The stories you've never heard: Autocar's secret launch diaries

It was the UK press launch of the original BMW X3 – in the spring of 2004, if memory serves – and, having been on the magazine for a grand total of six months, I’d been charged with driving a Land Rover Freelander to Aberdeen for what was, I think, the first big Autocar group test in which I had partaken. The test was being written by one Chris Harris, who had flown up to the Highlands with the rest of the BMW launch posse, while the rest of us drove up the rivals. Back then, we did a great many group-test stories like that.

I learned much over those few days. I learned how much farther away the north of Scotland is than the rest of it. I learned how quickly a veteran car photographer can lose patience with a novice road tester if he’s not doing exactly what he’s told. I learned how quickly Highland locals often drive on single-track roads that are usually – but not always – empty of four-car Autocar group-test exercises.

I’m pleased to say that it wasn’t a local who dented my pride and the panels of a borrowed test car that day, instead a sizeable roadside rock mostly submerged in a large puddle, which I ended up reversing into – and over the top of – at reasonable speed. We were running out of light; snapper Stan still had to get a water-splash cover shot plus several others; and I was taking my time, turning around properly and being careful. I was told to “just bloody reverse and hurry up about it”. All right, then. Wallop.

The chassis ended up so bent that BMW couldn’t repair it, and the car had to be driven back to the launch hotel – by Chris – very carefully indeed. The night out I had afterwards with ex-Autocar publishing executive Dai Davies, believing my career here to be over before it had really begun. Well, that was quite big also.

The last thing I learned that week? What a top bloke Chris is. He personally took the rap for the written-off X3, preventing the incident from impacting on Autocar’s budget line and shielding me from any serious repercussions. Thanks, Monkey. Sorry, BMW.

Jim Holder - Volcanoes, glaciers and an Mazda MX-5

Mazda has made a bit of a name for itself for taking its cars to wild locations and then letting hacks loose to create long-distance drive stories.

Even by its standards, however, the idea of driving around 800 miles or so of the perimeter of Iceland – maximum allowable speed limit 56mph – in 48 hours was pretty bonkers. More so because it had elected to put us in MX-5s to do so.

At 6ft 2in tall and unfamiliar with what kind of country lay ahead, I wasn’t whooping with delight at the prospect. How wrong I was.

Roof down, sun out, knees back, I discovered a country of mystical beauty, mixing the very best of the rolling valleys of Wales with the extremes of rugged mountain ranges, towering volcanoes, spine-tingling glaciers and black-sand beaches.

It turned out, too, that the combination of long, winding gravel roads and twisty coastal routes (plus, occasionally, the fact there was nobody to be seen for miles around) meant that the MX-5 was in its element. If you fancy a relaxed road trip, this is the way to do it.

Steve Cropley - The Italian Job

I’ll never forget one extraordinary mega-junket I experienced in Italy for the launch of the Alfa Romeo Alfasud coupé, the Veloce. A load of us were shipped to Rome but, instead of looking at cars, immediately were taken on a tour of The Eternal City’s restaurants and galleries.

Next was Naples, to see Alfasud saloons built at Pomigliano d’Arco, but we weren’t allowed to take any pictures because the workers were stroppy and might have walked out. My main memory is clocking the ferocity with which new cars were driven onto transporters: lots of wheelspin and last-yard braking.

Instead of cars, we looked at more antiquities around Naples and even spent a night on the island of Capri. Then it was Verona and at last Arese, outside Milan, where we really would meet the Veloce. But it turned out we’d arrived earlier than expected; nothing was ready.

A compromise was struck. We were allowed to see a single Veloce prototype, parked for a few minutes outside the R&D headquarters, as long as we viewed it from our bus – and agreed to take no photographs! After five minutes, we drove away.

When it was unveiled a month later, the Veloce was a decent little car, but from that trip we were none the wiser.

Mark Tisshaw - Dr Bez jumps the gun

Driving any new Aston Martin is great fun, so doing two on the same launch is even better. So it was when driving the previous Aston Martin Vanquish Volante, and even more memorably theAston Martin V12 Vantage S, on the sensational mountain roads an hour or so outside California’s Palm Springs, in the middle of the desert.

Yet something else about that launch always makes me chuckle and baffles me to this day. Aston’s then boss, Ulrich Bez – a real character who did a fine job in keeping the company going and making great cars with limited resources while never really receiving the credit he deserved – was ready to wind down and step aside, yet the PR team wasn’t quite as ready to announce it.

One by one, Dr Bez took the half-dozen or so of us hacks aside for a quiet chat one evening to announce he was leaving, without the PR team knowing. I’m pretty sure he was then taken aside for a quiet chat of his own, before we were told what he’d said to us wasn’t actually the case…

His reign must have lasted at least another year, and each time we saw him from Palm Springs until then, the elephant in the room was never quite addressed.

Rachel Burgess - Discovering Bhutan by Yeti

Bhutan isn’t one for many tourists, let alone motoring hacks. Yet I found myself in the mystical Asian country with a fleet of Skoda Yetis on a four-day adventure drive. The Yeti was ageing – and now is sadly no more – and this trip was Skoda’s farewell to its niche-yet-well-received 4x4.

The drive through Bhutan was remarkable – the roads were the hairiest I’ve known (and that includes Bolivia’s ‘most dangerous road in the world’), and the combination of narrow, weaving mountain passes, gargantuan Tata trucks and sheer drops could quickly have resulted in a gory death.

En route, we witnessed many smiling people, cows resolutely sitting in the middle of the road and, of course, a Buddhist monk blessing our cars to ensure our safe passage. What we didn’t see were many cars: the country has just 50,000 on its roads, one for every 15th person.

