Nye Doug

Doug Nye is the multiple award-winning author of more than 70 books covering motor sporting history. He has been a racing journalist for more than 57 years – first joining ‘Motor Racing’ magazine in 1963, and working later on ‘Motoring News’ and ‘Motor Sport’ before going freelance in August 1968. He remains a regular contributor to myriad racing and classic car publications in the UK and worldwide.

His books include standard works on Lotus, Cooper, BRM, Ferrari, McLaren and Tyrrell – and such wider subjects as the Grand Prix car, great racing drivers, including pre-war British ace Dick Seaman. He has also compiled biographies with (and about) such respected names of motor sport’s past as Juan Manuel Fangio, Sir Stirling Moss, Sir Jack Brabham, Phil Hill and Jim Clark.

Doug Nye is also consultant historian to Goodwood Motorsport, and is one of the co-founders of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Revival Meeting. With Robert Brooks he also helped found the Classic Adelaide Rally in Australia, participating there for 12 years in assorted Ferraris.

He was joint editor of the ‘Motorfilms Quarterly’ video part-work library, co-produced over 200 ‘Legends of Motorsport’ documentaries for American TV, and with colleague Sir Paul Vestey runs The GP Library collection of racing photography. He is a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers and, in 1996, was invited to join the select British Racing Drivers’ Club.

Doug-Nye-2
Doug Nye in conversation with Murray Walker at the Goodwood Festival
of Speed, prior to his run up the Hill in the Vanwall.

With veteran Ferrari F1 World Champion Phil Hill, he was founding co-presenter of the Collier Collection/Revs Institute’s international Car Connoisseurship Symposia at their fabulous museum in Naples, Florida, and is a consultant to Revs today. He has also been a consultant to the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, to the Dutch National and Louwman Museums in Holland, and to the Brooklands Museum in Surrey, in addition to several similar institutions and private collections worldwide. He has also featured in numerous TV and big-screen racing documentaries.

In 1984, he was instrumental in saving, ‘for the nation’, the last surviving BRM V16 Grand Prix car; the last surviving 1967 factory team Lotus 49, circa 1988; the Brooklands perpetual lap-record holding Napier-Railton in 1999; and also played a role in the nation’s acquisition of the ‘Thrust SST’ supersonic Land Speed Record car in 2001. He is today Bonhams Auctions’ long-serving specialist racing car consultant, having operated within that industry since 1981 – first with Christie’s, then Brooks before that concern acquired Bonhams.