I am baffled by Lexus because I’m English. We Brits don’t understand what Lexus is; never have done really. It’s the same throughout Europe. In the ‘90s when the brand arrived and kabooomed the entire US prestige car industry, we all just walked past the smattering of Lexus dealers over here and wondered what they…

When I was a kid, turbocharging ruled. The aim in life was to elongate the point between request and delivery, to worship at the altar of lag and to ensure that when the goods arrived they did as much damage to tires and supposed ‘handling’ as possible. By eliminating lag have we not eliminated what makes turbos fun?

The third biggest loser in this sad saga of Top Gear is the wider car media, and the business that surrounds it. Of course the first is the vast fan base that has followed the show for many years. The second, assuming the brand struggles to survive, is the team who work on it - and I can’t imagine how they feel right…

As the motorcar enters the post-manual-transmission epoch, I predict something bizarre happening: the re-emergence of the manual transmission. I'm not taking the piss. It's going to happen.

This year's Geneva show was one of contrition for your vertically challenged, vaguely brown UK correspondent. I had cause to come face-to-face with two people I felt wouldn't be too happy to see me. The first was the boss of Porsche's Weissach nerve-centre, Wolfgang Hatz, and the other was Christian Von Koenigsegg.

Watching eight-year-old boys play the game you lot insist on calling soccer is a peculiar pastime. As a spectator you are vaguely aware that the humanlings are governed by some sort of laws and rules, but it is hard to decipher what those are. Furthermore, despite each child being regularly reminded that they have a…

There was an unspoken rule when I started doing this job back in the 90s – as a British journalist you were supposed to be kind in your reviews of British cars. The editor didn't follow you home one night and threaten you with a terrible death if you did happen to tell the audience that the latest Jaguar S-Type was in…

"Fuck you Travis Oval-piston-face." The words repeated and scorched the inside of my head and the anger grew and swelled and assumed a magnitude which left me no longer in control of it.

I can't tell you what type of Toyota it was, but it instinctively looked sub-Camry, and yet by the same token supra-Corolla. There are some funny looking cars in Dubai. Its confident arrival outside the hotel didn't jangle any internal-alarms, and I hopped in with high hopes for a relaxing, expedient journey.

The role of the critic has long been ridiculed and lambasted for all the obvious reasons – so few of those who chose to comment on anything motorized could ever produce something approaching the quality of that which they were criticizing. The motor car is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon – at its most…

I think his name was Hans Lehmann. He was the man for whom the dubious job description 'car scoop photographer' was invented, and his ability of snaffle out disguised prototypes as they performed pre-production testing on public roads was legendary. He must have made a small fortune in his pomp, and no one could deny…

Do you work in an industry that is fundamentally broken? If you do, does it leave you unsettled because you don't know how best to react? That terrible self-pitying need to sit and moan with your colleagues about the desolation of the wider situation set against the exciting knowledge that now is the time you might…

There is much confusion and misinformation surrounding the actual definition of the phrase 'pure-joy.' To many it is a pallid cliché constructed around what they perceive as being their perfect pastime – their moment of uncontaminated joy. But I can now de-bunk this nonsense, for 'pure-joy' is actually not a perfect…

The first time I rode in an American car I didn't know it was an American car, but I did know it seemed very different to my daddy's car. And my mummy's car. It was huge, and it sounded angry, and it didn't have a gearlever on the floor – in fact the gearlever didn't seem to be used much at all – and it felt kind of…

Chris Bangle may be history's most infamous car designer, ridiculed for taking a visual language that BMW carefully developed over fifty years and gleefully drowning it in a bath tub. At the time I thought he was a madman, or maybe a moron. Maybe I was the moron.

Cricket is considered to be the most impenetrable game for non-Englishmen to comprehend. Being English I cannot understand why foreigners might struggle to grasp the appeal of sitting on a wooden bench and watching 22 men occasionally move on-and-off a large field for five days, but believe me when I tell you that a…

The problem with writing a column with the working title 'the problem with Lamborghini' just before a major motor show is that it doesn't account for the possibility that Lamborghini might unveil its best concept car since the Miura. But even post-Asterion unveil, I think Lamborghini has regressed into being a…

'Oh, and think of a name for your column too." The words sat discarded at the bottom of a Hardigree email containing the details of the miserly sum he'd offered in exchange for me filling this space once a week. So I thought I'd write a column about how you might go about naming a column. And see if the process…

The Welsh borders, 12 Oct 2014