A talk with Josh Paul and David Gray, the men behind Driver's Journal

The Red Bull mechanics change the tires on Checo Perez’s car during a late FP2 at the US Grand Prix. Photo: Josh Paul

A conversation with Josh Paul and David Gray on design, photography and the power and magic of print magazines.

Photography: Josh Paul + David Gray
Words: Mike Blanchard

 One of the great truisms in life is that one thing leads to another. The magazine Driver’s Journal is a classic case of this phenomenon. Driver’s Journal never would have come about but for the existence of photographer Josh Paul’s fantastic Formula One magazine Lollipop (of which there is a review in the Reviews section of Rust).

 Both magazines are a collaboration between Paul and the designer and photographer David Gray. Gray, a fan of Rust Magazine (speaking of one thing leading to another), reached out and turned us on to the Driver’s Journal and subsequently sent us a copy of the recently published Luftgekühlt issue. The magazine, which weighs three pounds and contains mostly photography, is so beautiful and rich that it took a week of just looking at it to digest it properly. And even then we are still finding details that we missed.

 Luftgekühlt (German for air cooled) is a gathering of Porsche organized by the photographer and filmmaker Jeff Zwart and Porsche factory racing driver Patrick Long. It has grown from a small cars and coffee thing in Southern California to be a sell-out event and one of the highlights of the calendar for the Porsche owner and enthusiast. Drawing cars from all over the world, Luft features everything from state-of-the-art race cars and mega-buck historic examples to dailydrivers that live in suburban garages and take the kids to school.

Driver’s Journal is a publication of the energy giant Exxon Mobil’s subsidiary Mobil 1, which, as you might imagine, has its fingers in all sorts of motorsports pies. Because the magazine has but one backer, there are no ads to disrupt the flow and spell cast by the images. The magazine is a pure exercise in Journalism, photography and design. It is almost a coffee-table book. An absolute luxury in the publishing world.

The second issue of *Driver’s Journal* documenting the Porsche gathering Luftgekühlt has become a sought-after collector’s item already. The first issue covered Formula One. Photo: David Gray

 The snag is that Driver’s Journal is not available on any newsstand. You can’t buy it. It’s like the famous Pirelli calendars. It’s available to those in the know and clients of Mobil 1. The publication run is roughly 1,200 copies. Recently, when 250 copies of the Luftgekühlt issue were given away online, they were snapped up in seconds with over 10,000 people trying to snag a copy. And as you can imagine, given the opportunism rampant in the world, they soon began appearing on Ebay for hundreds of dollars.

The Driver’s Journal project started out as a proposal for four issues, but as things have progressed it looks like there might end up being six issues of the magazine.

Each issue of the magazine is solely dedicated to one aspect of the motoring world. So far they have covered Formula One and Luftgekühlt, with issues featuring Pike’s Peak, NASCAR, ice racing and dirt-track racing provisionally in the cards, but there is much yet to be determined.

 Josh Paul and David Gray are two of the most accomplished practitioners of the slightly moribund art of the print magazine. Both are great photographers and camera nuts. Paul uses a 100-year-old, large-format Graflex camera with a barrel lens, which he has modified to produce a unique image. He has been known to do magazine shoots with an old Rolleiflex medium-format camera or a Holga plastic camera.

 Gray, in addition to being an accomplished book and magazine designer, is also an aficionado of vintage prime film camera lenses, which he mounts on modern digital cameras to produce images that are dripping with character and feel that modern lenses are not able to reproduce.

 For us to even get a copy of Driver’s Journal was a coup, but we had the great opportunity to talk with Paul and Gray about magazines, photography and design.

RUST How did this come about? What was the genesis of Driver’s Journal?

 Josh Paul. “This is so funny. In Formula One I came to a race and I had a raging headache and just dehydrated and hot sun and three or four days of shooting. I popped into Red Bull to grab a water and I saw a couple guys and asked if they had like, an Advil. And one of the guys said, ‘Come to the garage, I’ll find you one.’ So I went into the Red Bull garage. … One of the guys was an oil test person for Mobil 1. So they’re doing these tiny samples sending electronic sparks through the oil to see the opacity of the oil and see the density of it and see how it’s wearing.

