Piers Courage is one of those personalities from the sport's past who have an odd way of standing out – no mean feat, considering that F1's history has no shortage of interesting inhabitants. His legacy is not really his results, because his time ran out before he ever had the chance to make a serious dent in the statistician's tables. Nor is it the fact that he was killed in action. Courage raced during a so-called 'golden era' in which it was more dangerous to be a F1 driver than just about any other period in racing history, and he was hardly alone amongst his contemporaries in leaving his hotel for the racetrack one morning and never coming back.

In fact, pinpointing just what it is that makes Courage stand out is not easy to do, but after reading this book you could perhaps suggest that we're still getting the echoes of what by all accounts was a gigantic personality, and a somewhat enigmatic character all-round. Born very much with a silver spoon in his mouth as a member of a very powerful family brewing company, one could be forgiven for assuming that the only concern that Courage ever had as he progressed through the racing ranks was making sure that there was a pen somewhere at hand to sign the cheques. (It should come as no surprise to you at all to learn that this was indeed the view held by many of his rivals).

In fact, Courage was skint pretty much all the time. His father did not approve of his son going racing when there were far more productive things he could be doing, like accountancy, so the family fortune could not be relied upon when Piers needed money for racing. Which, as anybody who has anything to do with racing can tell you, is pretty much all the time.

Instead, Courage was forced to do things the hard way, and spent his formative years living rough around Europe with an assortment of people, including a few who would later become some of Formula One's most influential names.

Adam Cooper is well-known as a contributor to a number of magazines, however aside from his involvement with a sort of 3D Formula One pop-up book thing a few years ago, I don't recall him having written any other books. But if this is the sort of standard that we can expect, then here's hoping that plenty more are to come.

Cooper has worked with Courage's family to produce his book, and the result is an exquisitely personal, warm and insightful biography that brings Piers and his era back to life after more than thirty years. During his research, Cooper managed to track down just about everybody who had anything to do with Courage during his life, including a couple whose reminiscences are made all the more valuable by the fact that they passed away before the book made it to publication.

Not only have Courage's family and friends opened their hearts about Piers, they have also opened their photo albums. An overwhelming number of the many photographs in this book are being published for the first time, and every last one contributes something to the overall story.

The book has been produced in a large coffee-table format to show the images off to best effect, and while this particular reviewer is no great fan of the coffee-table book (purely because as nice as they look, they are a pain in the butt to carry around) it was absolutely the right way to go in this case.

But the highlight of the book was simply the author's treatment of his subject. Where so many similar titles stray away from their original path and degenerate into a succession of monotonous race reports punctuated with the occasional glimpse of the subject's personal life, this book's focus remains one hundred percent upon Piers as a person. His on-track exploits are obviously recounted, but again they are done in such a way that remains consistent with the overall thread of the book, and kept within the context of Piers's life as a whole.

It's also refreshing to see that Cooper was apparently aware of the richness of his material, and he does a perfect job of combining the memories of those who were there with his own narrative to produce a seamless, intimate picture of who Piers really was. This book is a veritable goldmine of worthwhile excerpts, but this one got the nod on the grounds that it made me laugh just as much when I read it the second time around. And it doesn't even directly involve Piers...

"Frank (Williams) was driving a Brabham I owned," says (Bubbles) Horsley. "I was driving around in my Ausper and I saw this familiar green bodywork all over the place, and then on the next lap there was Frank grinning at me out of a tree. I thought, 'you bastard, you've written my car off!' It upset me so much I went of shortly afterwards. I was chucked out of the old Ausper, and I winded myself landing, and I hurt my leg. I obviously didn't look too good, so they shoved me in the back of an ambulance and set off for hospital.

"They had to stop to open the gate, by which time I'd got my breath back and was compos mentis again. So I got up, got out, shut the door, and went back to the paddock. They took off at high speed and when they got there, there was nobody in the back. They came and found me and I got the most terrible bolliciking." (p65).