Classic read

STEPHEN BAYLEY picks a book about cars by a polymath

Being of the Penguin Classic generation, I might easily have chosen Waugh, Hemingway, Kafka or Camus for my classic read. Or, if non-fiction, then Kenneth Clark or Nikolaus Pevsner. Or even The Mersey Sound poetry collection which I still look at weekly. Instead, it has to be LJK Setright’s The Grand Prix Car 1954-1966 (Allen & Unwin, 1968). Leonard Setright (1931-2005) was a technical journalist and a founder of the Philharmonia Chorus, once singing in Beethoven’s 9th under Klemperer. In the Sixties, he began writing about cars. But to call Setright a ‘motoring journalist’ would be like calling Proust a ‘gossip columnist’.

The Grand Prix Car is his masterpiece. Setright saw literature, music, philosophy and motor-racing as a continuum; each was a fascinating aspect of man’s determination to understand the world. G-force and terza

rima were, in Setright’s view, related in the mind of any educated individual.

The performance of a racing car was, like poetry, a thing of beauty demanding meticulous analysis. Thus, The Grand

Prix Car begins with an ‘Exordium’, the rhetorical term for the beginning of a speech. Dionysius of Halicarnassus appears long before horse-power is mentioned.

His flamboyant style was influenced first by an understanding of engineering inherited from his father who designed the ‘Setright Ticket Machine’ which bus conductors were once never seen without. Second, by a profound knowledge of literature and music. Third, by Rabbinical wisdom. He was a Judaic scholar and jurist.

In his readers Setright expected a level of technical insight similar to his own: an understanding of the mathematical distinction between speed and acceleration was assumed.

He was a marvellously cantankerous individual, refusing to engage with his public. And he was, additionally, a dandy and a serious smoker. He wrote: ‘Driving and smoking – two of the greatest pleasures known to man – are not to be separated’. Alas, his Balkan Sobranie Black Russian habit killed him. Still, I have just taken The Grand Prix

Car off the shelf to write this piece. I opened it randomly at page 191 and read: ‘Assuming that a megaphone should be conical, it becomes a matter for arbitrary decision to decide how steep should be its taper.’ Utterly, utterly engrossing.