Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw

'Forget Senna and Schuey. Tommy Byrne was the best of them all.' - Eddie Jordan

A surreal tale of a poverty-stricken Dundalk kid's rise to become the only racing driver the great Ayrton Senna ever feared - and how it all went wrong from there. For a brief moment Tommy Byrne was arguably the world's greatest driver, the motor racing equivalent of George Best and Muhammad Ali rolled into one. A racer, a thief, a raconteur.

This is the story of his improbable escape, his rapid rise and his spectacular and bizarre fall from grace. Peppered with dark humour and a cast of ridiculous characters, it is the antithesis of a fairytale - and it's all true. Hold on tight, the tale of Tommy Byrne is quite a ride - from fending for himself as the runt of a big Catholic litter in the '60s, running the gauntlet of the sectarian violence in the '70s, troubling Ayrton Senna and making it to F1 in the '80s, resorting to drugs in the aftermath and driving for a deluded billionaire madman and then gun-toting Mexicans in the '90s. It's raw, passionate, and - with Byrne's ability to tell it like it is - not for the faint-hearted.

Tommy Byrne was the 1980 Double British Formula Ford 1600 champion, the 1981 British Formula Ford 2000 champion and also the European Formula Ford 2000 champion. In 1982 - having also become British F3 champion - he entered F1, but by the following year had disappeared without trace.

Mark Hughes is recognised as one of Formula One’s top journalists and his reports and columns for Autosport magazine have won him wide acclaim. He numbers ITV and Martin Brundle among his clients. He has written a number of books on F1, one of which won the 2005 Illustrated Sports Book of the Year.

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