Peter Egan, Remastered

We're giving Alex and the guys the week off for the first time since restarting the BaT podcast in January 2024. This week, we serve you a reheated and much-better-sounding version of Alex's February 2024 interview with the one-and-only, the legendary, the beloved, Peter Egan—he of Side Glances in Road & Track, of countless harebrained-slash-inspirational road trips, of April Fools road tests, and of so much more. This is the man that so many of us at BaT and beyond like to think we've fashioned ourselves after; a modest and humble writer who, perhaps unknowingly, has played a formative role in our addictions to the great machinery of the world, the call of the open road, and the treasures to be found when these things are combined.

Peter sat down with Alex over a year ago in his erstwhile stomping grounds of coastal Orange County, California, to discuss his career and the cars, bikes, planes, people, and places it was formed around. They cover his entry into journalism via Cycle World; the power of an interesting car, or a Piper Cub, to make friends out of strangers in faraway lands; the social advantages of touring the country in someone else's Ferrari; a memorable hometown show with Chuck Berry and Billy Peek, caught on happenstance; getting a glimpse of the Old Man at Fiorano; the art of (somewhat) feigning ignorance; getting locked into the Morgan factory at Malvern; sharing the last Everest flight of the season with Neil Sedaka, and only Neil Sedaka; whether Egan's next project will be a 76-year-old British sports car or a 27-year-old Italian superbike; and how Barb has stuck with him come fire and come rain (yes, Barb really is that great).

Links for titles/listings discussed in this episode:

• The Ex-Peter Egan 1967 Jaguar XKE Coupe that was auctioned in 2019 with 335 comments—including one from the man himself, which gathered quite possibly the most thumbs-up a single comment has ever received on BaT
• Tom Cotter's Cobra story
• Egan's archive at the Road & Track website (may require a membership subscription)
• A variety of Egan's writing collections available for purchase (we highly recommend picking up every last one of them)

Got suggestions for our next guest from the BaT community or One Year Garage episode? Let us know at [email protected]!