At the coalface

Simon Arron Editor 1991-1996

“Who do you think you are, telling me what’s going in the issue?” My first conversation with Bill Boddy didn’t get off to a great start. I took a deep breath and explained that I had been brought in as editor.

The title had been his for 50-odd years but Motor Sport proprietor Wesley Tee had lately decided to give the magazine an overhaul. David Tremayne would be executive editor, I’d oversee the day-to-day running — ably abetted by Gordon Cruickshank — and Bill would assume the role of Founder Editor from his home in Wales. As had suddenly become plain, however, this information didn’t appear to have percolated much further west than WJT’s office. When I raised the matter with the company’s octogenarian patriarch, he just chuckled. “Sorry, boy, might have forgotten to mention it.”

They were challenging, educational times but memories will forever be fond. In my youth I used to stick colour images from Motor Sport in scrapbooks or on my bedroom wall. It never occurred to me that I might one day end up selecting its editorial content.

Andrew Frankel Editor 1996-1999

I took the editors chair at Motor Sport in 1996 and relaunched the title with the April 1997 edition, in a rough approximation of the form it takes today. Armed with a little money and a few talented staff, all we did was think of features we’d like to read, and then commissioned people to write them, hoping our enthusiasm would find its way onto the page. But it also meant we would no longer report on modem F1 races and I remember the bags of post, praising and lambasting me in equal number.

The two greatest moments were seeing the relaunch issue in my newsagent and driving Richard Attwood’s Porsche 917, but it still gives me a buzz without fail, every month. Neil Lyndon once dedicated a page of a supplement in The Sunday Telegraph to explaining why the relaunched Motor Sport was going to finish off the title for good. At the time I was a little hurt and rather bewildered. Having seen what’s become of the magazine since then, I have become delighted.