THE BEST... EUROPEAN EDITOR
Georg Kacher, CAR’s long-serving European editor, is an insider. He’s been inside several US jail cells, for a start. It goes with the territory when you’re testing a new car before anybody else in the world and you just want to Get On With It. At speed. In the snow.
‘It was winter, a very snowy dual carriageway, and the Americans – chickens that they are – were all in the right-hand lane,’ chuckles Georg, CAR’s incredibly well connected man in Munich. ‘I was overtaking in the left lane for miles and miles. It was unploughed, but as someone who comes from Bavaria I know how to drive in snow, even on summer tyres. Back then, truckers had CB radios. My lane was suddenly blocked up ahead by cops with flashlights! Let’s say that I’ve spent enough time in the American justice system’s care.’
Georg has also done time inside the private oces of most of the world’s car bosses, in boardrooms, at dinner tables, at every single major motor show decade after decade, and behind the wheel of literally thousands of new cars, often being the first outsider to drive them. He has racked up millions of air miles, filed just as many words of copy in perfectly nuanced English (his second language), broken hundreds of scoops, revealed thousands of model plans, upset plenty of industry people and made the day of many more.
All for us, and for you, CAR’s loyal readers. Our 700 issues span 58 years. For 45 of those years, 540 of those issues, fully 80 per cent of this magazine’s lifespan, Georg Kacher’s mighty, 6ft 8in shadow has presided.
It began in October 1975, two years after Georg had first approached editor Mel Nichols. ‘Mel chucked me out the year before, and the year before that,’ says Georg. ‘Go and get some training,’ he told me. I didn’t, but I tried again in 1975.’ Fate intervened. Dozens of pages of typewritten copy were destroyed in an oce fire, and Georg was told to write a feature on the spot to help fill the issue. ‘Mel read it and told me I was a natural,’ says Georg. ‘I’m glad it worked out.’
He’s not the only one who’s glad. ‘We were fortunate to have Georg,’ says Gavin Green, twice Georg’s editor and still a CAR fixture.
‘There were no German correspondents back then, and when the Germans rose to dominate, we had our man on the spot. Nobody has a better contacts book than Georg, and not just with the German manufacturers. He’s without equal. He works incredibly hard, he’s very persistent and he brings authority – a great magazine has to have authority.’
Everybody has a Georg Kacher anecdote. He has a serious side (drawing a sketch of what the car ‘should have looked like’ and handing it to VW design legend Walter de Silva in a press conference); an enthusiast side (trying and failing to drive slowly enough in a Porsche 959 to keep the photographer’s rented Citroën BX in his mirrors, ending up in a 150mph dice with a 911); and a humorous side (eating the middle out of a pizza in a good restaurant, and using the remaining circle of crust as a steering wheel with which to loudly demonstrate oversteer).
From a personal point of view, when I was made editor in 1999, I was nervous about meeting Georg. I was aged 11 when he began writing for CAR; his experience, knowledge and reputation dwarfed me. I felt unworthy to be his editor. We met over breakfast in Geneva. He was absolutely lovely – humble, charming, very funny. I remember he asked me how he could improve his feature writing in English. As if it needed improving.
In the end most great men are keepers of a flame, passers of a baton, guardians of a promise. Whether presidents or pioneers or cultural heroes, their tenures add up to part of a bigger story, each representing the pillars on which histories are built. Some pillars, though, are more structurally integral than others. CAR owes a very great debt to Georg Kacher, not least for his bubbling stream of fresh drive stories when the UK languished in Covid lockdown earlier this year.
Incidentally, eventually the big man did manage to crack his problem with the US Highway Patrol. Stopped yet again, he handed over his Bavarian fishing licence to a state trooper, who duly endorsed it. So Georg is still allowed to drive in America. But he’s banned from fishing.
He’s upset plenty of industry people and made the day of many more