 “He gives me two aspirin and we become buddies and I start seeing this guy every race. A few months later he says, ‘Hey, why don’t we publish some of your pictures at Mobil 1? We’ll take them to the office to show them around and see what they think.’ So he paid me (for) these few images of the Red Bull car and then Covid hit. And I took a break, like the rest of us. When I came back my friend had been replaced and as I was heading back to the racing, 2022, kind of thinking, ‘Is this futile? Does it make sense to keep making Lollipop? It’s expensive.’ It didn’t have the crowd, I mean, Drive To Survive was bringing the crowd but nobody could come.

A track official keeps an eye on a pack of Super Stock cars sliding through a corner. There are plans for *Driver’s Journal* to cover dirt-track racing in a future issue, maybe. Photo: Josh Paul

 “I was trying to think, ‘What am I going to do?’ And as usual, the phone rings. Literally the phone rang half an hour later. The new guy from Mobil 1 said, ‘Hey, it’s Ryan from Mobile, are you the guy who shot these pictures?’ He invited me to come to Pike’s Peak with him. And basically it turns out they were kind of feeling me out and seeing what I was like.

 “I shot Pike’s but it really wasn’t an official shoot. Just kind of be there at the start/finish. And from that long weekend they proposed that we make a new magazine for Mobil 1 based on Lollipop. And what he wanted to do was have us cover four genres of racing. Flesh out like one NASCAR race, a little bit of Pike’s, F1 and then he sent me to dirt racing, which I had never been to.

 “And they wanted like a 50-page prototype, basically. And then that was the start. The first one was just Formula One based on Max and Red Bull.”

 RUST So Luftgekühlt is the second issue? And then NASCAR and then ice racing?

 Josh Paul. “They’ve been shifting around a bit. We don’t know. NASCAR may go to next year because Mobil 1 just announced they’re sponsoring the Toyota team. They have four new drivers. And the way NASCAR is they will basically wrap different cars per race, then one driver of the four will have just the white Mobil 1 uniform. So I will probably attend a handful of races when there is different drivers just to mix it up.”

 RUST Are the magazines going out to Mobil 1 clients like the Pirelli calendars used to?

 Josh Paul. “They’ve started a kind of lotto. So online at driversjournal.com you can apply to win one and they’re all free.”

Josh Paul uses as 100-year-old Graflex large-format camera for a lot of his work. It makes images that are rich with atmosphere and emotion. The fact that the image is slightly out of focus does not diminish its power, nor does it impede the image’s ability to tell a compelling story.

 David Gray. “There was a sudden love of the way things used to be, now that most magazines have gone. And so Mobil 1 had this lovely idea that it wouldn’t be newsstand, it wouldn’t be many that they’d make. We were making maybe 1,000 to 1,200 of each copy. And the only way to get them was either word of mouth or an online giveaway, and it’s been finessed because the Luft issue on the 12th of December at 12:12 pm they put 250 on the website to be given away to the first 250 people to log on and, although it sounds awfully old-fashioned, they had about 10,000 people instantly come on and the site crashed.

 “I was, of course, looking on Ebay and they were popping up for like $135, $150. It’s very much word of mouth. It’s such a change from the magazines that maybe we all worked in where they have maybe 100,000 newsstand copies. This is very much people who know people. People like us, I guess.”

 Josh Paul. “They want to do something analog and cool. And luckily our client, he’s very young, he loves print, he loves cameras.

 “There’s been a lot of double exposures with my Graflex. It’s getting old and it can't really be repaired any more. I’ve shot about 8,000 frames in the last 10 years so the mirror doesn’t return. I can shoot a frame and it doesn’t pull the mirror back. So now I have to put the dark slide back in and pull the mirror back. Changing my habits. You know how this works. It’s so mechanical.

 “They (Mobil 1) have embraced the medium the way David and I do. You know old photographs with thumbprints on and handwritten numbers on them for cataloging. And we’re just leaving all that on there. … We printed a handful of double exposures for NASCAR. I’m going to shoot Polaroids with an old 110B camera. I've got about 20 packs of that film so we're going to take it out in the snow and see how it looks.

