Iain Ayre was born in Glasgow in the 1950s, and has a low boredom threshold and a dark and surreal sense of humour. When his school saw a limited future for him as a schoolboy, he left with alacrity, to find a sympathetic coterie of stoned deadbeats at Harrow Tech, amongst which were a couple of the major future shapers of TV culture in the UK. Reluctant to leave this entertaining milieu, he became President of the Students' Union, revivified Harrow Tech as a London music venue and had an interesting chat about the concept of white reggae with drummer Stuart Copeland, whose band later did quite well.
Finally leaving Harrow with minimal qualifications and a moustache, he gave adulthood a try, until the looming threat of a semi in Pinner set off the alarm bells and he evaded the issue by taking a teaching degree. Discovering that children were ghastly, he abandoned teaching and took up fashion photography, specialising in test shots for model agencies and occasionally getting paid for them. Photography developed into design, commercial newspaper cartoons and copywriting, and the world of advertising had an opening for a semi-talented waster. Advertising was fun and remained interesting for more than a decade, culminating in the dramatic success and equally dramatic failure of Ayre Lindsay Wise Advertising Ltd, during the short life of which which Iain lived in some splendour aboard a yacht in Brighton Marina. Homeless and boatless, broke but unbroken, Iain returned to London. Win some, lose some. The climb up advertising's slippery ladder peaked with a writing job at J. Walter Thompson, but even JWT suffered in the depression of the time.
Advertising was dead in the water, so Iain jumped ship and began writing increasingly manic and disconnected articles in the specialist car press. Nobody sued: this encouraged him to continue, and he wrote articles for Classic Cars, Mini magazines, Fast Ford and the kitcar magazines. He launch-edited Car Builder magazine, which was a notable failure, and then Classic Ford, which was a notable success.
He currently writes for Classic Cars, Mini Magazine, MG Enthusiast, Triumph World, Kitcar UK, Kit Car Builder USA, Ultra VW and others.
Books so far include Cobra Classics; Cobra Replicas; TVR- Muscle and Curves; Maserati Heritage; Ferrari 512TR; Classic Sports Cars; TVR-all the cars; The Kit Car Manual (2 editions); The Affordable Porsche; Mad Minis; and Dinner with Rover, a book about gourmet dog food written with his wife, author and artist Helena Paton-Ayre. The writing of that book was supervised and edited by their rude rescue Chihuahua, Rambo.
Currently in pre-production is Cobra Replicas, an Essential Buyer's Guide for Veloce Publishing.
Books currently brewing up include A Dog's Dinner; The Affordable Cobra; The Bumper Mini Book for Boys and Girls.
When not clickclicking away on a Mac, Iain is building a barn-find Mini Marcos, restoring the wreckage of a 1950 Rolls- Royce Silver Wraith and developing a lightweight, turbocharged, propane-fuelled, dangerously fast Cobra lookalike.