The Tanner Ferrari book covers the kind of things I'm interested in, within the Scuderia, but with three drawbacks, in terms of what I think I'm looking for:
a) as I mentioned, too much automotive engineering knowledge is "taken as read", so it talks about "the first appearance of a double wishbone" for example, without explaining what it is and why it's innovative (that one I know, as it happens, but you get the idea)
b) There are many, MANY occasions when you think, "this would be much easier to understand with a picture of the car, or the bit of it in question...", and even when there is a picture, it's often pages away!
c) The structure of the book reflects what you said above - it separates F1 cars from Le Mans cars (and other sports racers) from road cars, so you never really discover how one led to another led to another, either for the cars or their engines...
I think we will just have to write one -- I'm a newbie to race cars and car modelling, but I spent a long time as a science and technology journalist explaining black holes and hypersonic flight to anyone who cared to read Focus Magazine! ;-)
bestest,
M.