JANUARY 18, 2007

A story never before told

Our own Joe Saward spends most of his time travelling to the Grands Prix and ferreting out the stories for the website, but for the last 18 years in his spare time he has long been working on a most extraordinary book about three Grand Prix winners who not only raced together in the dangerous and exciting 1920s and 1930s but later went to work together as British-trained secret agents with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France.

The SOE was created to build up resistance across occupied Europe and to cause as much disruption as possible, thus tying up large numbers of German soldiers who might otherwise be fighting in the front line.

The Grand Prix Saboteurs is a story that has never been properly told because many of the documents involved remained classified as top secret until they were released in 2003.

It is a story which not only tells the amazing story of Willy Grover (the man who won the first Monaco GP under the name "Williams"), Robert Benoist and Jean-Pierre Wimille, but also reveals some shocking revelations about the SOE in France. For more information, click here.