Toyota’s Insect Face is growing on me Toyota Corolla XSE – having been impressed with the Telluride, we carried this budget conscious mindset to our 2020 new model driving impressions of the Corolla. I am not predisposed to love Toyotas, and certainly not small ones with front...

To get to know about a car enough to be inspired to write about it I usually need to spend about 1000 miles with it. The Western Automotive Journalists day offered about ten miles, but since the route was over fast sweeping roads, and included a switchback hill ascent and descent, I found...

Recently l have delighted in confounding Tesla fans by telling them while their machines may be remarkable Mobility Devices, to me, they aren’t cars.  Cars, by their fullest definition, are Blower Bentleys or Mercedes SSKs. Or the Chevelle the teenage yet-to-be-Nascar legend...

I felt compelled to write in response to you two most recent backpage columns in Hotrod, one on autonomy, the next on the father son road trip. The first disappointed me enormously, the second coming so close after it made me keen to write. I do hope you read and think about what I have...

This was one of three large execu-barges I tried over the same route around Pebble Beach. I experienced a different car each year, first this Hyundai, then a big Kia, and finally a Cadillac, publishing the stories with Autoshopper. The strategy of copying Toyota when they created the first...

Its now 25 years since Senna’s passing, and five years since my visit to Imola. Thinking the whole experience through resulted in this paper, titled St Ayrton: The Beatification of a Racing Driver, a Commentary on How Attitudes to Ayrton Senna have Changed, which I presented at the 2018...

As cars change, so do motorshows. Car makers use different platforms to launch cars now, perhaps CES in Las Vegas or Mercedes and the GLK through the Sex and the City movie. The motorshows I visited as a teen and twenty something in England needed sharp elbows to get near any cars, while all...

Daytona 1963: gotta love Lil’ Joe’s shoes ! This was prepared for the 2016 Drive History Conference, organized by the HVA at the NB Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was also presented at the 2016 International Motor Racing Research Center conference in Watkins Glen, read...

Marmon V16 “As a confirmed Stutz man, I regard the V16 race as foolish” A fictitious, Gatsby era me would have loved to have said that, in a posh east coast club in the thirties: I would’ve thought the complexity of the V16 over the top, while the relative simplicity of the...

Part of my Motorsports in Academia crusade is about the quality of the sources, specifically film, and especially the free film on youtube. My refrain is that this is a dynamic history, where a few hours on youtube puts you on equal intellectual footing with the crusty historians and...