There are times when the urge to engage with activities of a private and solitary nature can no longer ignored; we may hope temptation will ebb away, but experience tells us otherwise. If anything, we’ll be powerless to resist the tidal force of its return.

Last week was an especially indulgent one for me in this regard. Between dipping in and out of a couple of ongoing projects and bouts of correspondence catch-up, my hyperfocusing needs required sating – only conducting some deeply intensive automotive research had the potential to hit the spot.

So, did it?

Spoiler alert: BLOODY HELL, YES!

Come on – beans, spill…

Well, they say a gentleman never tells, so for that reason – and because it’s part of a broader story I’ll touch upon when the Autocar Road Test Record is published later in 2025 – the details here are necessarily scant in nature.

It all revolves around the cumulative number used to identify Autocar’s Road Tests up this day. As it’s sequential, logic dictates it would have an origin point when the first of the genre was marked as #1.

Now, as anyone who’s conducted in-depth research on any subject will tell you, using historical records as a primary source material is fabulous where the opportunity exists, as it does in Autocar’s case with its online archive. It’s a resource I make frequent use of, particularly for pre-WW2 research as my personal archive of physical magazines only dates back to January 1945.

Those same people will also confirm that using records created in the time period being delved into won’t ensure that they’re glitch-free. We are all prone to creating and causing errors – mistakes borne of eagerness and enthusiasm, rather than malice or can’tbearsedery, so I expected to stumble upon occasional meanderings of the numerical sequence.

What I wasn’t expecting to find on my journey going backwards in time to Road Test #1 was what appeared in the 06 February 1931 issue. Or, more accurately, what didn’t appear. The Road Test in that issue – #618 of a Mathis coupé – was notable because the printed confirmation that this was indeed #618 was missing. As it was for #617, #616, #615…

Presumably you just counted back the unnumbered Road Tests from that point?

That was precisely my intention. After all, it wouldn’t be too difficult because at least once a year Autocar published comprehensive lists of cars it had tested over the previous twelve months. Or at least, it did from the early-1930s – remember I’m going backwards in time, so I soon appreciated that in the 1920s such lists were far more sporadic in nature and tended to cover shorter timescales.

However, hunting out the Road Tests was fairly straightforward, until 13 April 1928. That’s usually the date cited for the origin of this species, but my reverse count was not in the vicinity of #1.

Poring even more carefully over issues pre-dating that was revelatory. Road Tests were very much a present and established franchise within the magazine, it’s just that they were, well, road tests – that’s to say, they didn’t have a wholly standardised format or title, but they were there.

Well, this is surprisingly exciting! Were there 618 of them?

With even greater diligence than Sherlock Holmes cataloguing Victorian tyre tread patterns – come on, you know your The Adventure of the Priory School, don’t you? – I painstakingly recorded each and every pre-Road Test road test.

It was especially fascinating because pre-WW2 cars aren’t an area that particularly interested me beforehand, but witnessing the first, often primitive efforts of fledgling car manufacturers, some still with us, many long gone and a handful I could barely even recall hearing mention of before – Turcat-Méry, I’m especially looking at you – all undergoing rigorous review procedures confirmed that the aims of motoring journalists a century ago wasn’t at all dissimilar to those of today.

Sure, the language in the editorial sections dates it to an eye-widening degree, but the fundamentals of reporting performance, economy, handling and a sense of what each car was actually like to drive and use were omnipresent.

Yes, but were there 618 of them?

No. No there weren’t. I was convinced I must have missed a chunk of pre-Road Test road tests, but I couldn’t figure out how. After all, by this point I’ve already looked through two different archives – surely they couldn’t both have the same pages missing?

Whether it’s because I’m a tenacious git or due to the fact that when something doesn’t feel right, my mind works overtime… Okay, I’m an overthinker, I know it and can acknowledge it, and it sometimes has advantages – and this was one such case.

By counting the Road Tests, pre-Road Test road tests and adding to that quota any other piece of editorial which appeared in those occasional 1920s lists of cars recently tested, but which I’d previously discounted for not looking sufficiently Road Test-y yielded a total of…

No! Surely, it…? Really? Can it??

Six.

Hundred.

And.

Eighteen.

I was in such a state of disbelief that I looked behind me half-expecting to spot a tiny camera secreted away to livestream the scene of my bewilderment for other geeks’ collective amusement.

In fact, it was so convenient, that I put all of the research I’d done to one side and counted everything afresh and… 618.

BLOODY HELL!

I know, right? That kind of research-based tessellation is usually reserved for Hollywood movie scripts.

So what was Road Test #1?

I told you before, you’ll have to wait for the book to come out – I’m not giving away the best bits in the serialisation.

Primarily because the 1931 editorial commentary that introduced the running total at #619 wasn’t accompanied by a published list of everything which preceded it, I’ll never know if ‘my’ 618 correct. Nevertheless, I suspect there’s a strong likelihood that the methodology I employed accurately reflects that used 90-odd years ago by the unnamed tally-upper.

Perhaps an accurate record was created at the time for internal reference, but inevitably after all this time, various office moves and scores of editorial staff comings and goings, it’s likely long gone.

That said, I like to imagine that whoever was responsible for that 1931 count, perhaps out of a sense of mischief to thwart saddos like me in the future, gleefully disposed of their notes as soon as the announcement was published.

After all, plot twists ensure that not every tale has a happy ending.