Jenkinson became a motorsport enthusiast in the mid-1930s. In 1936 he saw a racing car — an E.R.A. — for the first time at the schoolboys' Exhibition, and later that year attended the Lewes Speed Trials where he first saw racing cars in action. He was studying engineering at the Regent Street Polytechnic when the Second World War broke out. As a conscientious objector, he served in a civilian capacity at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, where he came into contact with Bill Boddy, editor of Motor Sport, and other enthusiasts. A 1943 note in Motor Sport recorded that Jenkinson had built himself a motorcycle of Norton parts, much of the work done by torchlight in a small shed.
After the war, Jenkinson competed on two and four wheels but lacked the funds to race regularly. He found that acting as sidecar passenger to top riders allowed him to participate in top-level European competition while earning money and writing about it. He was passenger to Eric Oliver, with whom he became World Champion in 1949, and to Marcel Masuy. He competed as a sidecar passenger for the following two seasons, latterly for BMW. The BMW factory gave him a BMW R67 motorcycle for personal use; he fitted a sidecar and used it to travel across Europe reporting on races. Jenkinson occasionally mentioned picking up Mike Hawthorn, who lived nearby, for rides on the machine.
Jenkinson abandoned front-line competition to become Continental Correspondent for Motor Sport. He spent summers touring Europe and winters in a succession of lodgings in England, eventually settling near Crondall in Hampshire in a small run-down house with no mains electricity or water, largely filled with archives and vehicle parts. He became accepted as the "elder statesman" of British racing journalists for his closeness to teams and drivers, his conversational writing style, and his enduring passion for the sport.
Jenkinson loved to drive Porsche cars and coined the term "wischening" — from German wischen, to wipe — for the manner of cornering successfully in a Porsche 356. He later used an E-Type Jaguar as work transport, while at home he kept assorted vehicles including an elderly Mercedes-Benz saloon and a Citroën 2CV. In the 1960s Jenkinson did much to promote drag racing in the pages of Motor Sport. On 14 September 1963 he rode his NorBSA motorcycle at the Brighton Speed Trials, and he also drove an Allard Dragon dragster and rode a Triumph sprint motorcycle at the 1965 Drag Festival. As DSJ he contributed columns and features for several decades to Motor Sport's sister magazine Motorcycle Sport, published from the same offices at Standard House. He competed in hillclimbs and sprints on his own Tribsa hybrid well into his seventies.
For many years in the 1950s Jenkinson produced an annual Racing Car Review for Motor Sport, but stopped when he became increasingly frustrated by discrepancies between the chassis numbers teams quoted and what was actually being raced; rather than compromise his journalistic integrity, he simply ceased producing the books.
Jenkinson's most celebrated competitive appearance was as navigator for Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia. Together in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, they won the race by 32 minutes over Juan Manuel Fangio, who had engine problems and raced without a navigator after his co-driver had died in a crash years earlier. The use of pacenotes in navigation is associated with an earlier Mercedes-Benz win at the 1952 Carrera Panamericana; Jenkinson's contribution to the development and description of pacenote navigation led to their widespread adoption in rallying. His article "With Moss In The Mille Miglia" is considered a classic of motorsport journalism, and his book The Racing Driver was based on the experience.
Jenkinson developed the classification of a driver's effort into "tenths," with 10/10ths being the highest level, attained by only a few drivers in history. He considered the ability to "Tiger" — to race at ten-tenths and achieve feats others would find impossible — crucial for a champion.
In his later years Jenkinson became involved with Brooklands Museum, participating in operations that included exploring sealed underground air raid shelters. He worked as hard as anyone and did not seek special treatment. Jenkinson suffered a series of strokes in 1996 and moved to a home administered by the motor industry benevolent fund (BEN). He died on 29 November 1996.
Partial list of books by Jenkinson (not including several monographs for the Profile series):
The Racing Driver: The Theory and Practice of Fast Driving (1959)
Grand Prix Cars (1959)
A Story of Formula 1 1954–1960 (1960)
The Racing Car Pocketbook (1962)
The Maserati 250F (1975)
The Batsford Guide to Racing Cars (1978)
Porsche 356: Coupé, Cabriolet, Roadster, Speedster & Carrera (1980)
Jaguar E Type: 3.8 & 4.2 6-cylinder, 5.3 V12 (1982)
Porsche: Past and Present (1983)
From Chain Drive to Turbocharger: The A.F.N. Story (1984)
Maserati 3011: The story of a racing car (1987)
Directory of Historic Racing Cars (1987)
Motorcycle road racing: the 1950s in photographs (1989)
Grand Prix Winners: Motor Racing Heroes since 1950 (1995)
Jenks: A Passion For Motorsport (1997, posthumous compilation)
A Passion for Porsches (2001)
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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