Amid this colony of souls who earn their keep by writing, it initially comes as a surprise to find that there are more than a few that can't actually write. And I mean, really write. So when a book by someone that can write with the grace of Senna on a qualifying lap turns up in the mail, it is officially a Good Day. And the most recent such day came with the arrival of Richard Williams' latest title.

If this column has any regular readers, then they'll already be well aware of our long-standing admiration of Williams' books. He's not the most prolific author going around; at least, not where books are concerned - our count puts it somewhere around five books over the past decade. But the time and effort that goes into each title is always reflected in the quality of the end result, which goes part of the way toward explaining why we are still yet to receive a dud book from this author's pen.

'The Last Road Race' maintains the standard set by Williams' earlier books. Williams has captured a pivotal moment in Formula One history - the final chapter in the sport's shift from road racing to circuit racing, representing the severance of one of the last links between the sport's origins and its elite.

It's a vivid snapshot of an intriguing era in the sport, too - the rise of the British teams and drivers against the European vanguard (and all of the consequent effects upon national pride), the consolidation of Stirling Moss as Fangio's most obvious successor, and plenty of scope for mechanical and engineering diversity within the regulations. Looking back now, it's hard to imagine what the experience must have been like for the substantial crowd. Modern complaints about trackside spectators struggling to follow the race because their view is restricted to the patch of tarmac right in front of them seem rather shallow when compared with watching a three-hour race, contested by 16 entries (a number that would naturally diminish as the race progressed), racing over a 10-minute lap. And that's without gigantic superscreens...

But by this account, it must have been an amazing spectacle, not only through the pleasure of watching the best drivers in the world struggling to reconcile some seriously fast machinery with some roads that were, by modern standards, wholly unsuited to racing, but also because of the diversity of the cars themselves.

Williams has a special talent for stripping away the superlatives and showing the reader, through the eyes of those involved, what the 1957 Pescara Grand Prix was really like. Plenty of writers could help take you there, but Williams has a way of getting some grease under your fingernails as well. He is probably helped in this case by the fact that the four surviving drivers from the race - Moss, Tony Brooks, Roy Salvadori and Jack Brabham - are all quite eloquent and, crucially, suffer no romantic delusions about what they were doing.

Williams speaks at length with all four during the course of the book - each, in fact, gets their own chapter, which works well with the other contextual chapters concerning such subjects as the British and Italian teams and the historical backdrop to really set the scene. The account of the race itself is relatively (and mercifully, considering how badly race reports tend to translate into book form) short, but by then Williams' work has really been done. That Moss won the race from the front row is, of course, of historical importance, but it is not what made the event significant. Williams has clearly identified this, and weighted the book accordingly.

Unusually for a Williams book, this one is accompanied by photographs, all shot by the immensely well-respected Bernard Cahier. The pics, a number of which are candid shots taken in the pits, are all worthy of inclusion. However, in light of the circuit's very nature, and the fact that this was the last-ever race of its type in Formula One, I would have liked to see a few more that conveyed some sense of the circuit's character. There are a couple that show the track weaving between houses and cars thumping past grass verges crowded with spectators just a few feet from the cars, but other features of the layout, such as the changes in gradient, are unrepresented.

The book opens with a vivid quote from Brabham - "Those road courses were bloody dangerous and nasty, all of them. And Pescara was the worst." - and it would have been intriguing to have seen further evidence of this in the photographs. This is only a minor criticism though, and one that pales against the many things that make this book the worthy purchase that it is.