The Last Golden Age of Motoring Journalism – by Peter Dron

This book takes a light-hearted look at what the author considers to have been the golden age of motoring journalism – the last two decades of the 20th century.

As a writer and tester for Motor magazine, founding Editor of Fast Lane magazine, and a freelance journalist with a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph, Peter Dron has many tales to tell. In these pages we meet industry moguls, unusual motoring journalists, and various other passers-by.

The reasons why it has all gone wrong, both for the motor industry and motoring journalism, are examined with candour. Although this book is essentially about cars and car people, the author ambitiously hopes that it may amuse, irritate, or even inform people who are not interested in cars at all.

If the readers are not amused, irritated, or informed, the author does not mind in the least – provided they have bought the book with their own money rather than stolen it or acquired it by other means, fair or foul.

Period Covered: 1976 to present

Features

• One chapter describes a problem concerning Jeremy Clarkson
• Another discusses the enigma that was Leonard Setright
• Two chapters dissect the freeloading swine that was George Bishop
• Encounters with motor industry moguls: Ferdinand Piëch (Volkswagen), Eberhard von Kuenheim (BMW), Lord Stokes (BL), and others
• Driving adventures to and from international motor shows
• Motor show tales
• Giving the traffic police the slip in Sussex
• Getting caught and fined in France and Germany
• Supercars
• Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, and more
• Why the fun has stopped