Closing Speed: The Unabridged Edition

Mario Andretti said of Closing Speed author Ted West, I’ve known Ted forever; our paths ran together for many years. He worked hard to earn the respect he gets, and I’m sure the enthusiast world will now enjoy his fiction.

One of racing’s young lions, Ted West used his keen sense of observation and his immense writing talent to define the endurance racing war between Porsche’s 917 and the Ferrari 512 immortalized in Steve McQueen’s Le Mans.

Sent to Europe by Road & Track in 1970 at age 27, West quickly came to know the racers, their women, and the complex lives they shared at Brands Hatch, Monza, the Targa Florio, Spa, the Nurburgring, and Le Mans. Their lives were as dramatic off the track as their racing was on it.

West’s friend, Porsche and F1 racer Brian Redman, has noted that of the racers who filled the 1968 Monaco Grand Prix starting grid two-thirds of them were dead by 1972. The stakes were never higher.

In 1970, with cars reaching 248 mph at Le Mans, racing was at its fastest, most exciting, most competitive … with an underlying gravity that was both breathtaking and horrifying.

Closing Speed is a vivid and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of racing in Europe in 1970 – Porsche vs. Ferrari – when competitive pride, sexual desire, and racing fate collided head-on.