 “I see your Rolleiflex shirt. (Ed.: I was wearing a Rolleiflex shirt during the interview.) I’ve shot Rollei for over 20 years. It’s the best icebreaker camera and most beautiful camera ever made. I took a Rolleiflex to Cuba in 2002 and I took 300 rolls of film. And I was invited into dozens of homes because they wanted to show me their Yashica, their Yashicaflex, you know. They would say, ‘I have one of those but I can’t get film.’ So occasionally I would give out a roll of film knowing they would never be able to get it developed. But having a coffee and sitting and learning Spanish in Cuba in someone's living room was amazing and it was all due to that camera.”

 David Gray. “I also notice that if I’m at an event and Josh has got the Graflex out people are following him about. Other photographers and fans are following him about. They’re waiting for something to happen. Although it’s quite navel-gazing I have pictures of Josh having set up a shot and if you pan left behind him there are 20 other guys with cameras, right behind him. I don’t know if they’re trying to photograph Josh or trying to photograph over his shoulder, but he doesn’t get left alone with that.

 “There is this fascination and you can see it in peoples’ faces. When I’m seeing Josh’s shots for the first time, as a designer, there’s a lot of people, especially in F1, who are maybe not the most outgoing or cheerful, and they are quite animated. They want to have their pictures taken and they want to take pictures with that (the Graflex) and it’s not many people who get that. You know that. I mean all the old stuff. It’s a conversation point.”

 RUST Well it has a different look and it’s more reminiscent of the photos of someone like Jesse Alexander. You get something different and I think even the most jaded people in motorsports are romantic about that.

 David Gray. “It is because there’s not as much of it. I love digital and social media. I love the digital age we live in. But when you're only seeing something that’s two inches wide, people usually look at those things for a moment.

 “Having worked for many magazines for years where there was somebody at some level saying, ‘I don’t get this.’ We are in a pretty amazing zone at the moment. We’ve not had that once. We’ve not had any shots questioned, have we?”

 Josh Paul. “No, It’s one of those lucky things. They’re embracing our joy and it’s fun. It’s a blast.”

 David Gray. “The next issue is going to be Pike’s Peak because the order’s shifted. So we both attended Pike’s Peak last summer.”

 Josh Paul. “I highly recommend getting there if you can get yourself there at some point. It’s a magical race.

 “It’s a lot of families. It’s a lot of dudes with a lawn chair and a 12-pack. By the hundreds. It feels like California. You are on the side of the road, you’re having a good time and cars go by but you watch them sometimes. It’s funny the way NASCAR and Pike’s felt … brought me back to my ‘70s childhood because I’m into F1 which is so uptight. You can get close but you can’t see much of the car. You have like Jeff Zwart, his car disassembled with like five guys working on it next to you. And then you have two guys who built a kind of hot rod next to Jeff and then there’s an Alpine factory team with a bunch of French mechanics.

Sunrise at Pike’s Peak and a Porsche climbs into the Devil’s Playground. Photo: Josh Paul

 “It’s this awesome mix. On the side of the road with wrenches. There’s no electronic shit that I saw. It felt great.”

 David Gray. “People were quite lovely. I met a couple of guys, they were behind one of the oldest hill climbs in the U.S. It might have been Tennessee, I can’t remember. Their absolute mission in life is to revitalize hillclimbing. They were there having an absolute blast. …So Pike’s will be our next issue. It’s not that we don’t know but because it’s a new magazine things can be quite fluid. So we're used to that from our background. Things can change at quite short notice.”

 Josh Paul. “We spent November-December designing and putting together the NASCAR issue. That was a tough assignment for me because I’m not a NASCAR fan. And I was heading from New York.

 “The first race was North Carolina, Talladega, and just culturally, I was wearing these fitted clothes and you don’t fit in. It’s cargo shorts, a lot of beer and a lot of eagle shirts and Trump stuff, 100 percent of it. Ten feet (away) it’s journalists and teams and very high-tech but outside it’s maybe 100,000 hardcore fans. Culturally it was difficult and I was by myself so I didn’t have anyone to have my back. So I wore my photo vest the entire time just to be an official part of the race so I wasn’t singled out for any reason.

