We’ve seen car magazine The Road Rat quietly build a loyal readership since it launched in 2018. As its 22nd issue arrives in shops, we wanted to find out more.

Peter Grunert joined the magazine as editor in 2020, after roles as deputy editor at BBC Top Gear magazine and helping establish the Top Gear brand in India. He describes editing The Road Rat as his dream job, and says, ‘Our business has matured brilliantly over the past couple of years—everything has the right momentum.’ He tells us more as he shares his working week.


What are you doing this Monday morning?
Today is a pivotal one, when I lock in 90 per cent of the contents for our next edition. This moment has been months in the making, the culmination of a great many conversations with representatives of car brands, dealers, collectors, archives, The Road Rat’s contributors and our owners. We have some hugely ambitious plans for this one and much herding of kittens to follow if we’re to nail our deadline.

Describe your work environment

Today I’m working from home in Battersea, with our poodle Kitty keeping my feet warm under the desk. The Road Rat team is scattered around the country but meets once a week in a flexi office in St James’s. I do all I can to see contacts in person. Just in the past week I’ve been to events and planning meetings in rural Hampshire, Battersea Park, Selfridges and the Peninsula hotel. We have a large and exceptionally friendly community of classic car owners here in London and I often head to ‘cars and coffee’ meets in my green seventies Mercedes (above)—story ideas for our magazine often emerge from those.

Which magazine do you first remember? 
When I was a very young kid my parents had the Disney comic delivered for me. By accident one week the newsagent sent over a copy of 2000AD instead, a world of post-nuclear zombies, aliens, robo-dinosaurs and Judge Dredd. I never looked back…

Aside from yours, what’s your favourite magazine/zine?
Even though newsstand car magazines are sadly too often a shadow of their former selves, I still try to keep up with most of them. I have eclectic tastes – copies of GQ, The World of Interiors and Country Life are alongside me in my office right now, plus a few gorgeous vintage car brochures. 

The magazine I’ve most taken inspiration from in recent times is Cabana, a weighty independent Italian interiors magazine that comes with a piece of fabric as the cover. That gave me an idea when we recently worked on The Road Rat edition 21, ‘A Love Letter to Formula One’, which celebrated 75 years of the F1 World Championship. We thought we’d trial offering a limited edition version wrapped in Nomex, the fire-proof fabric used to make F1 drivers’ race suits.

This was quilted and embroidered with logo patches of the highest quality (43,000 stitches per cover!) by a company called Fyshe. With a cover price of £125 where a regular edition is £21, the 75 special edition covers sold out within 18 minutes of us dropping the link to buy them in our weekly newsletter.

What other piece of media would you recommend?
I find it meditative to dip into the 80-year ‘Desert Island Discs’ back catalogue while out dog walking and also listen to car podcasts: Chris Harris and Friends from the UK and ‘Spike’s Car Radio’ from the US. The latter often has Jerry Seinfeld on as a guest host, who occasionally gives The Road Rat a mention—he’s quite a fan, and an astute collector of classic Porsches.

Describe The Road Rat in three words
Handsome, charismatic, collectible.


Describe the scope of the magazine
We have relatively timeless generalised editions intermingled with themed editions. Those themes help illustrate both how broad and deep our focus can be. Edition 13, ‘Norman Foster on Cars’, was co-curated with the legendary architect and covered the relationship between cars, art and architecture. Edition 17, ‘Tales from Japan’ explored how the culture and craft of Japan have influenced the unique variety of cars produced there. 

Earlier this month we held a well over-subscribed launch party at The Devonshire in Soho for our latest, Edition 22, ‘The Nineties Renaissance’, which looked at the shift from analogue to digital in the nineties—a decade as magnetic for target readers in their twenties as those in their fifties. We just released a short behind-the-scenes film about it.


The magazine has backing from a member of one of the world’s most successful rock bands, but does The Road Rat need to stand alone as a business?
The Road Rat has three owners including Guy Berryman, the bass player from Coldplay. Each of the owners is passionate and knowledgeable about our subject matter. Our business has matured brilliantly over the past couple of years—everything has the right momentum. Nine of the past ten editions have seen their print runs averaging 10,000 copies sell out, we have built a cult following, and some frankly transformative brand partnerships are already in place for the year ahead. Beautifully crafted, luxurious independent magazines like ours are proving more viable—and more relevant—than ever before.



What is it about cars that continues to captivate people, way beyond their basic function of transport?
Cars still symbolise so many different things to different people: charisma, beauty, craft, nostalgia, technological advancement, competition, exhilaration, community, and the endless possibilities of the open road.


Show us one spread that sums up how the magazine works 
I’m going to take liberties here and share three related spreads, all from the same edition, ‘Tales from Japan’. This was published in the summer of 2024, at a time when we took a fresh look at the business. This edition blended my interests in cars, design and travel. 

The first spread shows a Nissan R35 GT-R we photographed outside a ramen shop in Shinjuku, Tokyo – this was from a feature about the origins of the GT-R, a sports car nicknamed ‘Obakemono’, ‘the monster’. The second shows a tiny ‘kei’ car outside a house in Shizuoka—I just love how the boxy, upright car and home have similar characteristics, with such cartoonish faces. The last spread shows a haiku we commissioned to open the edition—in the end 14 different experts were consulted to make sure we correctly wrote the haiku and expressed it in the calligraphy alongside, which says a lot about the creative care that goes into this project. ‘Tales from Japan’ became our first edition of The Road Rat  to sell out and I now regularly spot copies trading for over £200 on eBay.


What has publishing the magazine taught you that may be helpful to anyone else planning to launch one?
Be resilient, incredibly hard working, passionate, authentic and, above all, from my experience, diplomatic. A shared goodwill for your magazine between readers, investors, commercial partners and suppliers counts for so much.

What are you most looking forward to this coming week?
Next in line is some prototype development for an ultra limited edition cover planned for Edition 22 (already looking beyond exciting), then I’m off to meet friends/colleagues/contacts at the Rétromobile indoor classic car show in Paris—always a treat.

Art direction Sam Walton and Jasper van den Bosch

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