’s book (with a unanimous vote of one!) is Crashed and Byrned – The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw by Tommy Byrne and Mark Hughes.
On the 26th May the F1 calendar goes to the beautiful Monte Carlo, without doubt the most picturesque circuit in F1. To pay hommage to that circuit I have hand picked this great book, which was also the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Year for 2008.
A few older gentlemen down at my local have been telling me to read this for ages and after reading the blurb and a couple of online reviews I’m not surprised.
This is the thrilling, warts-engine-oil-and-all autobiography of the only racing driver Ayrton Senna ever feared – the 200mph flawed genius of Tommy Byrne.It tells the surreal tale of a poverty-stricken Dundalk kid’s rise to become the only racing driver the great Ayrton Senna ever feared – and how it all went wrong from there. For a brief moment Tommy Byrne was arguably the world’s greatest driver, the motor racing equivalent of George Best and Muhammad Ali rolled into one – A racer, a thief, a raconteur.This is the story of his improbable escape, his rapid rise and his spectacular and bizarre fall from grace. Peppered with dark humour and a cast of ridiculous characters, it is the antithesis of a fairytale – and it’s all true. Hold on tight, the tale of Tommy Byrne is quite a ride – from fending for himself as the runt of a big Catholic litter in the ’60s, running the gauntlet of the sectarian violence in the ’70s, troubling Ayrton Senna and making it to F1 in the ’80s, resorting to drugs in the aftermath and driving for a deluded billionaire madman and then gun-toting Mexicans in the ’90s. It’s raw, passionate, and – with Byrne’s ability to tell it like it is – not for the faint-hearted.
The only driver Ayrton Senna feared! I can’t believe it!
And if you’re not yet convinced that you should go out now and pick up a copy, check out this review, which was posted on Amazon by a very happy reader.
“Just extraordinary. What a fantastic read. If you could imagine an unlikely cross between Angela’s Ashes and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas with a loose motor racing backdrop, this is it. It has you in hysterics one moment, full of sadness the next. The most amazing sports biography I’ve ever read. In fact even if it was a work of fiction, it would still work. If you never buy another book again, you must buy this one.”