HEAVY READING; New books on the Daytona 24 and the Brothers Rodriguez are a pair worthy of your home library.(NEWS)

Byline: ROGER HART

The two most recent books from David Bull Publishing are heavyweights literally. The coffee table you display them on will need to be stout to hold the almost 15 pounds. But you should find a place for both in your motorsports library.

Daytona 24 Hours, by J. J. O'Malley, details the more than 40 years of the American answer to the 24 Hours of Le Mans. O'Malley, manager of communications for the Grand American Road Racing Associa-tion, the sanctioning body for the Daytona race, dug into the archives to recount the event from its earliest years as the Daytona Continental starting in 1962 to the most recent event in 2008.

The names in the book are familiar, from Dan Gurney, Pedro Rodriguez and Peter Gregg in the 1960s and 1970s to more recent winners such as Bob Wollek, Andy Wallace and Scott Pruett. First-person accounts from many of these drivers give the book's readers insights into the challenges of sports-car racing at Daytona.

Many of the photos used to illustrate the stories have never before been published.

The original edition of Daytona 24 Hours was published by Bull in 2003 and quickly sold out. This updated edition adds five chapters and scores of additional photo-graphs, as well as a revised driver index and race-results tables. The book lives up to its subtitle as the "definitive history of the ...