How Car magazine changed everything

Blain’s impact went far beyond writing. He was Car’s editor from 1964 to 1971 – he stepped up from deputy when founding editor George Bishop was fired – and it was his vision of what a car magazine should say, how it should say it and how it should be designed that would make Car the world’s most influential motoring magazine in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.

Doug was only 25 but he’d already been an editor at 20 (Sports Car World in Sydney). Intelligent, shrewd, ambitious and brave, he was also design literate and encouraged Car’s art editors to make the mag’s look as punchy as its words. He sliced the tortuous original name (deep breath) Small Car and Mini Owner incorporating Sporting Driver back to simply ‘Car’. Contributor and chief wit Ronald Barker wisecracked: ‘I fear for Country Life.’

It’s significant that Doug, and his four successive editors for the next 28 years (Ian Fraser, me, Cropley and Gavin Green), were Australian. We came from a febrile culture of blunt talking and lively writing that in the Fifties and Sixties made Australian car magazines far more advanced than their UK counterparts. They were audacious, frank and written in a friendly way. Comparison tests and scoops – details and pictures of secret new models – were staples. Blain introduced both to the UK.

British car titles then were boringly written, looked dowdy and pandered to the car industry. Blain berated them as ‘fuddy duddy magazines writing snivelling, flannelling test reports’. Readers noticed; C R Meade wrote in from Surrey: ‘You stand alone for your attitudes and the steadfast manner in which you commit yourself to controversial issues… all the more admirable compared to the pathetic refusal of other magazines to include criticism of advertisers’ products or anything outspoken.’

This is Blain on a Riley One-Point-Five he drove to Germany to test a Porsche 1600 S in December 1962:

European road trips became another Car hallmark as Blain and co scurried across the Channel to get first crack at new Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes, Alfas, Ferraris, Maseratis and especially Lamborghinis. Exciting new cars and adventurous drives: so obvious for a car magazine but rarely pursued by the others.

Doug hired good contributors. Many, such as waggish Ronald ‘Steady’ Barker, had been stifled elsewhere. He released rapscallion George Bishop from exile to write a popular tales-out-of-school column called Carte Blanche. He discovered the erudite and articulate, elegant, gracious, fastidious and eccentric Leonard Setright (LJKS) who became one of Car’s longest-serving and most distinctive contributors.

Editors never knew what form a story from LJKS, always immaculately typed and mailed in, would take. Would it start with piece of Latin; a poem; a reference to piece of music? It was all part of Car’s whimsical mix. Here’s what I found when I slid from its envelope Leonard’s tale about driving five Ferraris at Goodwood in 1977:

Blain passed the editorship to Ian Fraser whom he lured to London in 1971. Fraser made Car more reflective and considered but just as gutsy. Ian handed over to me three years later. My background in that forthright and exuberant Australian milieu was the same as theirs: newspapers to Wheels and Sports Car World. The newspaper training was important. It made us journalists first and foremost; we loved cars but we also knew how to write and, just as importantly, edit articles so that they shone, however poorly they’d started out.

I’d been greatly influenced by another Australian gamechanger – Bill Tuckey, the warm, authoritative and often hilarious writer and innovative editor who ran Wheels in the Sixties when I was a teenager, and made me want to work on a car mag. Bill’s emotive writing left an indelible mark. Read his opening to this story about a Lancia Flaminia GT and you’ll see why:

At Car I built on Doug and Ian’s work with a simple plan – a supercar drive every issue, and more and better scoop stories. They usually alternated on the covers. I thought writing about fast cars was clear-cut: it was your duty to put the reader in the driving seat; to do your utmost to share the experience; hire good photographers and go all out to get great pictures.

A stand-out article? That’ll be Convoy!, the 1977 story about belting across Italy and France in three Lamborghinis, led by a Countach. I can never forget sitting at 160mph – as fast as the little ’uns, the Urraco and Silhouette, would go – for long stretches on l’Autoroute du Soleil while gendarmes watched admiringly in the days before speed limits. Car reader Jeremy Clarkson, 16 when it was written, called it the best-ever drive story. This piece of mine about a hard day’s drive in Nick Mason’s Ferrari Daytona was of the same genre:

To get scoops, we staked out proving grounds, crept into factories and employed intrepid German scoop photographer Hans Lehmann who ambushed prototypes in the Arctic Circle and African deserts. The most significant came from a meeting in a London pub in spring 1979 with a Ford employee, who slipped me images of the still-very-secret 1981 Ford Escort, codenamed Erika. Why would a Ford man do that? Because Ford of Europe was battling Detroit’s uglier, plebeian vision of the Escort and wanted to build support for the European car. It made a powerful cover and helped FoE win the day. Car now had that kind of influence within the industry.

Rivals didn’t understand why we thought revealing imminent new models, or telling the truth about cars, was in readers’ interests. An editor of Motor upbraided me. ‘What you’re doing isn’t on, old boy,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know you’re killing the British car industry?’ What we were doing, in fact, was killing his and other lickspittle journals that thought they were part of the industry.

Our criticism of duff cars grew more strident in November 1976 when The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, our previously annual assessment of cars, went monthly. Each car had a summary, like this for the Chrysler Hunter: For Price? Against Just about everything Sum-up Horrid.

Readers loved it. Clarkson can still quote the entry for the Austin Allegro Vanden Plas, and others, word perfect. Last week, 45 years on, a surgeon I met gleefully repeated the Volvo 244 entry: Built like a tank; Looks like a tank; Feels like a tank.

Through the Seventies the circulation tripled. Outraged car makers who’d cancelled their ads – none more vehemently than Volvo after the famous ‘car as domestic appliance’ cover – returned as the magazine’s sales soared and they learned to live with hard-nosed criticism. Some acknowledged it pushed them to make better cars.

Masterful Steve Cropley, who’d read Tuckey’s articles under the desk as a schoolboy in Outback NSW, succeeded me and from 1981 to ’87 took Car on to new heights of quality and sales. Later he joined me at Autocar, where I was editorial director, as we rebuilt the world’s oldest car magazine into a vibrant pacesetter. I think the ‘England Expects’ cover Steve and art director Adam Stinson did in August 1986 about the Rover 800 is Car’s best-ever cover. Gavin Green carried on Steve’s fine work as Car became Britain’s best-selling motoring title.

A generation of new motor noters who grew up on Car – including Clarkson, Andrew Frankel, Russell Bulgin, David Vivian, Colin Goodwin and Paul Horrell – in turn influenced many others. New magazines such as Top Gear and Evo started from a baseline established by Car.

In the US, when legendary Sixties editor David E. Davis, Jr. – another of my key influencers – returned to revamp Car and Driver in 1976 he wrote that he was using Car as inspiration, and hired LJKS. Imagine my pride; the wheel had turned full circle. David launched Automobile in 1986 in Car’s image. Angus MacKenzie, ex-Wheels and another child of Tuckey et al, the sixth Aussie to edit Car (2002 to 2004), went on to America’s Motor Trend and revolutionised things there, too.

Such was the influence of a little magazine that’d launched with a wacky title, captured the dynamism of the Sixties, and showed what a coterie of journalists who loved writing, photography, design and magazine-making as much as they loved cars, could do.