I've been called many things in my time - not all of them very pleasant - but this is a new one. The latest issue of CAR, on sale today, calls me 'the Superman of technical features'. Which is nice.

The September 2007 issue carries a feature by me which attempts to explain 'torque' for people who drive cars rather than those who design them, with the aid of a Bentley Arnage T and a Mazda RX-8 PZ (and, by the by, a 400-ton Komatsu tipper truck). Up at the front of the book there's a brief backgrounder on one of CAR's newest scribblers:

Andrew Noakes is a bit like Clark Kent, teaching part-time on Coventry University's automotive journalism course. But out of the lecture theatre he becomes the Superman of technical features, as exemplified by his superbly written piece demystifying the grey area of torque (p110). It's packed with fascinating facts: did you know that if you plot bhp and torque on the same graph, the lines will always cross at 5252rpm? When he's not scribbling or lecturing, Andrew takes part in hillclimbs and collects old and unreliable watches. He has more than a dozen, although he still never really knows what time it is.

Writing about torque is a piece of cake, though, compared to photographing such an intangible concept. Full marks, then, to CAR's Mark Fagelson for a bringing the subject alive, with a touch of humour.