Polish up the pince-nez, suss out the smoking jacket, plump up the pipe and settle in for this special literary edition of motoring in The Oz. Yes, 20 readers we're going to be blabbing about books and muttering about mags.

A constant bestseller is Adrian Newey's 2017 autobiography, How to Build a Car. One of the greatest engineers in F1 history, Adrian designed winners for Williams and McLaren before joining Red Bull. Of course, a cool $60m a year helped him decide to leave Red Bull for Aston Martin. In 2014, Mercedes wanted him, he said a quick no. Later: "I travelled to visit Luca Montezemolo, the president of Ferrari, seeing him at his farmhouse close to Tuscany. We held serious talks and their offer was amazing. Luca wanted to give me the whole Ferrari operation, road and race car. The promise was of an almost film-star lifestyle and the most ridiculously large financial offer – well over double the already generous salary I was receiving at Red Bull." He said no again.

Josh Robinson and Jono Clegg's 2024 already classic, The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World's Fastest Growing Sport, shows how Liberty Media's TV series, Drive to Survive, added more than 70 million new fans in its 10 largest markets in two years. They also discovered a new breed of fan. They are fans of "post-sport sport". People who were perfectly happy calling themselves fans, buying merchandise and consuming F1 content who might never sit through a full Grand Prix.

The Race to the Future: 8000 Miles to Paris – the Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century, by Kassia St Clair, is a ripper read. In January 1907, Paris newspaper Le Matin proposed a race from Peking to Paris. Five cars started. It was a time when the automobile was so new that The Economist warned readers off investing in motorbus companies, arguing the horse would triumph over cars.

I am being really careful about recommending my first favourite motoring mag, The Road Rat. At $120 for four issues, the world's most beautiful car magazine is not cheap. It was set up by Coldplay's Guy Berryman. It doesn't have regular columns, features or anything else in it except extraordinary pics of extraordinary scenes featuring cars.

Back to the real world. This week the WSJ tells us that BMW is cutting financial targets because of recall costs and low China demand. The recall is to address a problem with the braking systems in more than 1.5 million vehicles estimated at high three-digit million euros.

The HAGI Top Index showed classic car market prices declined during August and were down 4.60 per cent month on month. Classic BMW, Ferrari and Porsche all dropped while classic Mercedes-Benz, Lamborghini went up.

Tomorrow our bet is the Azerbaijan Grand Prix will bring back more biff. Bookies have Norris, Leclerc and Piastri in the top three.

jc@jcp.com.au