Contributors

Even though Simon Taylor’s Lunch with… features are famously lengthy, he usually struggles to cut them to fit in the magazine. That’s because over a good meal his targets relax and let themselves go – it was a mammoth four hours with Patrick Head this month. But excess material can be a blessing. When Lotus team manager Peter Warr died leaving his book unfinished, the family asked Simon to help complete it. Luckily he still had copious notes from our 2008 lunch with Warr and could weave them around Warr’s text (Reviews, p137).

On the subject of lunches, Andrew Frankel probably enjoys more business catering than anyone on the staff, thanks to all the car launches he attends. You’ll have to wait for next month to read about Toyota’s new sports car, so let’s hope you can make do with the M5, V8 Bentley – oh, and his drive in the forgotten Lotus that brought active ride to F1. Once he’d squeezed into its tiny cockpit…

Andrew isn’t our only BMW M5 fan. As France was a little far for his usual bicycle, Paul Fearnley used his M5 to visit a small Parisien firm whose business is racing safety (see p88). He was impressed by what he saw, but he didn’t mention whether they gave him a good lunch. His blog about Mark Thatcher on our website is well worth catching, though.

Our photoshoot on the Williams FW14B was a good day for Charlie Magee – this time last year he was knee-deep in Swedish snow snapping Saabs, so a warm studio was a nice change. And given that he spends many shoots hanging out of cars with ‘stunt’ camera and safety harness, it was a lot safer, too…