Having recently crested the wave of my 39th year on Earth, and having well and truly made it in the sphere of automotive journalism*, I figured that it was time to do the inevitable. Yes, it was time to decide on the right specification for my Rolls Royce Phantom. Press releases from Rolls Royce Motor […]
The flames that Semelovsky ignited to provide a distraction had consumed him, and Baranovitch was laying in a pool of blood, having been shot by a Russian guard. Both had given their lives so that Mitchell Gant, fuelled by equal parts fear and ego, could perform the task that his infiltration of the Bilyarsk compound […]
You know when you notice something and then suddenly can’t un-see it, and you’ll not rest until you’ve got the answer as to exactly what it was that you thought you saw? No? I have, and it happened when I was sitting at the wheel of a Volvo S60. I’ve driven most of the current […]
On Wednesday, A lapse of journalistic integrity on the part of a prestigious broadsheet newspaper led to a Tweet from the esteemed @TimDavies_UK: Yeah, that’s right. The humble Casio F-91W. Quoth the Wiki: “Introduced in 1989, it is popular for its simplicity, reliability, and unpretentious clean design. As a result, it is still in production […]
A close relative, whose name will be concealed to protect the innocent, was recently the proud owner of a Ford Focus ST170. This was the ‘quite warm’ version of the first-generation Focus, and understudy to the scalding Focus RS. Without the spicy price tag and ‘deep breath’ running costs of the RS, and somewhat more […]
I conducted what turned into a bit of a social experiment the other day, using “Twitter”, which is a means of giving those who don’t deserve an opinion a means to broadcast obnoxious viewpoints far and wide. With the world gripped by Mustang fever and people clamouring to praise or condemn the idea of Ford […]
I quite like cars. Also, despite them being inextricably linked with my daily five-hour round trip to work and back, I quite like trains. The two have never really been happy bedfellows, though. It’s always been trains versus cars, the latter very much gaining the upper hand since the middle of the 20th century, at […]
What was I doing at this precise moment ten years ago? Well, there’s a strong possibility that I had just finished a very awkward phone call explaining why a customer’s car still isn’t fixed, why we haven’t ordered any parts and why, exactly, we haven’t got a clue what’s wrong with it. It was an […]
You’d like Michael “Trigger” Carpenter. I’ve only met him a handful of times, and he’s such a very modest and personable bloke that I’ve come to number him among my friends. His exploits, though, deserve global recognition – particularly his services to the universe of unloved, unappreciated, underdog transportation. He’s a serial owner and restorer […]
In a random Tweet I sent out on Wednesday, I moaned “It wouldn’t be hard for today’s digital dashboards to incorporate a retro 1980s mode. Sort it out!”, alongside the above brochure pic, which depicts the digital instrument cluster that adorned top models in the 1983 JDM Nissan Silvia range. The Tweet performed well. Dozens […]