Driving Enthusiast welcomes Brett Davis this week as the new owner and managing editor. Brett Davis was the editor and co-founder of PerformanceDrive and its PDriveTV YouTube channel.
Davis founded PerformanceDrive back in 2011 with media specialist Josh Bennis. They built up the website and brand from scratch, including the YouTube channel which now has over 160,000 subscribers. It was then sold to Eclipx Group in 2015, where Davis remained as managing editor.
With Davis joining Driving Enthusiast, fans of the old PDriveTV channel will be happy to hear his popular performance test videos will continue right here on the official Driving Enthusiast YouTube channel. We’re aiming to revise the video layout and incorporate more testing parameters going forward, as well as introduce lots of other cool new video styles and content.
Davis started his career as a motor mechanic because he enjoyed working on his first love, a 1971 Datsun 1600. With help from his brother, the Datto was fitted with a 2.4-litre ‘stroker’ engine conversion based on the L20B, breathing through twin 45mm side-draught Webers.
After getting tired of working on customer cars and constantly reading car magazines during his lunch breaks, Davis then decided to head to university to earn a degree in journalism and pursue a new passion in reporting car news and vehicle testing.
His first job was an editorial assistant at Top Gear Australia magazine back in 2008, and then moved to Express Publications to write for a number of titles including Zoom magazine and Extreme Performance. His first gig with the online automotive media landscape was with CarAdvice, as a staff news journalist. Following a two-year stint, PerformanceDrive was born.
Joining Driving Enthusiast with Josh Bennis, are former PerformanceDrive contributors Mitchell Jones and Mark Davis. Stay tuned as we build up this brand with lots of cool content in the coming weeks. We are also very open to feedback and suggestions, so please feel free to comment below.
