GP Car Story vol. 01 - McLaren MP4/4

[Jeep]

Hello all!

In my last order from Japan, I got this reference book (http://www.hlj.com/product/SAE61504) on the MP4/4 and I thought I'd share my thoughts on it.

First off, the price is quite reasonable (933 Yens, about $12). The cover art is nice and, including the covers, it's 100 pages even. There's also a nice drawing of Senna leaving his crashed MP4/4 at Monaco in the contents page. There are about 20 pages that are mostly text (all in Japanese) and one entire page of results at the end.

There are some nice shots, a number that I hadn't seen before, but others have been seen often over the years. At the beginning of the book (in Japanese order), there are a couple of nice (but small) shots of the car's cockpit in a museum, then a general history. It's only on page 018 that you get the first really usable picture (engine compartment, late season). Then there's a comparison of the MP4/4 and the Brabham BT55, with an article on Gordon Murray, an article on Prost and Senna, and another one on Jo Ramirez. Some nice shots here and there, but nothing that'll help you put together a McLaren (or very little). It's only on page 40 that you get to the section called The Details of the MP4/4... with a two-page, blurry picture of Senna at speed. Not much help. The following pages show pictures of the two cars at every race, which can help a bit with the placing of markings (I'd never noticed were the team put the Shell logo on the sidepods in Mexico, for instance). There are only 5 half-page pictures in these pages, almost all the others being 1/8 of page, which doesn't help for details (a couple of them are even smaller!). Then there's another article (nice two-page picture of Alain on track, but not much in the way of details) and we FINALLY get to the so-called "Detail File" on page 056. It's 12 pages long (yes, that's all) and while there are a few interesting shots (notably of pre-season testing), most of them are, again, small and, here's the real problem, DARK! There's a nice, full-page overhead shot of Senna sitting in his car in the pits while the car is being tended to, but it's printed so dark that there's no detail to be garnered from it! Most of the car is just a black outline with bits of silver here and there (like the top of the radiators). There are only four usable shots of the engine in the next section about the Honda powerplant (although one of them is a modern-day close-up), and then you get possibly the nicest engine shot of the book - of the engine compartment of the... Ferrari F187/88c!

The book ends with three articles on three races from 88: Monaco, Paul Ricard and Monza (track shots), then a bit about other cars/drivers, the table of results and the announcement that the next volume will be about the Ferrari 641/2.

And that's it. I guess you get what you pay for. But if you really want some reference material on the MP4/4, I'd recommend the Joe Honda book. No contest (no more than between an MP4/4 and, say, an Arrows A10, no offense intended to Arrows).