Clara’s Verdict
I am not a petrolhead. I’ve always felt a vague suspicion towards people who can identify an engine note at fifty yards and speak about torque curves with the reverence most people reserve for great literature. And yet I consumed Chris Harris’s memoir in almost one sitting. That is, I think, the real test of a good automotive memoir: it should work for people who don’t love cars, because what it’s actually about is obsession, identity, and the strange compulsion to pursue something with your whole self. Harris writes with the same combination of mischief and rigour he brings to his TV work, and narrates it himself with affectionate self-deprecation. At 4.7 stars from 537 ratings, the audience has already given its verdict, but I’d add mine without hesitation.
About the Audiobook
Harris calls his relationship with cars “unhinged geekery,” and the memoir lives up to that description in the most entertaining way possible. Beginning with childhood Scalextric tracks in Somerset and ending at the Nürburgring 24 Hour, the book traces the unlikely arc of a career that took him from regional car magazines to the world’s most watched automotive programme. Along the way there are accounts of early cars (invariably unreliable), formative low-budget racing adventures, the particular culture of motoring journalism, and eventually the surreal experience of driving things that are worth more than most houses for the cameras of Top Gear.
What Harris does well – and this is where the five hours and forty-three minutes fly past – is refuse to sentimentalise any of it. The Somerset Dukes of Hazard phase is funny because he knows how provincial it was. The early career struggles are handled without martyrdom. The arrival at Top Gear is described with genuine surprise rather than manufactured triumph. And his Guinness World Record sideways run of 3.4 kilometres in an electric car gets its moment without the book turning into a highlight reel. This is a memoir about what it actually costs to become exceptional at something, told by someone who is still slightly astonished that it happened.
The Narration
Harris narrating his own book is about as good as it gets for automotive memoir. He sounds exactly as he does on television – quick-witted, self-aware, occasionally inclined to go down a technical rabbit hole and come back slightly breathless. The difference from his broadcast persona is a quieter register for the personal material: his family background, the mixed-race experience in Somerset, his relationship with his own ambition. It’s a revealing performance in the best sense. The audio production from Penguin is clean and the pacing is well-managed across the full runtime.
What Readers Say
At 4.7 stars from 537 UK ratings, this is one of the more unanimously praised automotive memoirs of recent years. TMF, a self-described Bristol-based petrolhead, read it in twelve hours and calls it “a brilliant page turner” and “a must-read for any seasoned petrolhead.” Daniel Knight praises the book’s chronological clarity and the detail about Harris’s path to Top Gear. Steve Zodiac gives a typically wry four-star verdict – “great writing, brilliant criminal punctuation.” The occasional dissenter notes that non-car-enthusiasts may find some technical passages slow, but the consensus is that Harris’s voice and self-deprecating charm carry the whole thing regardless of your interest in variable valve timings.
Who Should Listen?
Obviously essential for anyone who watches Top Gear or The Grand Tour and wants to understand how Harris got there. But I’d also recommend it to anyone who grew up with a specific, consuming obsession – cars, music, sport, anything – and recognises the particular texture of that kind of devotion. It’s a memoir about following something impractical with absolute seriousness, and it’s written by someone who is genuinely funny. That combination is rarer than it should be.
Listen to Variable Valve Timings on Audible UK – find it via this link. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