 “I wasn’t in danger but definitely out of my comfort zone. I watched NASCAR as a kid. I was trying to tap into that kind of ‘70s vibe again. I shot a lot of lens flare. Shot into the sun as much as I could and tried to bring a lot of that ‘70s feel.

Sun and speed mix together at a NASCAR race, Darlington, North Carolina. Photo: Josh Paul

 “I was trying to bring that family feel that NASCAR clearly has. It’s all families. It’s tailgating parties. It’s like a college football game. I started liking it actually, which was good.”

 David Gray. “Well you captured that. I’m obviously not American, but it made NASCAR look the way I always imagined it would have looked. I’d only seen it on TV when I was a kid. When you’re in love with what a sport can be you can make it into that thing, so Josh’s depictions of NASCAR were absolutely what the childhood me would have thought it was. It was different from anything I grew up with and it looks quite lovely.”

 Josh Paul. “I hope we can stick to that look when we do the final issue. Also, one thing about motorsport, you are obviously into cameras and lenses like we are. I shot the last two years with a Holga camera. Like 95 percent of what I shot was with just the plastic lens. So it has a natural vignette. That’s why my color shots are soft. But when I was shooting NASCAR I shot with that lens and I found a lens in my drawer. It’s a 70-300 autofocus lens but the autofocus takes about five seconds. The glass and the plastic in those lenses gives it that ‘70s look.

 “What I found in F1 is people are so into tech, so they got the latest, so it’s mirrorless, everyone has a 600 (mm lens) at all times. Maybe a 24-70 and a 600. Always a 600. So when you shoot that way you’re cropping out the environment 100 percent. You don’t know if you’re in Talladega, North Carolina, or Darlington or Miami. And the same in F1. For the most part you don’t know if you’re in Germany, Hungary or wherever you are. It’s just a tight shot of the Ferrari or whatever it is. So I try to do the opposite and try to do environmental landscapes where the car is the subject. But it’s really about the space that comes from being a travel photographer before this. You’re bringing the place where you are. Whatever happens is kind of secondary.”

 RUST You were talking about how the event and the look of the event influence the design of the magazine. Can you talk about how the shots from Pike’s Peak are going to influence that issue of the magazine?

 David Gray. “We just looked at all the images again. I find, and Josh may feel a little different, but I think we both feel that you don’t look at the stuff you shot for a little while. I’m just starting to sit down with all the Light Room folders. It (image selection) will be driven not by my expectations but by what I feel.

 “Pike’s is unusual because there’s a lot of portraiture. The top of the mountain is so different from the bottom. When Josh and I shot we didn’t see each other on the main race day. He was up at the top about 15,000 feet, below freezing, and I was down with the mechanics at the start line at about 8,000 feet.

 “Of all the events Luft was entirely daylight … but Pikes started off with us in the rain and dark and the cold. Josh’s shots look like a moonscape to some extent.

“At the end Josh goes over everything and gives it a consistent color palette. Because we are shooting with different lenses, different cameras, different times of day, different conditions. We don’t want everything to feel the same but it has to feel consistent.

The Hoonigan Porsche at the Pike’s Peak hillclimb. Photo: David Gray

 “We keep our typographic feel. There’s not that much type in it but we use a very condensed typeface. So F1 was a very lightweight version of that. Luft was still condensed. NASCAR was set up with, I hate to use the word masculine, but it was a more masculine typeface. Pike’s will be a mixture, I don’t have it in my head. We bounce things back and forth where Josh tends to get no peace from me when we’re in the design stage. I will be sharing layouts as we go along because otherwise I’m working in a vacuum.”

 Josh Paul. “Dave and I have talked about using numbers because Pike’s is all about stats. So it’s timing, order and how many times you’ve raced it. It could be a beautiful issue with just numbers…But sometimes that doesn’t make sense to other people.”

 David Gray. “I do believe that good design is invisible, up to a certain point.”

RUST Good design is emotional. I think you see it on an emotional level. How you feel what you are looking at.

 David Gray. “Yea, I’ve put a lot of thought into that…I’ve read a lot about how people scan typefaces and how they intuitively pick up on them. Before you’ve even read the words you’ve got a certain feeling from the type face. So the Luftgekühlt issue, it’s Luftgekühlt over two pages. It’s merely as a pause for people to get their breath and think: ‘this is where I am.’

