DELAGE: A Brooklands Portfolio

I was decidedly disappointed with the 'Delahaye' and 'Hispano Suiza' volumes in this series. In my reviews I noted a dire lack of actual material from the 1920's and 30's and a huge amount from the awful post war American magazine 'Road and Track'. Happily this one on Delage features more than 50 actual pre war articles and road tests and only eight from Road and track. Moreover instead of printing articles in the order they were published this book covers the models themselves in chronological order, which makes it much easier to locate everything you want to find about a particular Delage model.However, there are still many gaps, and especially there are quite a few important contemporary road tests that are missing- for example the June and December 1930 Autocar road tests of the D8 are not here, and not many of the tests or articles printed are from Autocar (only 20 of 125)- there are rather more from 'Motor'. You learn much more about a prewar company and its products from contemporary reports by those two excellent magazines than from reading any number of 'modern' articles. The latter nearly always focus on a few exotic survivors, often with exagerated claims for their performance. They also always devote half the space to a tedious potted history of the company. That Classic D8 model provides a good example of this sort of thing, since there are many articles here on the exotic S and SS versions of this car, yet actually of 2000 D8s made a mere 100 were built in that form. I was very amused to read- inevitably from 'Road and Track'- that the D8S was 'tested by the factory for one hour at 100 mph'. Actually this model was made specifically for the British market and in reality the 'test' comprised a quick blast down the Great West Road in the early hours, before the police woke up. Maybe the whole excursion took an hour but 100mph, if ever reached at all, would have lasted for all of about 30 seconds!I do appreciate that a much greater effort has been made here to tell the Delage story and that compiling all those articles must have involved a lot of work. Unfortunately it is very expensive for a softback book in which the reproduction has not advanced from the Brooklands books of 30 years ago. Compare this with the superb volume two of 'Delage, France's finest car' (mostly by Davis BurgessWise) which is beautifully produced on art paper. That is an expensive book- but at about £35, so is this one.

This literary collation should have been half the size. There is too much repetition. Trouble is, very few Delage cars were imported to the UK, and there are repeated articles covering a narrow range of cars. Over the course of 50-60 years this is not a problem, but having articles from the 1920s to 1980s all covering just a few cars is a bit much to take in all at once.

Another labour of love -- fantastic compilation of Delage period literature. A must for any serious automotive library. A lot of work went into this limited interest book. Thanks to R M Clarke for going to the trouble.