Customer Reviews

Holman Moody The Legendary Race Team

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although the book chronicles the lives of one of the great car building and racing teams, it leaves out an integral part of the story. The author states, " I've purposely decided to steer clear of the politics and disagreements that occurred between John (Holman) and Ralph (Moody)." The author talks about all of the people who asked him to "concentrate on the positive."

Can you imagine if every book was written this way? Although one learns alot about their relationship with Ford and the drivers, what's missing is the details of what made Holman & Moody such an intersting and dynamic combination.

For $40, one would expect the whole story.

Holman Moody was an important part of the American auto racing scene for decades. The company deserves a quality presentation their part in American auto racing history similar to Alan Hummel's recent book on Penske. Instead readers get a coffee table book with wide margins, too little text, huge pictures with long captions that simply repeat portions of the text, and a gaudy graphic design from 1955 using pages and pages of deep red. Forcing readers to read black type on a red background is dumb.

The core of the book should be NASCAR but that material is buried in chapters on drag racing Mustangs, GT40's, road racing Falcons, Can-Am cars, and boats. These are all interesting chapters but they should be in addition to, not instead of, a comprehensive presentation of H-M in NASCAR. The NASCAR chapters are very personality oriented at the expense of technical information.

The authors seem to realize that the book is incomplete so they added several appendices, framed in the same ugly red. The second appendix, all ford and mercury victories, 1958 to 1971, is pointless.

Readers can only hope that this book won't keep other publishers from bringing out a better book on the same topic.

Overall the book has nice design, photos, and production but is sorely lacking in proof reading and editing. There are numerous and repeated examples of incorrect spellings. Some examples: Ford Galaxie is incorrectly spelled in book as "Galaxy" and driver Rodger Ward's name spelled "Roger." The authors were either sloppy or the proof reading nonexistent. It makes you wonder about the accuracy of other data.

If your into Ford Performance History this book is a must. Informative chapters with great back in time photos. There is a picture of John Holman standing in HM's warehouse surounded by pallets with 427 sohc motors sitting on them- if you can appreciate the reality of this photo, this book is for you. Its that simple.

This book covers the history of Holman Moody nicely. I noticed a few errors, but the overall story and photo's are excellent. I thought I knew quite a bit about Holman Moody, but this book really opened my eyes to their accomplishments and history. I am very pleased with my purchase.

A very nice coffee table type book. Loads of information and pictures.