John Surtees squirts his victorious MV round the Dundrod hairpin in the 1958 Ulster Grand Prix
ALAMY
One of my treasured books as a young lad was The Boys’ Book of Motors (it’s still on the shelf behind me). As well as the various four-wheeled excitements I was gripped by the pictures of pre-war bike racing around the Isle of Man. The machinery seemed so unsophisticated and the open road so dangerous that I might have ended up a bike fan instead of a car devotee, so the early pictures in this history of the Ulster Grand Prix, subtitled A Century of Road Racing, grabbed me immediately.