Andrew English was one of the very first journalists we recruited when Dan and I turned Ti from an Instagram site into an actual business. The Daily Telegraph’s motoring man for nearly 30 years, a fellow Car Of The Year jury member and a man who can speak and write with as much eloquence about spanners as he can the future of hydrogen fuel cells.
Outstanding drivers are not rare in this business, but there are a far smaller number of exceptional writers, fewer still who can combine the two, let alone while bringing the requisite analytical skills to come up with bombproof verdicts again and again. But Andrew can and does. Which is why when the invitation to the Ineos Grenadier launch in January coincided with me being out of the country driving something else and Dan away on paternity leave, it fell to our other Andrew to review for us.
He did not mince his words. One passage ran: ‘And the truth is that while not one Grenadier actually failed to proceed, if Land Rover, Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, or Isuzu had presented a vehicle with this number of schoolboy faults and errors, we’d have had their guts for garters. I got a feeling that the entire operation hasn’t got the sort of quality and attributes control that exists at rivals, or at least not yet.’
