Cobus F. Potgieter

Cobus has never been able to keep his car opinions to himself and at age 12, he expressed them in no uncertain terms to a certain motoring magazine’s editor. It was the first of many times he would be published and he even won a car in a TV scriptwriting competition.

He’s sought to improve his driving skills ever since he spectacularly spun out his parents’ 1982 VW Jetta on a farm road when he was 13 - the recollection of which still elicits the odd twitch. Many advanced driving courses followed and so too did a throng of weird, left-field ’80s and ’90s bangers that broke down all the time but were at least not ‘mainstream’ - a word he detests and will annoyingly remind you about ad nauseam.

A prolonged love affair with the bullet-proof and tunable Buick pushrod V6 under the hood of one of those cars - and a rocky relationship with an Australian Ford Falcon - cemented his love for six-cylinder cars that can be steered by the rear wheels.

But his latest obsession is the less-is-more school of thought, which means a lightweight, underpowered hatchback that makes up for what it lacks in speed with handling talent. Fun doesn’t require a huge engine if you can wring that final ounce of power from a small, agile package to keep the momentum going as you string together a series of bends on your favorite mountain pass.

Cobus joined the CarBuzz team in 2021 and puts his 25 years in public relations, editing, copywriting, and journalism to good use to write about an obsession that started when he first upended his stroller as a baby to play with its wheels.