Whilst studying at Dublin University I joined the photographic club and as part of the club's activities went to a lecture given by the late Max Boyd who was then the sports editor of Irish Motoring Life . I, subsequently, acted as Max's assistant at a number of Irish races and hill climbs. After about a year Max left to become the Sunday Times Motoring Correspondent leaving me to inherit his place at Irish Motoring Life. For reasons that are still not clear to me, in 1954 I started taking colour transparencies at the meetings I attended knowing full well that no one was going to publish them as being too expensive for Motoring Journals to utilize.

After nearly 50 years I dug the transparencies out and taught myself to digitize them. Some were badly damaged and have had a lot of work done on them. A few are not quite sharp but I thought that for historic reasons ought to be included, particularly as I have never published any of the pictures in this collection and as far as my research goes they are either unique or at least very rare.

All the pictures were taken with an M3 Leica and all the action shots with a Leitz 135mm Hektor lens with an aperture of f3.5. This meant to get decent shots you had to be pretty close to the action!

Martyn Wainwright