Pushing Matchbox and Siku toy cars around the bedroom floor, building Tamiya and Hasegawa model kits, and reading piles of car magazines in various languages — often with a dictionary at hand to translate words that had not yet been taught at school. This is where it all began for Natan Tazelaar at a very young age.
His passion for cars and print media and the rise of the World Wide Web naturally led to studying journalism and taking his first steps into online publishing in the late 1990s. After a detour into advertising, Natan began working for a number of automotive publications in the Netherlands, initially as a staff writer and later as a freelancer. His work focused primarily on collector cars, prototypes and concept cars, as well as low-volume and limited-production models.
His network gradually expanded to include a growing number of international publications. Along the way, however, he came to realise that the only way to write about the cars he truly loved was to create a publication of his own. Motorcar Journal was the natural progression and it became a publication built around a simple philosophy: “For the sake of driving.”
Natan was a long-standing judge for the International Engine + Powertrain of the Year Awards. Besides being a member of the international judging panel for the Concours d’Elegance at Wheels Mariënwaerdt, he is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers and the Society of Automotive Historians. As a member of the Texas Automotive Writers Association, his work has received multiple awards in the organisation’s annual Excellence in Craft Competition.
