Against Death and Time: One Fatal Season in Racing's Glory Years

by Brock Yates

Against Death and Time chronicles one fatal season in the post-war glory years of racecar driving. It is the story of the dispossessed young men who raced for "the sheer unvarnished hell of it." Yates has been writing for Car and Driver for more than thirty years and is one of the best-known people in the racing world. He raced his own car for a season in a Plimpton-like adventure recorded in one of his six books, Sunday Driver. He has published widely, from Playboy to the Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on every major television network as a racing and automotive industry commentator. Brock integrates unexpected and fascinating detail into this character-driven story of men compelled to compete against themselves, time, and death. His strategy of a fictional narrator observing, interrogating, and reporting on Brock's real-life protagonists imparts the immediacy of fiction to this minutely accurate account. The book is based on Yates's incomparable experience and interviews with dozens of surviving racers, widows, car owners, mechanics, and historians, and his deep research in the archives of the Speedway, the Detroit Public Library Auto Archive, United States Auto Club, Henry Ford Museum, Smithsonian Institute, and contemporary newspapers and periodicals.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports

352 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2004

About the author

Brock Yates was an American journalist and a best-selling author, most frequently about automotive topics and motor sport.

Reviews

[Mark Dill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable read. It's the nexus of historical fact and fiction. Bill Vukovich and James Dean are compelling real-life characters in the story, which also includes flights of fancy and fictional characters. It recounts the deadly 1955 auto racing season and in doing so offers compelling insights into the dangerous post-war auto racing sport. It also provides thought-provoking into the culture of the sport when many participants were World War veterans in need of an adrenaline fix. Worth your time if you appreciate auto racing history.

[Rey Dekker · Rating 5 out of 5]

...pretty incredible book if you are a motorsports fan...got this one from Robin Miller of Speed Network...knew of Yates and his writing from magazines past but didn't realize how he "Gumped" so many pivotal and newsworthy events...the disastrous crash that killed over 100 people at Le Mans, being on the scene within minutes after the crash that killed James Dean in CA...pretty amazing stuff...a good, quick read for anyone interesting in how visceral and dangerous motor racing was in the early fifties...a good look too at the psychology that seemingly drove these men, fresh from the adrenaline pumping scenes of WWII to vanilla, suburban American and their unquenched need for speed and the tailings that hunger necessarily brought with it in the era when speeds were dramatically increasing while technology (brakes, safety equipment, suspensions, fire management) was stuck in the early 1900's...a volatile mix wherein 50% of all professional drivers were dying, commensurate with gladiators in Roman times...glad I read it...

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this story. Mostly factual minus the contrived first person format. Yates is (was, unfortunately) a gifted writer and he sure can keep you glued to your reading chair. Except for a few minor irritations (spelling, factual errors, and some personal pet peeves) this would have garnered the coveted "5". A riveting story for race fans and non-fans alike. But, my God, there were no Dc-8's flying in 1955 and they certainly never landed in Burbank and they never flew for American. Great book though!

[Nathan Wittmann]

I picked this book up on a whim while browsing the motorsports shelf at the local library (this shelf is unfortunately sparing in its selection), as it covered a motorsports period which I was eager to learn more about (pre-1970s) and a topic that has been written around in books on motorsport (the sheer number of fatalities in the first 50-60 years of automobile racing).
I was not aware of the writing style, in which the author inserts himself into the narrative as if he were actually there (termed "faction" by Yates in the introduction), but I grew used to the style and just ended up reading the book like a fictional memoir.
Where Yates loses it for me is in the latter half of the book, as he tries to shoehorn himself into as many situations as he plausibly can; and that's just it, the plausibility is lost in the endeavor. I was engrossed in the Indy 500 lead-up because I felt that I knew the characters: Vukovich and co. jumped off of the page. It's telling that the author only devotes around 50 pages to Le Mans, whereas we finally leave Indianapolis after around 125 pages; I never understand drivers like Juan Manuel Fangio and Mike Hawthorn the way I do Bill Vukovich and Bob Sweikert. The entire James Dean section I can take or leave (including the preposterous romantic subplot, which Yates explains in the intro is a way of portraying certain women that hung around the sport at the time, but which only serves as a sex-tempered fever dream for the author and so many other male avatars).
While I enjoyed my time with this work, I'm still on the hunt for the all-encompassing historical retelling of this period in motorsports that hits every note squarely on the head.

[Grant Pratt Schweppe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read other pieces that covered motor racing in the 50's and 60's, and this book read as if it was a research paper. Although the author was detailed in his accounts, he would change subjects frequently and the separation of chapters seemed random. Knowing about some of the events he wrote about, Yates seemed to rush through the races only to repeat a point as if it was his thesis statement. He would state his points bluntly instead of letter the reader discover what he was trying to say through a vivid account of what had occurred.

[Jeff Koslowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a 235 page book, it tries to do a lot. I appreciate the "faction" style of writing the author uses but I don't think this is the right time or book for that.

There are a noticeable amount of grammatical mistakes in the text which is rather head-scratching.

I was hoping for a scholarly approach to these topics and instead I got a story. It makes it more readable but it also feels more like fiction than it does non-fiction.