THE INTERNATIONAL racing car driver and designer, Raymond Mays, is known to have written two books about his life and times but now knowledge of a third has surfaced although copies are extremely rare because the bulk of them were destroyed soon after publication. 

Mays (1899-1980), son of a Bourne businessman and motoring enthusiast, achieved fame in the world of motor racing on and off the track. After a successful career as a driver, he opened workshops in Bourne where he developed the BRM, the revolutionary Grand Prix car with a V16 engine that eventually became the first all-British model to win the world championship in 1962. He lived at Eastgate House in Bourne all his life and in 1978 was honoured with a CBE for his services to motor racing. 

The records show that he had two published works, both written with the help of ghost writers. They were Split Seconds - My Racing Years (G T Foulis & Co Ltd, London, 1950) and BRM with co-author Peter Roberts (Cassell and Co Ltd, 1962). He also contributed a chapter on hill climbing technique for Lord Howe's volume on Motor Racing (1939) and a piece for Speed: the Book of Racing and Records (1950). 

The two complete books carrying his name are well known publications and many copies exist here in Bourne, notably at the Heritage Centre in South Street, home of the Raymond Mays Memorial Room which is devoted to his life and career.  

But there was another entitled At Speed by Raymond Mays, published in 1952 by Hodder and Stoughton and printed by C Tinling and Co Ltd., of Liverpool, London and Prescot, a partnership that produced many popular books of the time although it has taken some research to track down this third work.  

Few people associated with Mays, either in Bourne or in the racing world, have heard of it. The publishers were unable to help because their records from that period no longer exist while the print firm folded in 1975 and there is no mention of it in the British Library, the country’s legal depository holding some 14 million titles and which receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom.  

Furthermore there is no copy of it in the Raymond Mays Memorial Room and the BRM Association, the organisation founded last year to promote the history and legacy of this famous car, knew nothing about it either but bit by bit, I have managed to piece together the story of this abortive biography.  

The book was printed and put on sale in 1952, a bad year for the BRM which had been dogged by a long period of misfortune involving components and race tracks and was now facing financial difficulties and in danger of being wound up, although it was eventually sold to the engineering firm Rubery Owen.  

It was a hardback with a red linen cover, 190 pages and ten photographs plus the frontispiece, a copy of the portrait in oils of Mays painted in 1950 by Sofy Asscher and which now hangs in the entrance foyer at the Red Hall at Bourne. Five hundred copies were printed at a cost of £800, the outlay being met by Mays himself. 

I spent some time trawling the Internet for a mention of At Speed but eventually Eric Biggadike of the BRM Association came up with the only reference we could find which provided a clue that has helped solve the mystery because there is a brief mention in a book entitled BRM V16 (Veloce Publishing 2006) by Karl Ludvigsen, the prolific American journalist and historian specialising in motor racing history and author of almost fifty titles on the subject who now lives in Suffolk. 

In a section entitled Reflections, he writes about his researches into the problems involved with the development of the V16 and the way they were eventually solved, describing how he was loaned a copy of the “rare” 1952 book At Speed and adds: “In it, Mays was so revelatory about the struggles of the BRM Trust and the team that all but a few copies were retrieved and pulped.” 

It now transpires that soon after publication it was discovered that in his revelations, Raymond Mays had written something to which others took exception and the implications were of sufficient gravity to alarm the publishers. Lawyers were consulted and after some discussion, they took the drastic step of withdrawing the book and removing and destroying all unsold copies from the shops, perhaps even to avoid the risk of a legal action that might have had costly repercussions. 

One copy that has survived is now owned by Lindsay Johnson, aged 59, a retired civil servant, who lives at Bromley, Kent, and is related to Raymond Mays as a second cousin. It was given to him by a friend who bought it for £10 while browsing for publications connected with motor racing from a second hand bookshop at Hay-on-Wye, a small market town at Powys, Wales, close to the border with England where there are so many bookshops that it is often described as "the town of books".  

This book, however, is a revised proof copy of the original with the offending paragraphs deleted as though ready for re-publication which did not happen, perhaps because Mays was unwilling to risk further expenditure. Other copies may exist but as the bulk of the print run was destroyed, they will have by now become collector’s items.  

Nevertheless, this puts the record straight about what Raymond Mays did leave for posterity in the way of autobiography and in view of the rarity of this book and the number of organisations now devoted to the history of the BRM and motor racing in general, there must be many supporters of the man and the motor car who would welcome an opportunity to have it reprinted at some time in the future.