Ten Years Of CARkeys
by David Finlay (8 December 2009)
What? No! It can't be. Is it really ten years since CARkeys first stumbled on to the wide, windswept, low-graphics plain that was the internet in those days? Sometimes it feels like I've been involved with this magazine for my whole life, sometimes that the whole thing started just a few weeks ago, but ten years . . . It seems too definite, too much of a milestone. I mean to say, ten years. A decade. No, surely not.
And yet as I write this I'm glancing at a printout of our home page as it looked on day one, and there it is. The date. 8th December 1999. Ten years ago today. So I'd better accept this and get on with reminiscing.
My father Ross Finlay and I, with combined experience in motoring journalism already extending beyond half a century at the time, started it. We had been involved in creating magazines before, but they were generally run by crooks who scuttled off without paying before the first year was up.
Despite this, we always believed we could run our own show, but the costs of setting up a printed magazine (or "dead-tree websites" as we later called to them) were prohibitive. Then some aimless conversation or other led, as our aimless conversations frequently did, to a Bright Idea - in this case, the possibility of running an online magazine which would avoid all the expense of paper, ink, distribution and so on.
It would be hard work, and it was, but we felt we could do it, and we did. News stories, features, road tests, launch reports, columns and (until we realised that the CARkeys readership wasn't as interested in them as we were) motorsport reports appeared online virtually every day for just over five years until my father, in one last display of his talent for making life as awkward as possible for those around him, abruptly died and left the job of editing the magazine to me. I missed him then (Ross Finlay Tribute), I did later (Strange Meeting), I still do, and I suppose I always will.
He is not the only one who has gone. So too has Malcolm Baylis, an occasional CARkeys contributor and still remembered after his death four years ago as one of our profession's finest gentleman. And although Mark Brennan, who died eight years ago at the stupidly early age of 24, was never directly involved with the magazine, he was referred to in it several times, and since he was the best friend I ever had I will make no apology for referring here to the influence he had on my life and work.
Fortunately, the survivors outnumber those lost. Over the years, CARkeys has been lucky enough to be able to publish articles by such notable writers as Alan Douglas, Richard Dredge, John Fife, Graeme Giles, Chris Goffey, Mike Grundon, Claire Lumb, Ian Lynas, Neil Lyndon, Jim McCauley, David Morgan, Stephen Park, David Ross, Carmel Stewart, Tom Stewart and Richard Yarrow, all of whom are fortunately still with us (though Lyndon is looking a bit shaky).
I like them all - some are close friends, and I enjoy the company of the others on the sadly rare occasions that I am able to experience it - and I like the fact that they have very different styles, and that on occasions they disagree with each other and with me. Sometimes I have said that I never fully trust one person's opinion on CARkeys unless it is contradicted by someone else's, and I'm not entirely joking about that. An "official" view, not to be deviated from, on any car or any motoring subject has never been the CARkeys way.
I also have to devote some space here to John Stevens, who is not a journalist but who has contributed a column from the earliest days of the magazine. John's real job is to coach racing drivers (see www.racecoaching.com for further details), and in my view he is the best in the world. He is also a wonderful man, and I am proud to be able to call him a friend.
Like all other motoring journalists my first point of contact with any manufacturer is the PR department, which in each case sends out press releases, invites us to launches of new models and sends out cars for us to test. The journalist/PR relationship is in theory an uneasy one, since PRs want us to be positive about their products at all times, and of course we won't always do that. That aside, though, I can happily say that there are some wonderful people working in PR, almost invariably to a very high standard (I don't have enough experience of other industries to be able to judge, but I would not be surprised to learn that this one is particularly blessed).
One of my favourite PR people recently told me at an awards ceremony that although he didn't always like what was written about his own company's products in CARkeys, he had always admired the magazine's honesty. I was more moved by that than I was able to express at the time, not least because it was partly a tribute to my father, who was one of the most honest people I have ever known. I try - not always successfully and, when successfully, perhaps not always wisely - to be equally honest, simply because I think it is the right way to be.
But a more specific reason to be honest is that it is the best way of serving our readers, and there is no question that the readers are the most important people involved in CARkeys. We have always sought to inform and entertain. Sometimes (as when, for example, we have published an article critical of a car on which a reader has spent good money) we have instead enraged, and in those cases all I can do is assure you that everything we publish - possibly excepting the ravings of that old scoundrel Rufus J Flywheel - comes from the heart and experience of the writer. If we fail in that, at least we fail trying.
So. Ten years, eh? The motoring world has changed a lot in that time (cars have improved enormously, manufacturers are in some cases in a state which could not have been imagined in 1999) and we have changed too. And we'll continue changing; a relaunch is planned for the near future, and it involves a nightmarish amount of work but I believe it will be worth it. By our twentieth anniversary we may have launched . . . who knows? . . . twice, maybe three times more. My printout of our very first home page will seem like a historic document then, but I like to think that the values we had when we started will not have changed at all.
