Tall, sporting long flowing locks and beard, monocle, a wide-brimmed hat and with a Black Russian always in his cigarette holder, Leonard Setright, who has died of cancer aged 74, presented an image which set him apart from a new wave of motoring journalists that emerged during the 1970s. But it was not only his visual persona that distinguished him. LJK Setright, as he bylined himself, was a writer whose intellectual rigour was underpinned by an exhaustive knowledge of both engineering and classical culture. He deployed both to impress - if not bamboozle - his audiences in such magazines as Car and Bike.
Car's youthful founding editor, Doug Blain, was somewhat bemused by the first piece Setright submitted - on aeroflow dynamics - in 1970, but was tickled by its arch prose and abundant self-confidence. So Setright joined a triumvirate of uniformly audacious columnists who became, in his case for more than three decades, synonymous with the magazine. Setright soon established himself as an idiosyncratic, even mischievous writer - he peppered his copy with Latin quotations and once referred to feet as "bicrural extremities" - but his opinions betrayed an authority that few dared challenge and many envied. His engineering interests led to many influential books, including Some Unusual Engines (1975), two volumes on the expensive and, of course, eccentric Bristol marque (1974 and 1998) and With Flying Colours (1987).
Setright was born in London, the son of Australian émigrés. His mother Lena was a fashion buyer and his father Henry an engineer, who invented the Setright rotary bus ticket machine and the Tote betting system. Setright's passion for all things mechanical stemmed from that childhood "when engineers were worshiped". He was educated at Southgate county school in Winchmore Hill where he developed an penchant for music and unconventional attire. An accomplished clarinet player, he joined Ray Potter's five-piece jazz band, and when Setright acquired his first car, a yellow 1920s Citroën Cloverleaf, he and Potter regularly visited the Goodwood racing circuit, igniting another enduring enthusiasm for the deerstalker-capped teenager.
Setright studied law at London University but hated it as a profession. Gaining great satisfaction but little income as a classical musician - he co-founded the Philharmonia Chorus in 1957 - he decided instead to pursue journalism and in 1960 joined the leading contemporary magazine, Machine Age, eventually becoming its editor. Then, in 1965, he took a job in public relations for the Firestone Tyre Company - in later life he was to be quietly involved in the development of radial tyres at Pirelli.
He won the Gwen Salmon Trophy for automotive photography and became a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in 1969, and joined the Institute of Rubber Industries in 1970. But it was at Car that he found a natural home for his talents. Setright was soon testing cars and motorcycles, as well as entertainingly dissecting the finer points of their design technology and lambasting the horrors of public transport or the bogus economics of speed limits.
As a driver, Setright was formidably fast to the point where at press launches he was usually given a vehicle of his own rather than have anyone else share one with him.
As Bike's callow founding editor, I sought him as a columnist in 1973, and while superficially aloof, he proved a kindly, assiduously polite, even shy man. However when fuelled with his favourite vintage champagnes, he was known to pick up a clarinet and play dazzling solos with the hotel bands that serenaded journalists on press junkets.
In 1980 tragedy struck. His first wife, Christine, a professional opera singer, drove one of his beloved Bristols up to Scotland and committed suicide. Setright, seeking an abrupt change of life, moved to America, where a visit to a Lubavitch community in Texas reaffirmed his Judaism. Embracing a devout orthodoxy with his usual studious zeal, he became something of an expert on schechitah, or ritual slaughter.
But, inevitably, he returned to journalism. His last book Drive On! (2003) is a fascinating account of the relationship between cars and social development, and it is ironic that in view of what killed him, one of his last essays eloquently railed against manufacturers that now offer non-smoking cars. "It is refreshing," he concluded, "that there remain stalwarts for whom driving and smoking - two of the greatest pleasure known to man - are not to be separated."
He is survived by his second wife Helen, and daughters Hilary and Anthea.
· Leonard John Kensell Setright, writer and musician, born August 10 1931; died September 7 2005