 “We’re not yet decided on the content for the Pike’s Peak issue. But because Pike’s is not entirely consistently grounded anyway. You know, you’ve got cars that the guy down the mountain just got up that morning and raced his car

 “Driver’s Journal goes to hundreds or people who have never heard of the event that’s inside it. So we have to be inclusive enough that the design has to pull you in.

 “We always have a set-to with the client where it’s me sharing a pdf and it's always nice but just never know. If I send something to Josh that’s been designed and he doesn’t like it I say, “you don’t have to say why you don’t like it. If it affects you in a visceral level that’s all I need to know.”

Formula One World Champion Max Verstappen at the Mexican Grand Prix. Photo: Josh Paul

 Josh Paul. ‘I have to say I love vulnerability. I don’t know when it happened with me but I like the risk of it and I like presenting something. And I don’t take anything personally. Like all of us have enough experience. Shouldn’t we know what’s good and what’s bad? So I don’t try to put something there that’s not good.”

 RUST One of the nice things about the Driver’s Journal is that it’s a pure thing. It doesn’t have advertising. It’s this singular, continued vision throughout the whole thing. It’s unified.

 David Gray. Laughing “It’s an absolute delight. I’m shooting for Driver’s Journal because Josh’s vision and open mindedness extended that invite. I was blissfully happy just designing and because of Josh’s vision and the evolution of the magazine we are now hitched.”

 Josh Paul. “I love that about photography. That you can be standing side by side with someone, same equipment, same situation and it’s a completely different image. Might be f-stop, might be shutter speed, might be someone standing on a step ladder. It’s completely night and day.”

 RUST It might be those physical things but it could also be the paintings you’ve looked at and the books that you’ve read.”

 Josh Paul. “Absolutely, 100 percent. When I moved to New York I would go to museums once a week. And I also had a membership to MOMA, I would look at sculpture and painting. I knew the photographers it was ok to see. I would look at Robert Frank or some iconic shot. But it was always painting and the more abstract expression for the most part. And sculpture Giacometti, Calder I was always drawn to the same pieces.

 “And I think of Giacometti quite a bit when I’m trying to get people moving through my frames. That forward bit of motion. I’ll wait for a shot. I’ll wait quite a bit of time for a shot.

“I love the compulsion of photography. When I first moved to New York I just didn’t know anybody and I would just walk. I would go to Central Park and I would be eight blocks East and down, whatever, because something drew you that way.”

 David Gray. “How many hours did we shoot at Pikes? 14 hours a day? And Luft was the same. I only stopped when I ran out of batteries in the end. You can’t finish for the day when there is stuff going on. We both have that compulsion… At Luft Josh would say to me, ‘just go and do your thing.’

“Josh had all these people to meet. People to photograph. Josh had times of the day in which we needed these shots to happen that you were doing.”

 Josh Paul. “I was changing film in the back of a rental car with a tent, those changing bags. It was a nightmare…Trying to keep track of exposed film, unexposed film, in the parking lot at Luft. It’s a distraction. That’s when you get thumb prints and all that stuff.”

The Hoonigan Porsche again. This time center stage at Luftgekühlt. The car was one of the late Ken Block’s fire breathing machines. A 1,400 horse power mid-engined rocket ship. Photo: David Gray

David Gray. “While Josh was doing that I had staked out; at Mare Island there is only one way out but there are four ways to get to that one way out. And I picked a warehouse wall and I swear I stood for the first hour and I could hear the noise of cars passing on the ways parallel to me. I was about to start that thing of running from one to the other, but I stuck with it. And sticking with it I finally got a batch of cars that passed where I was standing.

 “But I had that thing of what am I missing why can I hear all those cars. But you can only run about so much.

 RUST That’s the compulsion of Journalism. You always come back wondering what did I miss?

 David Gray. Laughing “Yea, what did I not get. But I always say to Josh, I always say to anyone I’ve worked with, ’The reader doesn’t know what you didn’t get.’ They will only see what you present.”

