Power players and their push to unleash boost

Karl Ludvigsen's new book on supercharging and turbos is a life's work. It's dizzying in its depth

- Damien Smith

Three big hardback volumes in a slipcase, comprising 1960 pages and 665,000 words, illustrated by 3584 photographs, technical drawings and cutaways.

Cripes. This is a proper monster. Power Unleashed represents the best part of a life's work on an apparent supercharging obsession for respected author, historian and former executive for GM, Fiat and Ford, Karl Ludvigsen.

In his preface, he pinpoints January 30 1955 as his first active involvement in chasing blown power boost solutions, in a proposal he submitted for a sports car during his studies of industrial design at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. Some of his thoughts then found their way into an article written for Sports Car Illustrated in July 1958 - but it was an article for Automobile Quarterly in 1970 entitled