About

Smith and Sniff is Jonny Smith and Richard Porter. They've been friends for years. They've been car journalists for even longer.

In 2011 they went on a ridiculous junket to Pebble Beach and snuck off from all the wine tasting and swan eating to film themselves driving a borrowed golf buggy around the grounds of the hotel and, eventually, out of the hotel, down a public road, onto a beach. Where they got stuck. The footage from this foolishness was lost, but the idea remained. The idea to film themselves in a vehicle of some kind, talking the sort of idle rubbish they'd talk about even if there weren't cameras on them.

In 2016 Jonny and Richard got around to doing this on a regular basis and the Smith and Sniff YouTube channel became a moderately unpopular thing until Covid spoilt their fun. Fortunately, they'd already worked out how to record audio remotely and from this, because in lockdown no one had anything better to do, they started the Smith and Sniff podcast which quickly became slightly less unpopular and is now, somehow, Britain's number one car podcast. Mostly.

Smith: Jonny Smith

Jonny started his car career after binning off a boring degree to take a job on a VW mag. After that he moved on to Max Power, which led to an extraordinary series of improbable adventures including the time he almost broke his back jumping a Dukes of Hazzard liveried Ford Sierra Sapphire. Fortunately he survived and went on to work at CAR magazine before becoming a presenter on 5th Gear. He's now the face, brain and other parts of The Late Brake Show, the most eclectic and least shouty car YouTube channel in the world. He lives in Lincolnshire and is reasonably tall.

Sniff: Richard Porter

Richard got a lucky break working on old Top Gear in the late '90s, then went off to do some other things, got made redundant and made use of his time setting up the satirical car website sniffpetrol.com, hence the Sniff nickname. He subsequently became the script editor on the 2002-2015 iteration of Top Gear, winner of the 2005 Emmy award for best unscripted show. He's now a script writer and editor for various TV shows, a contributor to several magazines and newspapers, and the author of over 25 books including the highly tedious Boring Car Trivia series. He lives in Bath and is also reasonably tall.