CJ is a former Associate Editor of CAR, and now runs parent company Bauer Media’s Digital Automotive Hub – the in-house team that provides much of the online content for CAR and sister site Parkers.co.uk as well as helping out with CAR magazine. He’s been writing about cars professionally (if that's the right word) for nearly two decades, though attempts to hide this fact with an extensive moisturising routine. Rumour has it his first word was 'car' as well, mind, so his fascination with the topic goes back more than double that length of time...
His former life at specialist automotive editorial agency Motoring Research means he’s also written for the likes of PistonHeads, the Sunday Times, City AM, Auto Express and the Microsoft MSN network, and has appeared in print and on video all over the world. He's also previously taken a diversion into the world of light commercial vehicles, which means he knows an unhealthy amount about vans and pick-ups, too.
Writing about cars since 2015 has seen him cover events and create features from all over the globe, including locations as diverse as the Australian Outback, the Arctic Circle, the Omani desert, North and South America, India, China, Thailand and Cuba. An enthusiast and a technologist, he approaches the current quickening evolution of all things automotive with an analytical interest that aims to put the driver first, and feels incredible lucky to be experiencing so many of these changes first hand.
Over this time he's driven everything from city cars to articulated trucks, and almost every type of power-source imaginable. There's no steam car in the archive, but as well as petrol, diesel and electric, CJ's tried LPG, CNG and several varieties of hydrogen, including rotary and V12 as well fuel cell. He's daily driven a Lamborghini for six months (tough gig; apparently even tougher to stop mentioning it, several years later), crossed Europe in a van, crashed on track, travelled on and off-road in all kinds of conditions, been kinetically recovered, run out of fuel, and even found himself reported as stolen. In Sweden.
CJ's personal four-wheeled back catalogue includes E30 and E34 BMWs, Fords fast and slow, multiple MX-5s, a Saab 900, a Nissan Sunny and... a Vauxhall Cavalier. Having not learnt his lesson spending far too much money ITB-modifying an early Eunos Roadster, he’s now burning all his spare cash trying to keep a notoriously unfickle 996 alive. A car he bought largely by accident due to its entirely Nephrite Green interior. As such, he's the very embodiment of why you should do your research before buying a car, rather than afterwards, a perspective that usefully comes across more correctly in his writing than his bank account.
For cat pictures, random musings, and to see just how green that cabin really is, you can find CJ on Instagram and, less frequently, Twitter. He’s also on LinkedIn, but is yet to work our quite why. CJ's latest CAR articles are listed below.