Tony Gardiner is a highly experienced professional illustrator, who has maintained a lifelong interest in motorsport, including club events, rallies, sprints and hillclimbs, as a spectator, official and competitor._x000B_ Tony first became interested in motorsport in 1957 when the Ecurie Ecosse team of D Type Jaguars won at Le Mans. Other forms of motorsport, including rallies like the Monte Carlo and Liége-Rome-Liége, with competitors driving over Europe’_x0019_s mountain roads and snow-covered goat tracks at high speed, captured Tony‘s imagination. He quickly became aware of Britain _x0019_s own RAC International Rally which covered some two thousand miles of British roads each November. As _x0018_The RAC _x0019_ became more and more competitive with new forest stages, his interest grew.In 1964 he was a spectator at the RAC Rally‘s start at the Chelsea Barracks in London, and decided there and then that, next year, he would follow the Rally round its entire route. This started some 14 further such ventures, covering thousands of miles in a Mini Cooper, Vauxhall Magnum and a Leyland 1800. Tony even persuaded the Press Office of the Royal Automobile Club to issue him with passes and rally plates, which helped him immensely getting in and out of stages quickly.The result of Tony _x0019_s passion for the RAC Rally is that he amassed, between 1964-1983, over a thousand photographs in black and white and colour, plus a large collection of RAC Rally memorabilia, much of which is reproduced in this book.Tony is based in Worthing, West Sussex, and has published several other books with Veloce, including How to Draw & Paint Cars, Motor Racing at Goodwood in the Sixties, and The Brighton National Speed Trials.

This new print has been revised and freshened up in paperback, with many new photographs documenting Tony's photographs taken through the eyes of someone who took a week off every year to follow the RAC around the country, truly an enthusiasts perspective. Tony is a professional illustrator. Once he caught the rally bug, he trekked around the RAC route between 1964 and 1983, clocking up some 28,000 miles in a Mini Cooper, Vauxhall Magnum and a BNC 1800 ... he managed to eventually obtain press passes and plates from the Royal Automobile Club's Press Office, which helped enormously. Using his trusty Zenit (a Russian copy of a Leica) with a cheap lens, he was an early adopter of colour film. What makes Tony's record particularly interesting is that he did not just concentrate on the front-runners - he has plenty of clubmen struggling hard. The book also contains a few route maps showing what an amazing event the RAC rally was in the times when the rally really was a rally of Great Britain. - Old Stager. This book reissued by Veloce Publishing traces the history of the 1960 RAC Rally, the year of the creation of the first special stage closed to traffic, in 1983, the last year of the old fashioned rally before the appearance of Group B. This book was written by Tony Gardiner, a sort of knowledgeable spectator who, as a professional illustrator in life, had a passion for photography. He admits himself that his work is mostly a collection of photos, most taken by himself. But it offers a great range of cars from those blessed years when the rally was not a "calculated" sport like today and where the drivers engaged almost "any car." No less than 335 photos illustrate this book of 208 pages rich in atmosphere and having at least the merit of containing a caption explanation for each illustration. - AUTOnews Redaction. The RAC Rally Action book is very well put together, well written with pages and pages of superb photographs. It gives a great knowledgeable insight into the history of the event from the 1960s through to the 1980s. I can fully recommend this book for rally enthusiasts with it's wonderful stories. A big must for your ever expanding bookshelf. - Don Barrow Rally Navigation Equipment. If you haven't already, read it; it's worth the price. - IRDC Quattro.