As the title says: Which books would you recommend for (becoming) setup-gurus, perfect drivers, race commentators, brand experts or - to put it simply - car-enthusiasts?

I for myself am currently reading "Porsche 917 - Archiv 1968-1975" by Walther Näher which painstakingly accurate examines the history of every single one of the famous 917s ever built. In places it's strangely dry (for example when a driver totalled a car in a practice crash and, by the way, died) but I blame this on the author being German.

What are your favourites?

Thanks to scipy:

Tune to win - Carroll Smith
Drive to win - Carroll Smith

A lot of good stuff in those two I know they helped me. I'm sure he has others that would be as equally useful.

This. Written by Alex Roy, one of Gumball 3000 veterans. Team Polizei FTW

I recently finished reading The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit. Was a decent read. After I finish reading another book my girlfriend gave me for Christmas I'm going to start reading The Art of Racing in the Rain, which is only tangentially related to racing, I guess.

its a good read, and gives a lot of info on how to be faster on track (lines etc) Has many diagrams and illustrations, and some pretty pics of Nissan/Nismo related race cars.
The foreword of Pedro is not worth mentioning tho.

I recently acquired a good version of Ayrton Senna's principles of race driving. Haven't had the time to dig into it yet unfortunately.

Quote from Seb66 :

Thanks to scipy:

Tune to win - Carroll Smith
Drive to win - Carroll Smith

A lot of good stuff in those two I know they helped me. I'm sure he has others that would be as equally useful.

I just gobbled the pre-reads at amazon.com and am now not far away from ordering, especially the first one. Seems to be written understandably and to have quite a sense of humour ... nice!

Quote from ACCAkut :

its a good read, and gives a lot of info on how to be faster on track (lines etc) Has many diagrams and illustrations, and some pretty pics of Nissan/Nismo related race cars.
The foreword of Pedro is not worth mentioning tho.

I just came across this at amazon, looks promising ... but he didn't publish it in German, did he?

I can't help reading the thread title as 'The retarded book thread'.

Quote from Crashgate3 :

I can't help reading the thread title as 'The retarded book thread'.

And I still haven't given up hope that there are some more bookworms here at the forum giving constructive feedback.