I shot some 30 TV commercials with three-time world champion racing driver Jackie Stewart. At one point, Jackie said when he was driving really well, he always had plenty of time. That floored me. I'd driven racing cars, and I never had any time at all, arriving at corners, in Jackie's phrase, "in a flurry of feathers and blood." But when Jackie was racing he had "plenty of time" because he could divide time into thousandths of a second. And I thought, if I could capture that intensity, ferocity and detail, I could put you behind the wheel of a Formula One car. I wrote my first novel, Formula One, and gave the manuscript to Jackie. He took it with him on a flight from London to San Francisco. "You've done it, Bob," Jackie wrote on a postcard. "You are the Dick Francis of motor racing."