NZ motoring doyen launches book covering career, advice

Sandy Myhre has written a book that covers motoring and motorsport . Photos: Supplied

New Zealand motoring doyen (and my friend) Sandy Myhre has just had a book launched worldwide by UK publishers, Austin Macauley, with offices in London, Cambridge, New York and Sharjah.

Entitled One Lady Owner, Memoirs of a Motoring Madam, the book covers her long history as a motoring and motor sport journalist.  

Sandy, the Honorary President of Women’s Worldwide Car of the Year, says it is more than a memoir; it’s part biographical and part autobiographical.

“The book examines just about everything you need to know about a car except how the engine works and how to drive it,” she says.

She suggests the best time and the best way to buy and sell car, she looks at EVs, at car parts made naturally and discusses all the alternative fuels available.

“The book has developed into a story of liberation for women and cars and women in motor sport, and although it didn’t start out like that, it turned out that way as the writing went along,” she says. 

It questions why, when women set out to buy a car, they invariably take a man with them. It asks why women are so poorly represented in all forms of motorsport.

Sandy (left) is Honorary President of Women’s Worldwide Car of the Year.

Although women are increasingly infiltrating both these male-dominated arenas, they are still well within a minority.  

One Lady Owner is unique in that it attempts to answer these vexed questions while at the same time delivering a reasoned and often humorous dissertation on cars, the motor industry and motor racing.

It will inform and enliven and by the end, readers will have a well-grounded and well-thought-out knowledge of both the industry and the sport, she says.

She begins – and ends – with her first love, Women’s World Car of the Year (later Women’s Worldwide Car of the Year) and then displays her well-known sense of humour by having a man in the passenger seat.

She has dissertations on car advertising and the disappearing woman, she unleashes the petrosexual, and she interprets motor company acronyms.

The book looks at car designers, it lists women who have made a mark on the industry and the sport and outlines women mechanics.  All these women have a history dating back to the late 19th century.