Having been released back in 2002, this account of the career of Emerson Fittipaldi is not exactly new. But hey, even if we are three years late in reviewing it, better now than never, right?

As far as I'm aware, this is the most recent installment of Ludvigsen's well-known series of driver biographies (and if it's not the most recent then Karl will no doubt email me to let me know!), and like its predecessors it does a nice job of commemorating one of motorsport's more illustrious careers.

Or should I say, illustrious, yet still somehow unrealised? Before I go further I should qualify all this by saying that before I read this book, I knew far less than I probably should have about Emerson. I had a general grounding in his career, knew one or two anecdotes, and was aware that he possessed the most impressive set of sideburns ever to win a couple of World Championships.

Yet the thing with Copersucar ­ Fittipaldi's ill-fated venture into team ownership ­ always bothered me. Two championships (1972 and 1974) along with two Indy 500 wins and a CART championship in 1989 makes for a freakin' good palmares by anyone's standard. But given how much of his potential was still untapped when he and elder brother Wilson got their own team going, it's hard not wonder what his F1 career might have been like had he stayed with McLaren.

Fittipaldi himself, on the other hand, does not seem like the kind of guy to get too hung up on worrying about what might have been, so if he's happy with it all, then so am I.

Anyhow, on to the book. If you have read any of the other books in the series, then you'll know what to expect from this one. While there seems to be a bit of a 'format war' in the biography world at the moment, with publishers split between conventional book formats and larger, more image-driven coffee-table type deals, these ones kind of straddle the middle ground. At a shade over 200 pages, equal weight is given to the words and the photographs.

And like the other books in the series, it takes a deceptively long time to read from start to finish, given how much space there seems to be around the text when you first flick through it. (That's a compliment, by the way!). Once again, Ludvigsen has come through with some great photographs that strike a nice balance between race images and more candid stuff. There were stacks of shots that I had not seen before, although I don't know whether this is because of the rarity of the photographs or my ignorance. It's probably a bit of both.

There's some nice interview material throughout the book (and a particularly good foreword from Teddy Mayer), and it is countered with a lot of second-hand stuff, some from other books, and some from contemporary reports and features that are no longer obtainable. There may be bits and pieces that you have read before, particularly if you are a history buff, but the inclusion of the more difficult-to-find things balances it out nicely. If you can't write a book primarily from first-hand material then the next-best thing is to offer a good digest of what has been done in the last three decades, and Ludvigsen executes the whole thing perfectly.