The Rub' Al Khali in Saudi Arabia, the Wahiba sands in Oman and the deserts of the United Arab Emirates offer desert wilderness which is accessible if one possess the driving skills required. There are few restrictions and it is therefore one of the most popular recreational activities for the expat population. This manual is borne of 20 years of experience in the Arabian Gulf and describes all the skills that are needed to lead novitiates into soft sand deserts and is offered to all those who wish to experience true desert.

If you wish, you can go most places in the desert on tracks. These can be well - worn, serving the camel farms or they can be faint impressions, blown over by the desert winds. These tracks usually follow gravel valleys between ridges of dunes, or sabkhas (dried lake beds), or meander through the dunes to link up with another valley. They are used by camel or sheep herders and are often the most efficient way to get around. These tracks lace the deserts of the Gulf. They do change in appearance though, as sands drift over and new routes are found around these but the essence of the tracks will remain, purposeful lanes of travel following the path of least resistance to a known destination. Once initial skills have been acquired, however, it is great fun to cross open ranges of dunes without the benefit of these tracks and there are still areas of the desert that are close to empty (of civilization) and offer beauty, solitude and a challenging drive for even the most advanced drivers. Learning how to negotiate these is a skill that gives great freedom. It is a spontaneous business, requiring the right reactions, good intuition, sound judgment, improvisation and planning. Go forth then, after reading!

Summer of Speed you takes on an energetic journey following one driver's exploits during the 2005 Legends Chargers Series at Atlanta Motor Speedway. James Auld is the racing driver on which the story centres. The racer from Britain who pushed hard and took the title favourite to a championship shoot-out at the final race of the series. Told by James himself, this is his story of his dramatic summer of spectacular wins, spins, disasters and successes! Events on and off the track are recounted, the good days, the bad days, the crashes, the wins and life away from the races in Atlanta. Going much further more honestly than most similar books of this nature, the reader gets a brutal introduction with James' crash in the NASCAR supporting race at the Golden Corral 500, then goes through the process of how James got into this series, his car and the fantastically realistic imaginary run in which the reader drives in one of the practice sessions on race night, as the grandstands fill up and the tension rises. A resume of James' lengthy car racing career to date, including two championship wins followed by introductions and pictures of the leading contenders completes the reader's picture before going into an event by event recount of the dramatic Thursday Thunder series itself. Here, you effectively ride with James during the races, witnessing all the action and incidents, some quite serious, building up to the final race championship showdown. Interspersed are chapters illustrating life away from the tracks and the dramas resulting from a tornado destroying Atlanta Motor Speedway... Interesting memoir of the 'year in the life' variety.

Stock car racing as we know it began in the late 1940's. Throughout the 1950's, the sport became popular across the United States. In the southern states, the 1950's saw a tremendous proliferation of small dirt tracks whose owners were hoping to ride the crest of stock car racing's building popularity.

Along with the increasing number of tracks, a new breed of race driver emerged. These were primarily blue-collar men who had families to support and full-time jobs to fulfull, but whose lives often became consumed with building cars, racing and long hours of mechanical work in a never-ending search for more speed. With each passing year, more was learned about racing and the sport gradually became more sophisticated.

The stories told in this book are direct from the memories of the drivers, owners, and family members of drivers who describe what it was like to be a part of the racing subculture of the era in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Hear it in their own words.