In 2006 I had the incredible fortune to interview Britain’s beloved motorsport commentator Murray Walker at his home in the New Forest.
I was ushered into a study crammed with assorted motorsport memorabilia, gloves and helmets signed by racing greats and row upon row of books. These included a collection of increasingly yellowed Autocourses which clearly ran back several decades and appeared – still, my beating heart – to be complete.That was the moment I resolved to start building a collection of my own. The best part of two decades later, it’s still no match for his, but I’ve come to appreciate why so many in motorsport consider this the indispensable annual reference to a year in motorsport.
The latest edition runs to a mammoth 432 pages, of which 344 are devoted to Formula 1. This includes both a race-by-race review of the season, plus detailed surveys of each team’s performance over the year. Now the F1 calendar has grown to a mammoth 24 rounds, recalling the events of every event each year becomes more challenging. Autocourse has therefore become a vital reference to fill in the gaps on what happened on- and off-track.
Despite the inevitable heavy slant towards F1, Autocourse also covers the wider world of professional, four-wheeled motor racing in a series of season summaries. These include prominent junior single-seater series, leading US motorsport categories and sports car racing. I regret the removal of international karting coverage from its pages a few years ago.
With veteran scribes Tony Dodgins and Maurice Hamilton among the writing talent, the quality of the coverage is first-rate. It’s generously illustrated with a varied selection of photography, along with statistics and diagrams, though never to the extent that they overwhelm the text.
At £70, it is a premium product with a premium price: you get an awful lot of quality motorsport coverage for your money. However, it’s discounted to just under £60 on the publisher’s website and RaceFans readers can claim a further saving as described below, making this even easier to recommend.
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Autocourse 2024-25
Publisher: Icon
Published: 2024
Pages: 432
Price: £70
ISBN: 9781910584583
Special discount for RaceFans readers on Autocourse and Autocourse Archive
RaceFans readers can claim a 50% discount on Autocourse Archive subscriptions (£49.99 reduced to £24.99) using the code RaceFans50 and a 25% discount on Autocourse and Motocourse 2024 Annuals using the code RaceFans25. Buy them here:
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Phil Norman (@phil-f1-21)
9th March 2025, 10:12
Sorry. Might sound like an odd question. Presumably there is one annual for each year and these are available from the archive?
Jere (@jerejj)
9th March 2025, 11:37
I don’t know about archive, but Autocourse annual releases are always available to buy online on Amazon, for example.
Phil Norman (@phil-f1-21)
9th March 2025, 12:48
OK. Thank you.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
10th March 2025, 20:34
There is one Autocourse and one Motocourse per year, published. Many post-2000 Autocourses and Motocourses (plus a few other books) can be found in the link. Older ones can be found in sources of second-hand books.
The Archive subscription allows access to many Autocourses (not all of them), for people with insufficient shelf space, money or time to acquire all the physical copies.
Jere (@jerejj)
9th March 2025, 14:15
I’ve been collecting Autocourse Annual releases ever since 2015 & they never disappoint.
One thing I don’t get is a section called chassis log book that features what monocoque copies drivers have used for a given season’s GP weekends.
The thing with these is that these sections used to feature them for every single team until Ferrari stopped having them followed by McLaren separately & most recently the Red Bull B-team, even though such info isn’t at all advantageous performance-wise or otherwise these books wouldn’t feature monocoque numbers for any team, nor can such info turn into something like that later.
I’ve struggled to come up with even anything else as a logical explanation for Ferrari’s boxes being blank first in the 2017 edition only to feature monocoque numbers in the 2018 edition & blank consecutively since the 2019 edition, with McLaren having them blank since 2018, & VCARB in last year’s edition.
Anyway, I always enjoy going through these sections to find out which monocoque copies a given driver has used for which GP weekends & especially whether anyone has used the same one for every single same-season round, which isn’t exactly uncommon either, with Seb, for example, using the same monocoque for all 2016 rounds, iirc, & some others within the last ten seasons as well.
I luv chicken
9th March 2025, 15:57
This information used to be available race by race, in articles in the Motoring News. At some point, the teams decided to control the information being disseminated. At that
point, I cancelled my subscription. Unfortunately, it progressed so far, that information released was sadly lacking, in technical terms, as journalists were excluded from many details, and the releases had to be taken with a grain of salt. Ever since third chassis were eliminated at races, and mechanical issues basically disappearing, the chassis technical race information has become trivial. I stopped my collection of Autocourse in 2016, after over 40 years of attachment.
dot_com (@dot_com)
10th March 2025, 11:26
Firstly, what an immense privilege @keithcollantine – to interview the great Murray Walker, in his own home no less. Such a nice man and genuine fanatic.
Secondly, with this kind of price tag, they should at least hire a graphic designer to pretty up the front cover a bit. But you know what they say about books and covers.