Once, in the world of Formula 1 racing, Bernard Cahier was the ultimate insider. He started his career as a photojournalist in 1952, two years after the beginning of modern-day Grand Prix racing, and continued to work in that capacity even after undertaking a twenty-year stint as Goodyear’s public relations consultant for the Formula 1 circuit.

Cahier was president of the International Racing Press Association from its founding in 1968 and was instrumental in making IRPA’s red armband more useful than a chief of police’s uniform when it came to gaining unlimited access at a race course. As the years passed, he took on other PR clients and was a groundbreaker in the practice of trackside entertainment.

Helped in no small measure by his American wife, Joan, Cahier was without parallel as a host—and for that time, without peer at spending client money. This reviewer recalls a Cahier-hosted dinner (sponsored by Henry Ford II) at Le Mans where Château Latour 1953 flowed like draught beer—and where Carroll Shelby grabbed the arm of a passing waiter, handed him an empty bottle, and announced, “We’d better have another six-pack of this shit.”

Each year, for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Cahier commandeered the whole of the Moderne, the hotel that harbored the city’s only Michelin-starred restaurant. And at Monaco, he conducted his business affairs from his room in the Hotel de Paris overlooking the circuit.

He was a master at charming persons in high places—and of telling each of two important persons that he could arrange meetings with the other. GM styling legend Bill Mitchell was a longtime friend. Other GM executives took Mitchell and Cahier hunting at Turtle Creek in Michigan, where he killed a ten-point buck. He also hunted with the CEOs of Goodyear, AT&T, and UOP. He was a confidant of Juan Manuel Fangio and any number of other Formula 1 greats. The actor Peter Ustinov was a friend, as was the then Prince Juan Carlos of Spain. Cahier helped Dan Gurney and Phil Hill get their first factory rides. Had he been any more connected, he would have needed an electrician’s license.

Cahier did some racing himself, competing in several Targa Florios and winning the 1967 GT class there in a Porsche 911. For years, his annual route took him from Sebring to Mexico to California and all over the continent—usually at someone else’s expense, which is a marvelous way to travel. If living well is the best revenge, Bernard Cahier has savored more revenge than the Russians who marched into Berlin in 1945. And speaking of 1945, Cahier was a documented member of the French Resistance forces before the Allies invaded Normandy, and afterward he served with the French Second Armored Division.

He has now written a memoir that covers this remarkable life, illustrating it with more than 1300 duotone black-andwhite photographs from his archives. A great many of these were commissioned by Road & Track and later Motor Trend. Published and edited by former racer Michael Keyser’s Autosports Marketing Associates, this is not just any memoir.

For one thing, it is boxed and contains 723 pages spread over two volumes. Handsomely produced in Hong Kong, the book covers eighty years of fascinating and often lavish living. It is an especially warm chronicle of Grand Prix racing in the days when a Formula 1 driver might actually have dinner with a journalist and not bring along his manager, his public relations person, his masseur, or his attorney. Once, Formula 1 drivers had none of those things, and Volume I of the Cahier memoir speaks to us of that golden time early in modern Formula 1 history.

Volume II, which opens with the 1966 season, takes us through Cahier’s consultant work on the movie Grand Prix, the coming of rear-engine cars, safety equipment, the part motor homes played in making drivers disappear from public view, the decline of IRPA, and the battle between

Bernie Ecclestone and Jean-Marie Balestre for control of the increasingly lucrative Grand Prix circuit. Throughout both volumes, names drop like summer hailstones.

In 1983, Goodyear changed CEOs, and the new one fired Cahier the following year, effectively removing his power base—to say nothing of his entertainment budget. He is not as bitter about this in print as he may have been in private. You’d be peeved too if your top-flight expense account vanished in a waft of Havana smoke.

You will note the word “tears” in the memoir’s title. There were more than a few of these in the years Cahier covers. We have forgotten the chilling regularity with which drivers once died in auto racing. Cahier saw a score of drivers—real friends—killed. Dozens of spectators died as well. Death sat at the Grand Prix table like an unwanted intruder—ignored, but privately acknowledged.

There was also laughter. For example, those of us who remember the 1950s know the story of a group of pranksters lifting Harry Schell’s tiny Vespa car up the stairs and into the card room at the Hotel Lion d’Or—in Rheims in 1958, if you’re taking notes. Cahier was one of the gang, and one of his photos confirms the story.

Speaking of confirmations, what about getting Hill and Gurney their first Formula 1 rides? Each of these gentlemen has written a foreword to Bernard Cahier, and each says graciously that Cahier indeed jump-started his career.

“He was one of us,” wrote Hill, stating the Cahier case perfectly.