Erin baker – The 14 Definitive Moments from Bakers World of Motoring 2015

A former Motoring Editor at the Telegraph, Erin combines a bike licence and race licence with a love of high-speed cars and penchant for embarrassingly low-speed crashes. Now she has two sons, she’s largely put her leathers to one side, preferring the cut and thrust of automotive industry debates and wondering which cars have Isofix…

 

 

 1. Petrol reaching 99.9p per litre. That’s got to be the motoring highlight of the decade, not just 2015.

2. Getting back on a motorbike for the first time in six years. A Honda CBR500R at Silverstone, to be precise. 47bhp was just the right amount for a tentative rider, but on a very sexy bike. Emotional, all round.

3. Driving the new Civic Type R, while we’re on the Honda theme (well, it was their 50th anniversary this year, after all).

4. Interviewing Yasmin Le Bon about her love of fast cars and bikes. She’s pretty cool and I’d quite like to be her.

5. A sneak peak of the new Rolls Royce studio at their Goodwood home, where customers can collect their cars and choose their colours. Oh, to be wealthy.

6. My first sight of Bloodhound, in the flesh, at FoS this year. You cannot grasp the scale of this thing until you see it.

7. Hot laps with Gordon Shedden, British Touring Car Champion, at Knockhill, where he was teaching Kaiser Chiefs singer and The Voice judge Ricky Wilson how to drive a car round a circuit.

8. Interviewing Ricky Wilson. I’m a little bit in love.

9. Driving Toyota’s Mirai fuel-cell car in Hamburg. It felt like the future but, more importantly, a credible future, albeit one that has to overcome hydrogen storage and safety challenges…

10. Revving the nuts off my 120bhp Mazda CX-3 long-termer test car; this little thing has surprised and entertained me for six months. A reminder of how well Mazda does petrol engines.

11. Conquering my fear of car washes. Seriously. And to anyone who finds that an unusual fear, I say what on earth is normal about subjecting yourself to big mechanical brushes and powerful water jets in an enclosed space, that won’t necessarily stop when you scream?

12. Driving my mate’s Aston Martin DB1 replica; more fun than the real thing, gasp shock horror.

13. Shoehorning both my sons into a Ferrari California so they could experience a Ferrari. The fact that they were less than impressed is neither here nor there; it’s like eating broccoli – it’s good for you, so shut up.

14. Driving an E-type for the very first time. And not any old E-type, a V12 from the Jaguar heritage collection. This job is pretty much the best in the world, on occasion.

Total image courtesy of Colin Grice, licensed under Creative Commons and ARC image courtesy of Robin Stott licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.