Gift guide: Father’s Day gear for your favorite auto enthusiast

Are you a procrastinator looking to do better than a gift card to make dad crack a smile this Father’s Day? Here are a few ideas.

Feel the speed with a quick read

For dads who find fan-less auto racing in the time of coronavirus about as thrilling as watching a vintage ant farm, New York Times best-selling author Neal Bascomb has a cure. His latest non-fiction work, “Faster,” is a rollicking read on the international drama and intrigue that fueled Europe’s pre-war motorsports.

Seventeen months before Germany’s invasion of Poland ignited World War II, a racing team owned by Lucy Schell, a rich American heiress, the team’s star driver, Rene Dreyfus, and their French Delahaye racecar pulled off a stunning win at the 1938 Pau Grand Prix, besting a hyper-organized Mercedes-Benz team that carried the full backing — and full expectations of victory — of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The Delahaye 145 that Dreyfus — a Jew — drove may have been unlovely and down by well over 100 horsepower next to the Mercedes-Benz W154 piloted by Hermann Lang, but on Pau’s tight, 100-lap street circuit, Bascomb notes, the W154 Silver Arrow was like bringing “a cannon to a close-quarter knife fight.”

“Faster” dives into racing’s early technology, the period’s automakers, and the roaring global politics that steered early 20th century history. Bascomb’s literary journalism, often lap by lap, examines the relentless quest for speed, the grim determination to win, as well as friendship and conflict among drivers, engineers, designers and bean counters.

At the finish line, dad will come away with rich insights into many of racing’s legendary names, including Bugatti, Alfa Romeo, Auto Union, Maserati, Ferrari and...