Steve Saxty Author and Ford aficionado

The writer of the popular Secret Fords books reveals a car and career history that extends well beyond the Blue Oval

- BRETT FRASER

WHILE SOME AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY W figures have a celebrity beyond the inner circles of the car business, others attain high levels of seniority without the general public being so aware of their names.

Steve Saxty has worked in design engineering and marketing at Ford, was at Mazda for the launch of the MX-5 in the UK, enjoyed a stint in sales at Porsche GB, ran his own automotive consultancy with clients including Lotus, RollsRoyce, Volkswagen and McLaren (on the Fl project), produced global marketing strategies for the likes of Nissan while employed by other large consultancies, and was global brand communications director for Jaguar. But it was a handful of books on Ford, some written while confined to barracks - well, his New York apartment - during Covid lockdowns, that really brought Saxty to the public's attention.

Not that he's a blinkered Ford enthusiast. "I think Ford had a golden moment in the 1970s and '80s, and they had some of the world's finest designers working there," he says. "And during the Richard ParryJones era they changed vehicle dynamics forever.'

However, it's Saxty's early backstory - not to mention the fact that the only car he now owns is a Capri Injection Special with a Turbo Technics conversion from new - that really helps explain why Ford was an inevitable topic for his venture into book writing: 'I grew up in Essex, quite close to Ford's R&D track at Dunton. As a young lad I was more interested in planes than cars and used to traipse to the local library every Thursday to read the latest issue of Flight magazine.

'Then in the early 1970s I spent a month in Canada with a relative. There were all these huge American cars floating around and mutated versions of cars I recognised from back home but with different bumpers, and I became fixated. So afterwards I started to go to the library on a Wednesday to read the motoring magazines and soon realised I'd switched my allegiance to four wheels.