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...

Historiography sounds very ivory tower academics, but really it isn’t. The Oxford English Dictionary defines historiography as “The study of the writing of history and of written histories”. So, it is about how the story is told: not just who won the race, but whether we...

I am about to get on a plane for a NASCAR Conference at the International Motor Racing Research Center, at Watkins Glen in upstate New York. I was digging around some old photos looking for illustrations for my presentation, and stumbled upon these. Firstly, they show how gung-ho the old...

This piece first appeared in Autoshopper in Feb 2013. I’ve sampled four or five of these large Mopars now, and am struck by how different they manage to feel. I was going to change the bits of this article which echo bits of my Hemi Charger piece, but decided to leave them, the...