Driven To Crime: True stories of wrongdoing in motor racing

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Clearly a troubled individual, his curious mixture of insecurities, ego and stupidity had combined to form a dangerous cocktail. He chose the Goodyear-supported Ferrari Challenge, a club-level British championship that catered for drivers competing in a wide variety of Ferrari models divided into two categories, one for older and often standard road models, the other for much quicker ‘modified’ cars. It's a very journalistic, non-fiction style, very straightforward and with incredible eye to detail.

During the week he was the bespectacled manager of an accounts department but at weekends he became an attention-seeking, self-styled ‘millionaire businessman’ and ‘gentleman racer’ of a McLaren F1 GTR.Inspired by James Hunt’s Formula 1 exploits with Hesketh and having become friends with the World Champion’s younger brother at school, he competed in Formula Ford during the late 1970s but had to face the reality that his results were not going to earn him a place in F1. Despite this, most of the amateurs at this level were capable drivers, as they needed to be to handle such powerful race-bred machinery. Immediately after the Brands Hatch race, Munroe funded an extravagant trip to the third round of the American Le Mans Series (ALMS) at Mosport in Canada for Goodwin and several AM Racing personnel. The book is 500 pages but made up of profiles of 66 different profiles, all independent of each other, so you can read it like a book of collected short stories. He not only acquired an example of the even rarer GTR racing version, of which 28 were made, but also became the proud — and very dishonest — owner of a road-going model as well.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Inevitably, like most youngsters with similar aspirations, there was neither the money nor the opportunity to fulfil his ambitions.Questions had already been raised about the honesty of this ostensibly very ordinary man who took excessive amounts of sick leave so that he could devote time to his extracurricular activities.

It was while Munroe was away on a two-week family holiday in Spain that his life of subterfuge began to unravel. Interesting subject matter, sort of light on high crimes and heavier on white-collar offenses, but the reader learns a lot. Taking advantage of clement winter weather in Spain, AM Racing conducted initial pre-season testing at the Albacete circuit with Calum Lockie. Now aged 42, he was convicted on one charge of obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception, three charges of obtaining services by deception and two of theft, but there were 16 other charges that he denied and weren’t dealt with. Very few owned more than one of these incredible machines apart from Ralph Lauren, who had two, the Sultan of Brunei, who had no fewer than five… and James Munroe.The aspiring racing driver’s new venture was announced with great fanfare at a lavish press launch held at the exclusive Mezzo restaurant in London’s Soho on 15th January 1999. He used these companies to submit bogus invoices to his employer and was perfectly placed to ensure that payments were authorised and made to the respective bank accounts, of which he was the sole beneficiary. Fee said that this sum had been transferred to a Jaguar dealership and that the paperwork was in the name of James Cox.

Over 60 true stories cover webs of deceit and numerous crimes including drug trafficking, corruption, embezzlement, robbery, fraud, murder and money laundering.The car was devoid of any signs of external sponsorship except for a strip across the top of the windscreen sporting allegiance to Veuve Clicquot, presumably in deference to the copious quantities that had been quaffed at the launch party. Some of these people are the same kind of pure sociopaths that can steal all the money from an elementary school teacher pension fund, and their only thought is, "how can I do the same thing to the middle school?