Issue 03 · The Long Read · Magazines & Annuals

Road Test Prose and How It Changed

The house style went from engineering report to first-person adventure in about fifteen years, and you can date an unmarked page from the verbs alone.

An open motoring magazine spread showing a road test with data tables

The engineering report era

Pre-war and immediately post-war road tests read like instrument logs. Passive voice throughout, the car as the subject, the tester almost entirely absent. Acceleration figures, fuel consumption at steady speeds, braking distances from thirty, and a paragraph on the driving position.

The assumption was that the reader wanted to know what the car did, not what it was like. Opinion appears sparingly and is heavily hedged. The word enjoyable is rare and the word fun is essentially absent.

A vintage stopwatch and clipboard used for timing performance runs — The measured mile. Comparable across titles and across decades, until it was not.

The shift

Somewhere in the mid-sixties the tester walked into the frame. The prose goes first person, the roads acquire names, the weather is mentioned and the car becomes a character rather than a specimen.

This is usually credited to a handful of writers with strong personal voices, and it is not wrong to credit them, but the underlying driver was competition. Once several magazines were publishing the same figures for the same car, the figures stopped being the product and the writing had to be.

The result is the road test as it still exists: a narrative with data attached, rather than data with commentary attached.

What was lost and what was gained

The gain is obvious and the loss is less discussed. Comparability went. When every tester used the same measured mile and published the same figures, the numbers across magazines and across years could be laid side by side.

Modern tests are more enjoyable to read and much harder to use as evidence. Working out whether a 1972 saloon was actually quicker than a 1968 one is straightforward from period data and nearly impossible from period prose.

Anyone researching a specific car should go to the earliest test they can find and treat the later ones as literature.

Reading them as sources

Two cautions. Test cars were frequently prepared, and everyone in the industry knew it. Figures from a manufacturer-supplied press car should be treated as a best case rather than a typical one.

And advertising mattered. A magazine carrying four pages from a manufacturer rarely destroyed that manufacturer's new model, and the criticism is often in the omissions rather than the text. A test that praises the seats at length and never mentions the gearbox is telling you about the gearbox.

Read three tests of the same car from three titles and the consensus is usually reliable. Read one and you are reading a relationship as much as a review.

Duncan Ashby, April 2026

Next piece: The Golden Age of Motoring Poster Art