'The maddest 12 months of my life. The journey starts with an oddball race up an American mountain and ends with me checking myself out of hospital with a broken back. Again ...' As Guy's Latvian grandfather frequently reminded him, 'When you dead, you dead'. So before it's all over, Guy Martin is making the most of the time he's got. In this past year alone, Guy has raced the Isle of Man TT and finished on the podium; bike trekked through India; competed in solo 24-hour bicycles races; flown a stunt plane; broken a go-kart speed record down a French mountain and attempted to break the motorcycle land-speed record at Bonneville Salt Flats. And he's done all this around his day job as a truck mechanic. But let Guy tell you about it himself: 'This book starts in a Transit, ends in a Transit, and in between I've raced a few pushbikes, raced a few motorbikes and got a fair few stories to tell you.' Spot on.

This book describes the birth, development and rallying career of the Lancia Stratos, Europe's very first purpose-built rally car, in the mid/late 1970s. It provides a compact and authoritative history of where, when and how it became so important to the sport, as well as telling the story of the team. The book is part of Graham Robson's definitive "Rally Giants" series, published by Veloce.

An in-depth study of the Sauber-Mercedes racecars that dominated the Group C racing scene during the late 1980s and early 1990s. When Peter Sauber started using Mercedes V8 engines in his Group C sports cars in 1985 the result was World Championship wins in 1989 and 1990. Utterly dominant, the three-pointed star of Mercedes beat the TWR Jaguars and Nissans, and introduced a certain M. Schumacher into the factory team in 1990. This book features interviews with many of the personalities who raced with the Sauber-Mercedes team, including Jochen Mass, Mauro Baldi, Kenny Acheson, David Price, Bobby Bell and Leo Ress. A host of magnificent colour photographs backs up the history and development of the cars. Also included is a chassis-by-chassis history of each individual car.

Chasing an alcoholic father around the UK - and attending nine different schools in the process - may not have been the best start to life for Ian Bain. But it certainly gave him a taste for adventure. By 23, he'd sailed around the world a couple of times, risked jail as a big-time booze smuggler in India and worked as the Buenos Aires correspondent of The Economist. Then, after a decade as a journalist in London with some of Britain's biggest newspapers, life really got interesting. Ian's own slide into drink and despair took him to the Arabian Gulf in the belief that living there would be dry in every sense. It wasn't. Fired twice by local newspapers, he checked himself into a Dubai psychiatric ward where he was shocked to see patients handcuffed to the water pipes and guards with batons. Not the kind of rehab he'd imagined. Emerging sober but broke, Ian talked a benevolent bank manager into lending him just enough to start his own public relations company. The firm's birth pangs were both painful and comical and could have ended abruptly when Ian was threatened with deportation. In time he built it into one of the most successful PR consultancies in the Middle East with clients such as General Motors, Airbus, Samsung, Emirates Airline and the Government of Dubai. Commercial success didn't end his affection for adventure. Helping to smuggle an Arab rally driver across tightly controlled European borders was hardly conducive to a quiet life. Nor was narrowly avoiding capture as Saddam's forces moved to seize Kuwait airport. There were business risks too, like the gamble he took in resigning a million-dollar-a-year PR account. Regardless of acclaim as a writer and PR strategist, Ian carried a secret shame through his long career: an entrenched belief rooted in his turbulent childhood that he wasn't - and never would be - good enough. It got to the point where he gave away substantial sums of money because he felt he didn't deserve to have it, and failed to collect fees for the same reason. Eventually, Ian gave up the business and the comfortable life in Dubai to focus on healing the deep emotional wounds of his early years. And there began another remarkable adventure. SINGING IN THE LIFEBOAT is the poignant, often funny, immensely readable story of a man searching for himself.