The image of jubilant race car drivers lifting oversized champagne bottles into the air is well-known. However, the life of a race car driver is – and has always been – marked by setbacks, confrontations, and problems of an uncertain nature. It is, like life in general, arduous. This is what this book is about. The first tears that Max Küng (*1969) still remembers were shed on December 16, 1982, a Thursday – the day the news came over the radio that Colin Chapman had died. They were tears of sorrow; Chapman was the founder and the genius behind the sports and racing car manufacturer Lotus, which was then the center of Küng's interest. Since childhood, Max Küng has been collecting car magazines, and he has never missed a television broadcast of a Formula 1 race. "The car saved my childhood," says Küng.