 Josh Paul. “Also, for me to shoot Formula One, I knew there would be another race a week and a half later. So I could spend more time in the garage or on track or somewhere. These events are finite so it’s a ticking clock. We’re trying to make a 200 page magazine with two days of shooting more or less.

 “So when I saw his film I didn’t take any of the same shots he took. I didn’t see any of the same shots he took. We were in the same spot but his images didn’t just appeal to me in the sense that ‘ Oh I’ll shoot the numbers or the doors or the dogs. I was too focused trying to find minimalism in this pretty busy crowded event. A lot of it was waiting for the crowd to clear out so I could have the car to myself.

 “I was really pleasantly surprised. I loved what David contributed to it because I didn’t see it. You really brought the life, and the fun, and just a good time in California, with the kids and dogs.”

 RUST I really enjoyed that part of the magazine.

 David Gray. “Because Josh is shooting the stuff that defines the event I have the freedom to be following someone.”

 Josh Paul. “It was the one shot of the little girl looking at herself in the mirror.”

 RUST That’s one of my favorite shots

 Josh Paul. “Gorgeous shot right? It’s beautiful. Was just like, it has to be in it. Love that shot. Good job David.”

 David Gray. “Well Josh saved it. She wasn’t sharp. She was almost sharp but not sharp.”

 Josh Paul. Laughing “Well I have ideas about sharp, as you know. I did a couple passes on the eyes with the sharpen tool. Not a lot, just to give it a little contrast.”

Porsche runs in the family. Photo: David Gray

David Gray. “Luft was a big success because of Josh. We were there early before any access was allowed, and Josh stopped a car and just started chatting to a guy who was directing cars.”

Josh Paul. “We got up early, drove to the location and went for a hike … and were looking for where to park, basically. And I saw a guy in a truck … and we said, well, ‘Where is the event?’ He said, ‘You guys have the pass so you’re gonna park over there.’

 “So David and I drove over there … and there were literally dozens of Porsches being unloaded from semis and being stored in this warehouse covered in their hair nets that fit the car. These clear plastic bags. And of course we’re like, ‘Holy shit!’ We grabbed the cameras and started shooting.

 “We got kicked out in about 45 minutes. But what’s funny is I would say the majority of the foundation shots of Luft were shot in that hour or two that we just happened to get really really lucky, right place, right time, and took our time to take those pictures. And they’re my favorite shots.

 “We got kicked out of the warehouse because these are privately owned cars and they’re worth millions of dollars. And you kind of forget, but it’s the history of the race car. A lot of them hadn’t been cleaned after a race, which I love. So we were able to find some of those gems.

 ”David and I are having a lot of fun. It’s a dream project. I wake up every morning and I can’t believe I’m taking pictures of Formula One or these events and we're also getting paid.”

One of the Red Bull Formula One cars on the grid at the U.S. Grand Prix. Photo: Josh Paul

 David Gray. “High quality niche magazines are having a good time just now. There is a recognition, not all of them but people want to have something. Social (media) is amazing but…”

 Josh Paul. “I remember taking a magazine to Mercedes and they had no idea who I was and I asked to take a portrait of Lewis. I handed him the magazine (Lollipop) and he felt the weight of it. He rubbed the texture, because it was a matte finish. And he smelled it and he says, ‘What can I do for you?’ It was amazing; oh, my God. So I said, ‘I want to take a portrait of your driver.’ And he said, ‘OK, come to the garage tomorrow at 10 am for FP 1. So I walked out and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’

 “I realized the power of that thing we all love that he responded to as well. And that’s a beautiful thing.”

 Josh Paul. “One thing, too: This is a finite project. I’m way more optimistic than David is and I’m a risk-taker … but we are trying to make the best of it while it lasts.

 “We don’t know if someone else is going to call and say, ‘Hey…’ This is such a rare opportunity and we are very, very lucky. Luckily Lollipop set the tone for things.”

 David Gray. “It’s been a stealth launch. Back in the day launches had the backing of Conde or Hearst, who are smaller than our client now, but they were still a well-oiled machine. But this is a different age. The magazine was launched with no publicity whatsoever. With no marketing push. It’s a different age. … You still can’t buy any. I assume we will still go on printing a number that leaves people wanting to have more: 1,000 copies, 1,200 copies? That’s not much.”