Fred's Book Club: Vroom.

Welcome to yet another episode of the Humpback Writers, the awesome book club with the weird name. Of course, we don't think any of the writers actually have humps, even though we post on Hump Day, but the subject of today's book could have wound up with all sorts of bumps, lumps, and humps had he been less skillful and less fortunate.

Rick Mears: Thanks: The Story of Rick Mears and the Mears Gang is a coffee table paperback by Gordon Kirby about the amazing career if Indy driver Rick Mears, one of a handful of men who have achieved the highest number of Indianapolis 500 victories to date with four. Mears won in 1979, 1984, 1988, and 1991. (The other two four-time winners are A.J. Foyt and Mears rival Al Unser.)

I'm not kidding when I say this is a coffee table book. It's 11" by 11" and weighs about ten pounds. As far as I can tell it's a really good biography of International Motorsports Hall of Famer Mears, but that's where I have to make a confession: I have only skimmed this book, not read it. It belongs to another member of the family, someone much more interested in Indy car racing than I. Anyway, however good the text is, we all know these books are all about the pictures. And it has a lot of great pictures.

I do think Kirby does do a nice job throwing you into the action. Here's how the prologue starts:

With his left foot pushing down on top of his broken right foot most of the time, Rick Mears fought for the lead of the Indianapolis 500 for almost three hours that late May afternoon in 1991. Rick had broken his foot when he crashed his Penke Indy car because of a suspension failure near the end of the first week of practice at Indianapolis that year. Rick and team owner Roger Penske kept his broken foot a secret from race officials and the press and despite intense pain he was back in action again later that same day in his back-up car.  

I also got a bit of a feel for what made Mears such a great driver. His great love in life is driving, and he'd drive anything. He started with his brother Roger, shooting around in sprint buggies, then achieved success in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. "I loved that road up the mountain," Rick is quoted as saying in the book. "It was a real challenge to drive. I was glad we'd won it because I didn't necessarily need to do it again. Every year you got braver and braver because you knew the course better and better, and you were just getting closer and closer to the edge."

Dreaming about hoisting the trophy is nice, but a guy whose #1 desire is to get out there on anything and tearing it up in a powerful machine -- that's a champion.

Of course, Mears's career was not without its crashes and injuries. The book has plenty of personal photographs, some connected to that. Here he is on the right, driving a far less powerful machine:

That was following a crash in Quebec in 1984 that knocked him out and left his feet poking out the car's front end. "I remember the first time I looked down and saw both feet were still on my legs, that was before they were talking about taking them off," he said. "But when I looked down and saw them both still there, it was almost immediate, I knew I was going to drive again." This was just a couple of months after his second Indy victory.

The Indy ran late this year, just last Sunday instead of Memorial Day weekend, all because of the Chinese Death Virus. There was not a single fan present in person -- which is 300,000 fewer than normal. If that was not strange enough, the race was barreling toward a thrilling conclusion when a racer in the back crashed, and the race had to finish under a yellow flag, so no one could change position for the remaining five laps. Still, we at Fred's Book Club congratulate Japanese racer  Takuma Sato for his second victory. Get two more and maybe we'll have your book on the Humpback Writers one day.