From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Egan is the author of the Side Glances column in Road & Track magazine and the Leanings column in Cycle World magazine. He is noted by his readers as having a self-deprecating, ironic, sarcastic, and often dark sense of humor, and for journalistic accounts of his many road trips, including detailed accounts of the failings of his vehicles and his interactions with the people who go with him and the people they meet along the way.

[edit] Early life

Egan was born in Elroy, Wisconsin. He first became acquainted with sports cars from photographs of celebrities and their cars in his sister Barbara's glamor magazines. He would later watch sports car racing at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin

After owning and riding a motorcycle for a time, Peter Egan bought a used Triumph TR3, which later became the subject of his Road & Track article Triumphs And Other Disasters. In that article, and in several of his Side Glances columns, he mentioned an incident that occurred while he was driving his girlfriend (and future wife) Barbara to a date. When he honked the horn, an electrical malfunction occurred that set the car on fire.

Egan dropped out of college and was drafted into the US Army. He was deployed to Vietnam where he saw action, later referring to a jeep he had been driving and that had been hit by a mortar shell as "the only non-English vehicle I ever drove that exploded."

After his tour of duty, he visited Paris, France, from which he and a friend rode bicycles to Marseilles.

Upon his return to Wisconsin, Egan proposed to his girlfriend Barb and started work as a mechanic at Foreign Car Specialists, a repair shop owned by Chris Beebe. Beebe would later be mentioned frequently in Egan's Side Glances column and would accompany him on several of his road trips. Beebe and Egan are now neighbors in Wisconsin.

[edit] Motor journalism career

Egan went on a motorcycling trip with his wife that ended unexpectedly when his bike broke down. He wrote an article about the journey from the point of view of reflecting on the ride while on the bus headed back home. He submitted the story to Cycle World, in which it was published. Allan Girdler, then editor of Cycle World offered him a position as a staff writer based on that article. Egan accepted and relocated to southern California with his family.

While writing for Cycle World, Egan also wrote for the automotive magazine Road & Track, which was part of the same organization and had its headquarters in the same building as Cycle World. His writing style fit well with, and may have been influenced by, those of his contemporaries at Road & Track, including Henry N. Manney III, Rob Walker, Innes Ireland, and Dennis Simanaitis.

Apart from writing road tests and reports on motor races and car shows, Egan wrote about the perils and pitfalls of repairs, restoration, and racing. He would illustrate his points with first-hand anecdotes of facing the perils he described, in which he usually makes the perils seem more prevalent in old English cars, which he prefers to work on and drive despite the many woes he ascribes to them. He also shows a preference for English and Italian motorcycles, which, in his writings, appear to have about as many woes as English cars.

Egan has since retired from the regular staff of both magazines, although he still contributes his monthly columns to both and also contributes to both as an Editor-At-Large.

[edit] Road trips

Peter Egan has documented several road trips, mostly, but not always, in North America. These trips include:

• riding a bicycle from Paris to Marseilles in the early 1970s
• driving with Chris Beebe from Wisconsin to Los Angeles in a Ford Model A, after he and Beebe restored the car ("Model A Odyssey, Parts I and II")
• several trips from Wisconsin to the SCCA Runoffs at Road Atlanta and back
• driving a BMW Isetta from Wisconsin to Memphis, Tennessee, after realizing that he would not be able to make it to Road Atlanta in time for the Runoffs
• driving a Caterham 7 with his wife around New England
• driving a Jaguar E-Type with his wife as far north as the map indicated the existence of pavement
• driving a Mini in a rally across Texas
• driving a '53 Cadillac down into the Mississippi Delta Blues Country