Keeping good company

VETERAN MAZDA AUSTRALIA EXECUTIVE ALASTAIR DOAK EXPLAINS WHAT'S KEPT THE LOCAL OPERATION RIDING SO HIGH FOR DECADES

-  KATHRYN FISK

ALMOST 22 YEARS ago, a young Alastair Doak left journalism to venture into pastures new in the upper echelons of Mazda's Australian operations - and he hasn't looked back since.

Arriving on our shores in the late 1970s as a teen to Sydney, the Scot embarked upon his university studies - first in Canberra pursuing science, before moving into journalism in Melbourne.

Always a car enthusiast, it wasn't long before Doak was being paid to write about them as a journalist and with a bit of elbow grease he was quickly at the top of his game leading The Australian's motoring desk as Editor between 1992 and 1999, followed by a stint in the equivalent role at The Age.

But in 2001 a fresh challenge presented itself and the game changed.

"I'd been a journalist for around 10 years up until that point," Doak tells Wheels in his thick Scottish brogue, undiluted despite all the years passing since he migrated.

"And I guess I became a journalist so I could drive cars - for as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with cars. But I also knew at the same time that, you get to the point where you start to think there's a lot more in the industry happening that I don't know about as a journalist. You get to bounce around the surface of it, but you never really get a deep dive.

"So I just thought, well maybe if you join a company, you'll learn more things about the industry that you love and products that you love - that was kind of the motivation. And at the time, certainly Mazda was promising to go on this growth journey and it was coming up to the first of the Zoom-Zoom products. I thought, well, why not? Let's join.

"I was Motoring Editor of The Age and I was really enjoying it, it was a good place to be. Obviously the paper had a lot of clout so it was a hard choice to leave, but I moved into Mazda as head of public relations - I think the first car I launched was the Mazda 6 - and then it just went from there."