Down here in Texas, mudding is a pastime. If you roll into a gas station, it’s likely you’ll see a truck or a Jeep covered in mud from its windshield to its rear window. If we’d ever get snow in the Austin area, I’m sure there would be plenty of rigs with gobs of it packed into their wheel wells.
Montreal, Canada gets plenty of the white stuff during the cold months, which makes it a great place for winter driving events. FCA recently held one. It had a Jeep Renegade and a Jeep Wrangler, among many other vehicles, on hand for journalists to drive up steep grades and through passes thick with snow.
Roman Mica of the The Fast Lane Car drove them both on a course built by Land Rover to find out if the baby Jeep has the off-road chops of its legendary cousin. While the cute ute needed a little more gas and a course correction to get past the more difficult cold-weather obstacles, it didn’t embarrass itself or its parent company. The Wrangler Unlimited? Bah! No sweat – and that’s not just because the sub-zero temperatures made sweating a hard thing to do.
Derek Shiekhi's father raised him on cars. As a boy, Derek accompanied his dad as he bought classics such as post-WWII GM trucks and early Ford Mustang convertibles.
After loving cars for years and getting a bachelor's degree in Business Management, Derek decided to get an associate degree in journalism. His networking put him in contact with the editor of the Austin-American Statesman newspaper, who hired him to write freelance about automotive culture and events in Austin, Texas in 2013. One particular story led to him getting a certificate for learning the foundations of road racing.
While watching TV with his parents one fateful evening, he saw a commercial that changed his life. In it, Jeep touted the Wrangler as the Texas Auto Writers Association's "SUV of Texas." Derek knew he had to join the organization if he was going to advance as an automotive writer. He joined the Texas Auto Writers Association (TAWA) in 2014 and was fortunate to meet several nice people who connected him to the representatives of several automakers and the people who could give him access to press vehicles (the first one he ever got the keys to was a Lexus LX 570). He's now a regular at TAWA's two main events: the Texas Auto Roundup in the spring and the Texas Truck Rodeo in the fall.
Over the past several years, Derek has learned how to drive off-road in various four-wheel-drive SUVs (he even camped out for two nights in a Land Rover), and driven around various tracks in hot hatches, muscle cars, and exotics. Several of his pieces, including his article about the 2015 Ford F-150 being crowned TAWA's 2014 "Truck of Texas" and his review of the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, have won awards in TAWA's annual Excellence in Craft Competition. Last year, his JK Forum profile of Wagonmaster, a business that restores Jeep Wagoneers, won prizes in TAWA’s signature writing contest and its pickup- and SUV-focused Texas Truck Invitational.
