Mike Duff
Mike Duff ties technical detail to real-world performance, using decades of road-testing experience to explain how modern cars deliver their speed, range, and character. He is Director of Reviews at Road & Track, where he focuses on performance-oriented automobiles, electrified powertrains, and the engineering decisions behind them. His coverage stands out for its blend of hard numbers, product context, and longform stories about extreme speed and the specialist garages that keep car culture moving.
Road & Track reviews with a performance and technology lens
Duff’s core work at Road & Track is structured around testing and explaining new vehicles, with a clear emphasis on how powertrain technology changes the driving experience. His recent coverage of the 2028 Volvo XC60 T8 plug-in hybrid highlights its nearly 80-mile electric-only range, framing that figure as a meaningful step in usable EV capability rather than a spec sheet curiosity. In his piece on the BMW i3 EV as the Neue Klasse sedan, he treats the car as a benchmark for the next generation of compact electric sedans, focusing on how platform and design choices shape future products. When he writes about the 2026 Porsche 911 Turbo S as a 701-hp hybrid with a $272,650 starting price, he anchors the story in output, price, and positioning, showing where it sits in Porsche’s performance hierarchy and what hybridization means for an icon. The same pattern appears in his coverage of Porsche’s new 1139-hp Cayenne Turbo Electric, which he describes as the most powerful road car in the brand’s history while detailing pricing and delivery timing, tying a headline-grabbing number to market reality.
Land-speed records and extreme engineering stories
Beyond early-access reviews, Duff devotes recurring attention to land-speed records and the engineering ambition behind them.
In “The World’s Fastest Man Prepares to Make a Run at Another Record,” he follows Andy Green’s plan to pursue a new record with the hydrogen-powered Hydromax, treating the car as a technical project and a statement about where ultimate speed might go next. The headline connects the human pursuit of records with hydrogen propulsion, and Duff uses that combination to explore how alternative fuels enter the most demanding corners of performance. His earlier piece “A Requiem for Speed Records” signals a reflective approach to the subject, suggesting a broader look at how record-setting has changed as technology, safety, and public priorities move on.
Taken together, these stories mark him out as one of the writers at the masthead who returns to speed records not just for spectacle but to question their future and the engineering paths that enable them.
Sports cars, specialist builders, and low-volume expertise
Duff regularly threads his reviews and news coverage with features on specialist builders and the cars enthusiasts dream about.
His story on the Ruf Tribute positions the car as “far more than the air-cooled 911 Turbo you wish Porsche still made,” using that comparison to set expectations about authenticity, performance, and emotional appeal. The headline indicates a focus on how a small manufacturer interprets a historic model, and Duff makes that tension between heritage and modern capability central to the narrative.
In “Low Volume, High Skill: 3 Shops Where Unique Expertise …,” he turns his attention to the garages themselves, profiling three operations defined by craft and technical depth rather than scale. That kind of piece leans on his long experience assessing cars to recognize the value of specialist knowledge, and it broadens his beat beyond OEM launches to the independent ecosystem that shapes how serious enthusiasts buy, maintain, and modify their cars.
This strand of his work shows that he treats car culture as a network of makers and fixers, not just a sequence of factory announcements.
Industry strategy and the future of performance lineups
Duff’s beat also encompasses executive decision-making and product strategy, particularly where it intersects with high-performance and luxury brands. In his coverage of an Aston Martin leader arguing that fewer models and more variants are the key to future success, he presents model-count and derivative strategy as central levers for profitability and brand clarity.
That story aligns with his broader pattern: he covers high-output hybrids, flagship EVs, and specialist builds, then steps back to show how boardroom decisions determine which of those concepts reach the road. His long tenure reviewing thousands of cars for major outlets on both sides of the Atlantic informs this work, giving him historical context on past product cycles and the ability to judge how current strategies might reshape the performance landscape. Before joining Road & Track, he held senior roles at CAR, Autocar, and evo, wrote for MPH and Autoweek, and spent a decade as European editor for Car and Driver, building a comparative view of how different markets approach performance and innovation.
That background supports a style of coverage in which new models, record programs, and low-volume shops are always read against the larger industry patterns that enable them.
Across reviews, news pieces, and features, Duff’s distinguishing trait is consistency in connecting specs, engineering choices, and business context to the lived reality of driving and owning performance cars. He returns repeatedly to electrification and extreme power outputs, but his stories remain grounded in clear numbers, recognizable brands, and specific projects, from plug-in family crossovers to hydrogen land-speed challengers.
For anyone tracking how performance and technology are evolving in mainstream and enthusiast segments, his Road & Track work offers a concentrated view informed by long experience and a broad cross-section of the automotive world.
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Adrian Leung
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Alan Dowds
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Alan Feldberg
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Alastair Crooks
Alastair Crooks is a senior news reporter at Auto Express who covers both new cars and the infrastructure that will support them, tying factory-scale developments to driveway-level reviews. He focuses on electric cars, mainstream launches and UK pricing, reporting on new and electrified models entering the market, their spec, positioning and what they change for buyers. His road tests of SUVs and saloons assess ride, range, interior space, value and running costs, with clear, sometimes blunt verdicts backed by specifics rather than general impressions. He writes news, reviews, features and occasional opinion columns on driving behaviour and in-car tech, drawing on his background as a car salesman, his degree in journalism and his enthusiast experience at car shows and track days. Some of his work also appears in magazine-style formats.