The story of how Chrysler's minivan team created an automobile that captured the 1995 Motor Trend Car of the Year and other major awards - and reinvented a perilously entrenched corporation in the process - is as dramatic and inspiring a story as any in business today. Brock Yates, one of the most respected writers in the auto world, was given unprecedented access to Chrysler - every planning session, presentation, budget review, test drive, assembly line start-up, and marketing launch. The result is a book that unveils the mysteries of modern car-making, revealing how cars are shaped through countless interlinked decisions ranging from size and power to door configurations, color selections, and innumerable other interconnected details. It also captures the complex process by which the thousands of separate pieces that make up a car are designed, tested, manufactured, and marshaled into place at the exact moment they are needed. For any reader who cares about cars, this is the most intriguing look inside the mysteries of their creation ever written. At the same time, The Critical Path recounts an extraordinary drama of all-too-human managers attempting to make something new, in a new way, inside a corporate culture that resists them at every turn. The story of how Chrysler's minivan platform team kept their commitment to quality, schedule, and budget - with a $3 billion investment and the company's fate palpably in the balance - is as encouraging a tale as has emerged from American business in years. The unprecedented triumph and Chrysler's resultant comeback is a lesson in successful management that will be savored by any reader interested in how great companies make breakthroughproducts.

The Critical Path: Inventing an Automobile and Reinventing a Corporation

Engineering & Transportation

Yates, Brock W.

Automotive

Little. Brown and Company

Dead in the water

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

For everyone who's ever wanted to know what it's really like to get behind the wheel of a racecar, automotive enthusiast Brock Yates lived the dream, and lived to tell about it. You'll smell the fumes and feel the heat rising from the track as Brock takes the reader through a refresher course at Bob Bondurant's high-performance driving school, then off to Watkins Glen, Michigan Motor Speedway, and across the country on an unsanctioned, hair-raising thirty-six-hour race from New York to Los Angeles. Sunday Driver is the perfect companion for anyone who has felt the need for speed, or just marveled as they watched their favorite driver race around the track at death-defying speed and wondered what it would feel like to be in the driver's seat.

Sunday driver, First edition by Yates, Brock W (1972) Hardcover

The American automotive journalist recounts his experiences on and about the race track and offers new insight into the talents and personalities of racing drivers

Sunday Driver (Fireside Sports Classics)

Fireside

This first book of its kind tells the behind-the-scenes story of the incredibly illegal Cannonball rally. In the early 1970s, Brock Yates, senior editor of Car and Driver Magazine, created the now infamous Cannonball Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash; a flat out, no-holds-barred race from New York City to Redondo Beach, California. Setting out to prove that well trained drivers could safely navigate the American highways at speeds in excess of the posted limits, Mr. Yates created a spectacle reminiscent of the glory days of the barnstorming pilots. Filled with fascinating unpublished stories, nostalgic and modern-day photographs, inside information and hilarious stories from this outrageous and incredibly immoral rally. Brock is one of the best-known, most respected automotive journalists in the world today.

Cannonball!: World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race

Motorbooks Intl

In the late 1950s a slightly mad kart racer named Frank "Duff" Livingston had the nerve to enter the quintessential American vehicle-a hot rod-in a sports car race. Hot rods may have been successful in crude American-style drag races, but according to conventional wisdom, they had no place competing on a road course against European sports cars. But Duff and his Eliminator defied that wisdom and beat some of the finest sports cars in the world. The Eliminator soon went into retirement, but many people remembered its achievements. One of these people happened to be Brock Yates, who acquired the Eliminator in the 1990s. Yates campaigned the car in vintage sports car races, and soon the Eliminator was once again beating Ferraris and Porsches on U.S. road courses.The car inspired Yates to build a modern interpretation of the concept, and he took one of the most potent engines available-a Viper V-10-and mounted it in a hot rod chassis with a road-racing-inspired suspension. His goal? To build the fastest, best-handling, and just plain coolest hot rod on the road. The resulting Eliminator Special proved a fitting tribute to the original Eliminator.About the Author:Brock Yates is one of the best-known and most respected automotive journalists in the world today. He is currently an editor for Car and Driver magazine and his byline has appeared on numerous books, features in major magazines, columns for websites and The Wall Street Journal. He has also authored movie scripts for Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit II. He is the creator of the famed 1970's Cannonball Run road race which he chronicled in the best-selling book Cannonball!, published by MBI Publishing Company in 2002.

The Hot Rod: Resurrection of a Legend

Like any giant enterprise, the NASCAR we see today is very different from the regional race series launched by a visionary Bill France in the late 1940s. Few writers are as intimately aware of that history as Car and Driver's Brock Yates. In the 1950s he recalls the intimate nature of the sport's early years, when he would see the entire Petty family working together, Richard wrenching on the car while his father cooked for the family on a bar-b-que grill. In 1979, Yates was reporting from the pits for ABC at the Daytona 500 when the infamous fight erupted between Cale Yarborough and the Allison boys. His perspective spans nearly 50 years, and his wry observations are always sure to incite both cheers and jeers. NASCAR Off the Record is a pithy, opiniated, hilarious, and compelling collection of some of the greatest NASCAR stories of all time, as told by a man who was present at the scene.About the AuthorWhile best known for his columns in Car and Driver and his television reporting, Brock Yates has written numerous books, including Cannonball: The World's Greatest Outlaw Road Race (ISBN 0-7603-1090-4), and The Hot Rod (ISBN 0-7603-1598-1). He also wrote the film scripts for Cannonball Run and Smokey and the Bandit II. His NASCAR stories date almost to the very beginning of the series. Brock lives with his wife Pamela in the towns of Wyoming, New York, and Alexandria Bay, New York. He is the proud father of four children and two grandchildren. Vintage automobile racing consumes his spare time.- From the best-selling author of Cannonball!, Brock Yates takes an irreverent look at the grand spectacle of NASCAR- NASCAR is the largest and fastest growing American automotive racing series

Nascar Off The Record

King of the Dragsters: The Story of Big Daddy "Don" Garlits

Garlits, Don

Biographies & Memoirs

UNKNO

Analyzes the reasons for the failures of the American auto industry to compete with foreign imports and to make use of modern technology and styling

The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry

Business & Money

Empire Books

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