Review: McKlein Motorsport Classic calendar

From MaxRally: Review: McKlein Motorsport Classic calendar
Do you hanker after the good old days of motorsport, when sex was safe and racing was dangerous, as the legendary Sir Stirling Moss inimitably put it? Do you believe that the two biggest evils facing society at the moment are the terrible twins of 'health' and 'safety'? If so, the McKlein Motorsport Classic calendar is for you. In fact, it's for you even if you just like looking at beautiful old racing cars and don't particularly care about the nanny state.

Rather than purely a rally calendar, this collection of photographs harks back to the golden era of circuit racing as well. Reinhard Klein has been around for quite a while, but even he will gratefully admit that he wasn't there to photograph Fangio in his prime, so this is instead a calendar that mostly uses shots from McKlein's extensive photographic racing archive: an important element to the Cologne-based business that many people don't even know exists. Well, they do now.

What strikes you about this collection is the sheer variety of the images, having been taken by a number of different photographers and assembled through a wide range of sources.

An overriding theme is the fragility of life at the time: the drivers are piloting volatile, but achingly beautiful, death traps – while an essential accessory for refuelling, for example, seems to be a cigarette. There are some rally images too; from the happy era of motoring when speed and drink-drive limits were a figment of the imagination. Some rallies even ended on Fridays, to give the hard-working teams and media the weekend off.

Yes, those were the days. And now you can relive them whenever you like by perusing the 25 images that form the calendar. In typical McKlein fashion, you can choose which images you'd like displayed. Free up your wall space now – Patrick Depailler is coming through in a six-wheeled Tyrrell.

That's just one of the images: you can also see how a Lancia Stratos copes with the mud on the East African Safari Rally (badly, we suspect) and find out what a pit stop on the 1952 Carrera Panamericana was like (fraught with risk, essentially).

Underneath each image, there's a brief explanation of what is going on, allowing the reader to really get under the skin of each photograph. It's astonishing, provocative, and unashamedly sentimental. Get it while you can.

The calendar costs €39.90 or £34.90 and it's available from the Rallywebshop: McKlein's official outlet. Visit http://www.rallywebshop.com or call +44 (0)20 81 33 0605 in the UK or +49 (0)2203-9242570 in Germany.