Young was born in Cave, in the Canterbury region of New Zealand's South Island. He began his working life in a bank in Timaru while contributing motor sport columns to the Timaru Herald. In 1961 he moved to the United Kingdom, initially working with Denny Hulme in the Formula Junior series in Europe — an early connection with the Kiwi motorsport network that would shape his entire career.
In 1962 Young became Bruce McLaren's secretary and began ghostwriting McLaren's column for Autosport magazine. When McLaren founded Bruce McLaren Racing Ltd in 1964, Young was appointed a director of the organisation, placing him at the centre of one of the most ambitious racing ventures of the era. He remained with the team until McLaren stepped up to Formula One competition in 1966, at which point Young chose to return to full-time journalism rather than continue in a management role.
Young's weekly Autocar column, From The Grid, launched in 1967 and ran for thirty-one years, making it one of the longest-running bylined Formula One columns in the British motorsport press. At its peak the column was syndicated to seven magazines internationally. He also contributed to a wide range of publications including F1 Racing and Cars for the Connoisseur in the United Kingdom, Victory Lane and On Track in the United States, NZ Classic Car in New Zealand, Autosprint in Italy, and Am Klassiek in the Netherlands, as well as writing for the web-based magazine pitpass.com.
Young was a prolific author of motorsport biographies and histories. His 1971 biography of Bruce McLaren, McLaren: The Man and His Racing Team, drew on his years of direct access to the constructor and remains a primary source on the early McLaren story. In 1976 he co-authored Against All Odds with James Hunt, chronicling Hunt's 1976 Formula One World Championship. Later works included Forza Amon! (2003), a biography of New Zealand driver Chris Amon, and Memories of the Bear (2007), a biography of Denny Hulme — revisiting the fellow New Zealander he had worked alongside at the very start of his career in Europe.
Other titles included Jim Clark and His Most Successful Lotus, The Amazing Summer of '55, Classic Racers: New Zealand's Grand Prix Greats, and the two-volume It Beats Working and It Still Beats Working, memoirs covering his decades inside the sport.
Young returned to New Zealand in his later years. He became ill in July 2014 and died on 5 September 2014 in Christchurch. He was 75.
Young occupied a rare position in motorsport — simultaneously a trusted insider in the McLaren organisation during its founding years and one of the most consistent long-form voices in the Formula One press. His tenure at Autocar gave an entire generation of British readers a direct line into the paddock. His biographies of McLaren, Hulme, Amon, and Hunt preserved first-hand accounts of drivers and teams that were central to Formula One's most transformative decades, and they remain reference works for historians of the sport.