Over sixty years ago, in 1958 Guy Anthony Vandervell's team of Vanwall Grand Prix cars won the Manufacturers’ Championship, fulfilling seven years of endeavour by Vandervell to build and race his own cars against all comers, particularly the Italian teams. In a spectacular series exclusively for 8W, Ron Rex gives us an in-depth look into the engines that propelled the all-British effort, starting with the first four chapters of an eight-part series.

On May 14, 2015, an intriguing book titled Senna versus Schumacher and Other Formula One Rivalries That Never Happened was released through several online outlets. In the book, motorsport editors Christiaan Lustig and Mattijs Diepraam tried to answer the question what might have happened if the rivalry between Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher had come to full bloom. In three more stories, they went on to ask the same question about Alberto Ascari, Stirling Moss and Gilles Villeneuve and the competition they would have had with Juan Manuel Fangio, Jim Clark and Alain Prost respectively. In 2019, on the 25th anniversary of Ayrton Senna's death, Lustig and Diepraam have decided to release excerpts from the book in order to revive interest in these events from Formula 1's often glorious but sometimes tragic past. Here is part 4, on the Ascari vs Fangio rivalry that never happened.

It never rained as hard as in some of the surrounding areas but a continuous drizzle and the occasional shower still made the 2019 Spa Six Hours into one of the wettest ever recorded. Only on Friday, the sun came out for a brief and joyful moment, but the rest of the weekend the drivers expressed their feelings about the very difficult slippery conditions that changed every corner and every lap. It was surprising how few crashes were counted – even though some of them were quite violent. In the Six Hours race itself, lasting the full six hours for once, it was a question of Agatha Christie’s 20 Big Ford GT40s all over again, as just one example made it across the line troublefree. That did mean that it won by three laps…