Wyss, Legate, Friedman, Mills.. Where's the 427 book???

[Historybuff]

Tevor Legate is right--doing a proper book with all the right pictures and interviews is too expensive to do the way books are done nowadays. The publishers won't advance the monies needed to do the spade work.

The ideal example of a Cobra book presently on the market is Michael Schoen's Cobra-Ferrari wars. That book probably took over a year to do.Schoen is a lawyer and no doubt that profession taught him how to interview people. Plus he's an ultra enthusiast who has owned a Daytona coupe and many other Cobras.

He interviewed at least 50 people in doing the book. Travel costs today have doubled so
unless you have a lot of free airline miles it would cost several thousand to find all the people who can tell the tale.

Not only that, like writing about WWII,due to the passage of over 40 years, the original participants are fading fast. It's hard to believe our heroes like Bondurant are now over 70! I wager that half the people Schoen interviewed have died by now.

Publishers only come up with miniscule advances, $1000 or $2000, it's going to cost me that just to go to Monterey, and I live in Calif.! Nobody could set out to write a 427 Cobra book with less than about $10,000 expense money.

So it's going to take a writer that's independently wealthy, with knowledge of Sixties racing, who can devote the year or so of time

One example of a non publisher doing a bang-up job was George Stauffers book on the Cobra Daytona coupe. It cost $100 when the book was first published and is now about $750 used. (Clue: You can order it from the library that has it through your own library through a plan where you can order books from any library for $2) But George is a car dealer in (real) Cobras and GT40s and thus could write off the whole venture as promotion. He enlisted Brock, Friedman and one other ex-Shelby employee to produce it.

Another alternative is to have a club produce it but now that the SAAC club is at odds with Shelby
I can't see that happening --as some Shelby employees would probably refuse to "cross the pioket line" as it were and at any rate they would have to get the Registry out first to have any credibility before they could take orders on a new book that doesn't exist yet.I am not sure how long a time lapse you can have before ordering a book and getting it before some law is broken.

By the way, talking about Yates' book Of Time and Death where a fictional reporter tells the story one of the best selling books out now is called
Racing in the Rain which is
told from the viewpoint of a dog!

Pretty funny book, actually

I don't remember if it tells what kind of dog but I'd believe anything a Labrador Retriever tells me...