The Yeti held its own impressively, touring us around a kingdom so magical and untouched that it’s hard to believe it’s even real.

Kris Culmer - Finding a 200T, easy as W123...

I only joined Autocar in January, so I must spin a yarn from my old desk at our sister title. For the 40th What Car? Awards, we planned to gather every winner since 1978.

Most were easy to track down, because many manufacturers maintain a historic fleet, with the rest located via cousin’s-friend’s-dad arrangements. But one car we just couldn’t get our hands on was a Mercedes-Benz 200T.

Fortunately, the fretting made me realise that I saw a W123 wagon every day. So I knocked at my neighbour’s and explained who I was and what I wanted. Surprisingly, he was keen to help, if baffled that I wasn’t after his SLK 55. Soon I swapped an Audi Q5 for his 280TE – the first 20th-century car I’d driven. I’d never felt so cool. I’ll admit driving to the shoot wearing my Ray-Bans and 1980 Brighton football shirt, playing Phil Collins.

I’ll never forget the shocked face of an old schoolmate who saw me, my nervousness or the terror when I realised at midnight the low-fuel light was broken. Above all, though, how I carefully never exceeded 60mph, only to return to a merry anecdote about how happy the car was doing a ton.

Simon Davis - Struck dumb by Fiat

One of the more memorable launch experiences I’ve had came not as a result of the sheer majesty of the location we were in, nor the quality of the roads we were driving on, nor even the car we were there to test in the first place. In fact, ‘memorable’ isn’t really the correct word to describe what happened. ‘Downright bizarre’ would probably be a more apt descriptor.

We’d been flown into Turin to test drive the facelifted Fiat 500X, but we first had to attend the evening press conference. To begin with, this went pretty smoothly. We were shown the car, heard about the differences between it and the old one, asked a few questions – all the standard press conference stuff. But then things got a bit weird.

Seemingly out of the blue, the Fiat executive who had been delivering the presentation announced to a room full of British motoring hacks (collectively famed for their sophisticated sense of humour) that they were “about to see some serious sh*t”.

To really hammer the point home, the phrase had been projected onto the massive screen behind him, too. Cue an excruciatingly awkward silence, which was immediately followed by violently stifled laughter.

To this day I wonder if he had actually been trying to warn us…

James Attwood - Thai'd up in knots

Anyone who has been to Thailand will know the concept of social distancing doesn’t apply on Bangkok roads. Cars are usually bumper-to-bumper, with motorbikes, tuk-tuks and other unidentified objects whizzing between with terrifyingly little space. And it was onto those roads Mitsubishi intended to let loose a group of European journalists in its new L200 pick-up trucks. Eek.

The idea was to drive from Bangkok to an off-road test track in the Thai countryside, to showcase the all-round abilities of the latest L200. Frankly, the prospect of tackling Thai highways was scarier than any possible 4x4 course.

Thankfully, Mitsubishi had a plan. We were taken by bus from our Bangkok hotel to a convention centre on the outskirts of the city, where we were met by a fleet of L200s, a security team and a number of police outriders. We were going in a motorcade.

Lessons were given: keep at a set distance from the car ahead. Don’t slow down of your own accord. Don’t let anything cut in. Then we were off, a succession of L200s with police bikes swarming around them, blocking traffic and clearing our route. Unsurprisingly, we made swift progress to the off-road test centre. It was quite the experience – although, as you might imagine, it didn’t exactly allow for much judgement of the L200’s handling dynamics.

The return journey was even better: we did it in a minibus, with one police bike accompanying. Somehow, he kept us moving – including, at several points, guiding us on the wrong side of the road down packed Bangkok thoroughfares.

Richard Lane - Lamborghini's cliffhanger

Last summer, photographer Max Edleston and I almost dropped an Aventador SVJ Roadster off the side of the Raticosa Pass. It was a world-exclusive drive, where we collected the car – all £432,000 of it – from Sant’Agata and kept it overnight Friday. The obvious thing to do was therefore to scope out the road that Lamborghini’s test drivers have used since the days of Bob Wallace and bag a set of mind-blowing images as the sun went down.

Despite an early rendezvous with the police, who had set up a roadblock consisting of two patrol cars, six officers and two machine guns in our honour on the outskirts of Bologna, it was going well. And then the Aventador went full prima donna and evaporated reverse gear at the worst moment imaginable.

It was while we were doing cornering shots, which involves lots of back and forth driving on the same road. Specifically, during the most perpendicular point of a three-point turn in a shallow, downhill-sloping gravel lay-by on the fresh-air side of the road. Reverse, selected via a button, just wouldn’t engage, even after we’d let the car cool and reset.

Having traipsed back uphill, Max adopted a prop-forward position and took the car’s weight while I released the brakes, then climbed out and joined him. With gravel slipping under our feet and P45s at the front of our minds, we established a faint rocking rhythm that grew and grew until we had inched this 1700kg mid-engined monster back onto the road.

Sweating profusely and with suspected hernias, we finished the shoot and stopped for a pizza in the quiet village of, well, I can’t remember. What I can recall is that the car’s hugely expensive carbon centre-caps were no longer in place by the time we’d paid the bill.

Tom Morgan - Not focused on taking selfies

PR bods like to call it the ‘lifestyle rotation’. Us lot are usually first in line at any new car launch, so as to get driving impressions into print as quickly as possible. But for my first taste of Ford’s monumental Mk3 Focus RS, I had infiltrated one of the later groups. Here things are a lot more laidback, so online ‘influencers’ can take all the selfies they need.

But when miles of twisty Spanish mountain roads and an empty Circuit Ricardo Tormo are waiting, you aren’t going to hang around for everyone to update their Instagram, so I hopped into the first car I could.