Phil’s car journey started with his dad, forever tinkering with mum’s Morris Minor Traveller in the garage and looking unusually cool in his Reliant Scimitar. His interest in Ford, Peugeot and BMW stems from his car tastes, and he started writing about cars in 1998 for a company car magazine in London. This led to a couple of years as news editor on Autocar, before his love for glossy, intelligent magazines lured him to CAR in 2003 – and he worked here for an extraordinary two decades until summer 2024.
CAR has been an incredible playground, giving him the access to cover an industry he finds fascinating and thrilling. As editor of CAR for 10 years and 124 issues, he inherited a mag with a pioneering history of great story-telling, leading-edge photography and award-winning design, and tried to shape it for the future by embracing new car trends and technologies and digital publishing channels.
Phil’s favourite two drive stories were bending the rules to take a Porsche 997 to the Great Wall of China, and blasting from Monte Carlo to Maranello in a Ferrari 430 Scuderia, Maserati GranTurismo and Alfa 8C, commemorating those three brands 1-2-3 in the 1950 Monaco GP. A mind-blowing opportunity, where he could wallow in his love of exotic Italian cars for five days.
He was on the panel of European journalists who crown the continent’s Car of the Year from 2008, during which time he watched the stepchange as EVs including the Nissan Leaf, Jaguar iPace and Kia EV6 took the top award. In his latter years as group editor of CAR, Phil was keen to push the brand in new directions and built on the editorial team’s great work in growing the magazine’s circulation in new and increasingly digital channels.
Read on to see all the articles and reviews written Phil McNamara’s two-and-a-bit-decade tenure at CAR in the list below.