Preetam is a seasoned motoring journalist with a specialisation & passion for two-wheelers. He has been riding motorcycles since the 1990s and has been heading all two-wheeler content at car&bike for over 7 years. He helps provide a key perspective to all two-wheeler industry and product-related stories and has also played a leadership role in mentoring others in the car&bike team along the way.

Rishad has the distinction of being the only Jury member from India to serve several years on the prestigious International Bike of the Year Awards. He was also a jury member on the 2008 Indian Motorcycle of the Year Awards. Rishad brings 3 decades of experience & technical expertise with two-wheelers, backed by a 360-degree knowledge of the Indian two-wheeler market.

Ashok has been involved with two-wheelers in one way or another since he first started riding over 20 years ago. As his last editorial role, he was the Road Test Editor at BBC Top Gear India where he was responsible for performance testing two-wheelers. He has also worked with publications like OVERDRIVE and Motoring World - riding, testing and writing about all kinds of motorcycles. He currently heads the business at Big Rock Dirt Park, India’s finest off-road training facility. He is also one of the only four internationally certified coaches for the Harley-Davidson Riding Academy in India and occasionally takes on the role of riding coach.

Actor by profession, and a biker at heart, Siddhant Karnik has been riding motorcycles all his life. The newest member of the car&bike jury, Siddhant brings a fresh perspective to all things on two wheels. When he is not busy shooting at the film city, you will usually see him travelling across the country on his motorcycle.

Sagar is a former California Superbike School coach and the founder of Living It Up - an automotive publication specialising in motorcycle video content. He is also an ex-racer and was the head of motorcycle content at PowerDrift for eight years.

Janak’s passion for automobiles was instilled at an early age, sketching car and motorcycle designs in his classwork books. He’s currently an assistant editor at car&bike, where he can be spotted doing what he loves the most - riding, writing and reviewing motorcycles and anything that has an engine strapped to it.

Prior to his journalism career, Janak worked at a car performance and modification shop and contributed to wrenching on cars and motorcycles. In his free time, he enjoys keeping his riding gear clean, building scale models of boats, and of course, riding and driving his motorcycles and cars.

Aashish is an experienced professional with about 16 years of industry experience. He acquired his Master's degree from Istituto Europeo di Design in 2007, after which he joined the Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Pvt design team. Ltd from 2008 to 2011.

From Honda, he moved to Maruti Suzuki India Limited as Deputy Manager for the vehicle exterior styling department, assisting the brand. After his tenure at Maruti Suzuki, he joined Hero MotoCorp Ltd as a senior designer. In 2017, Aashish co-founded Studio34 Designart. It is an industrial design studio that works closely with automotive OEMs.

Throughout his professional tenure, he has worked on various products with different development cycles and change contents. Some of them made it through to production, becoming the stars in his work portfolio.

Punit Chaphekar is a product designer from IDC, IIT Bombay (1998-2000 Batch). Since childhood, he has been passionate about automobiles. After IDC, he joined Bajaj Auto Ltd; where he mainly worked on three-wheeler design, bike decals and two-wheeler concepts.

In 2002, he started C DESIGN STUDIO (CDS), his own design firm in Mumbai, to cater to the automotive and product design needs of the industry. He has worked on a number of Luxury Bus, City Bus & Speciality Vehicle design assignments for Automotive OEM’s and Coach Builders.

Of all the projects, the most notable being the design and Interior execution of a VIP Bus for Bharat Coach Builders (BCB) in 2015.  BCB produced the bus for Ashok Leyland, who gifted the same to the President of Tanzania.

Punit Chaphekar is the winner of the Autocar, Lego & Mahindra & Mahindra sponsored “Build A Scorpio” contest held in the year 2005. He has also received an Honorable Mention for the redesign of the Fiat Millecento, Motor Trend International Design Contest, 2002.  

He passionately works towards the ingenious integration of style and function to come up with designs relevant to the context. Over the years, neat lines, attention to detail & immaculate execution have become his hallmarks and he is known in the industry for his effective conversion of concepts into reality.

Thomas, director and Dean of Strate School of Design Bangalore, is a trained transportation designer from Institut Superieur de Design ISD, France where he graduated best overall in 1999. Thomas is also a master graduate from Ecole d'architecture de Paris La Villette, specialisation Naval architecture in 2006 in Paris France.
Thomas worked 10 years as a design manager in the car industry, developing projects for nearly all European car makers, and taking part in the development of the first BMW Mini, the First Mercedes Maybach, the all PEUGEOT, RENAULT and Citroen launched from 2002 to 2012.
Thomas re-oriented his career towards education by setting up the well-known DSK-Rubika school of design in Pune India in 2008, where he founded and led the successful Transportation design department from 2008 to 2012 .
In 2012, Thomas quit DSK-Rubika to go back to France and start working for Decathlon as Director of Design and Innovation. In 2017, Thomas was asked to open and head the Asian branch of Strate School of Design in Bangalore.
Driven by challenge and understanding that the future of our world depends on education, this international multiple design award winner, jumped on the occasion to come back to India and to the education field in order to be a "designer of designers" and to set up the best design school of India.
He continues to keep close ties to the industry by parallelly running his own design consultancy involved in most of the booming sectors (HMI & car interfaces, interior design for Autonomous vehicles, User experience, and immersive reality for fast and accurate design and CMF decision). The studio will soon proudly reveal in India, 2 Premium EV buses, one sport car, and a complete range of bicycles and EV-bikes.