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What Is Going On With Road & Track Magazine?
My wife doesn’t understand why I have a seacan full of old car magazines - but presumably tolerates it because they are not in the house. I started buying Road & Track as a kid with my paper route money at maybe 11 or 12 years old. I would take them to school and get chastised by my teachers when trying to read them in class. My primitive drawings of Lamborghinis adorned the margins. I watched for the new issue on the news stand and bought every issue, usually the day it came out, and read it cover to cover in a couple of sittings. It was the highlight of my month.
It was an early immersion into a car hobby that has stayed with me my entire life. I learned about the Jim Russell race driving school, F1 racing and the Monaco Grand Prix, Vintage racing in Monterey, the Mille Miglia, the Pebble Beach Concours, etc. etc. When I was older and scraped together enough money, I took the race courses and attended all the events that I had read about for so long. For better or worse, this profoundly shaped my life.
About 20 years ago I stumbled across a stash of early Road & Tracks from the 50’s and 60’s which led to assembling a complete collection of the magazine from 1947 to the mid 80’s. The sadly departed Wilknson’s Automobilia in Vancouver (still online though https://www.eautomobilia.com ) was a great help with this - I sent Ted a spreadsheet with all the missing issues, and he would put aside copies for me when they came into his shop.
When a friend or client bought a collector car, I would go into the collection and photocopy articles about the car. Eventually I scanned 2,500 pages of articles to make it easier to retrieve them.
I started buying the British magazines, CAR, Motorsport, Supercar Classics, Classic and Thoroughbred Cars etc.: five or six every month. The British mags were vastly better, with longer articles and lavish photography and art direction, but I still bought Road & Track - though every year there was less and less content that was interesting. I started throwing out the R&T’s, but kept all the others.
When friends and clients learned that I collected car magazines, I became a depository for unwanted collections. A large collection of Motorsport arrived in a dozen or so boxes, a near complete collection of Automobile quarterly etc. I took them all. So that’s how I got a seacan full of car magazines... thankfully I live in Bowness and you can get away with seacans in your backyard!
So it was with great sadness to witness the slow dumbing down of the R&T starting in the 1990’s and reaching the point of complete worthlessness. A few years ago I’d pick it up on the news stand and put it back, not finding a single thing that was of any interest - I’d been buying it religiously for 40 years! If you took out the Weathertech and Tire Rack ads, it was skinnier than the first copies in 1947!
Road & Track History
Road & Track was founded by two friends, Wilfred H. Brehaut, Jr. and Joseph S. Fennessy in Hempstead, Long Island in 1947. In 1952 Editor John Bond took ownership of the magazine and ran it with his wife Elaine. They built a flagship office in Newport Beach, CA which became the epicentre of the import car movement in America. The Bonds sold the Magazine to CBS publishing in 1972, who then sold it to Hachettte Filipacchi Media in 1988. In 2011 it was sold to the current owner, Hearst Publishing (who recently purchased Bring A Trailer.)
In 1988 Road & Track printed 680,000 copies; 240,000 were sent to the news stands, of which about half were sold. Twenty years later the print run dropped to 580,000 copies, 17,500 were sent to the news stands, of which 12% sold - the rest pulped. By 2019 a ten-issue subscription cost USD $12, which barely covered printing and mailing costs.
Some of this can be attributed to the internet and Youtube in particular, but the British magazines such as CAR, OCTANE and EVO are as good to read as ever. SPORTS CAR MARKET is eagerly awaited by all my collector car friends. Keith Martin, despite a suffering a stroke, is present and approachable at all the important car collector events and has built a thriving community around the magazine. New lavish publications such as ROAD RAT, co-founded by Coldplay bass guitarist Guy Berryman, are injecting new life into automotive print. (https://theroadrat.com)
Road & Track has gone through numerous staffing, format and art direction changes in the last 20 years - they’ve done everything apart from address the content, which has become more and more banal... The Newport Beach office was closed, and moved to Ann Arbour Michigan in 2012 with the sale to Hearst Media. None of the staff moved with them. Now Road & Track offices are in the Hearst Tower in New York, along with sister publications Car and Driver and Motorweek, was well as the rest of the Hearst Media publications. Now I'm sure New York is the place to centre a Fashion magazine - but sports cars?
In its latest incarnation, Road & Track is branding itself as a ‘lifestyle’ magazine. Published every two months, the art direction has taken a page from the British magazines with lots of white space and lavish photography. They are selling print and digital subscriptions for $50 per year, and ‘founders’ packages for $975 which include “ultimate access to editorial track days, VIP entry to automotive events, office hours with editors, and more!” Will selling ‘experiences’ reverse 30 years of decline?
What is my take on this?
Just as the automobile business is about product, magazines are about content. When Road & Track columnist Paul Frere - the Belgian engineer and racing car driver, winner of Le Mans, publisher of a book on racing Porsches who had close access to the personnel at the Porsche factory - wrote an article on the new Porsche, I soaked up every word. This is a guy who Porsche let drive an 1,100hp 917/30, something not too many journalists got to do...
When Rob Walker - a former F1 team owner who had Sterling Moss as a driver, and whose generous allowance from the Johnny Walker Scotch fortune allowed him to buy and adventure in all manner of exotic machinery - wrote a Grand Prix report, he transported you right to the scene. He knew everybody and was really good at telling stories.
Phill Hill, Innes Ireland, John Surtees, Stirling Moss, Sam Posey, Bob Akin, Jeff Zwart, and others were all important names in international motorsport, who contributed to the magazine in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.
The technical articles came from Dennis Simanaitis, who had a PHD in engineering and worked for the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). Dennis was at R&T for over 30 years and introduced many of us to the Bosch Automotive Handbook and the math behind many automotive principles.
Peter Egan spent a lifetime restoring and racing old British cars, and could take you along on his road trips with his folksy writing. Peter was a pilot and motorcyclist who also wrote for Cycle World and other publications.
Road tests were exhaustive and detailed. Not every car was the winner. Performance tests often revealed inconsistencies with manufacturer claims.
Add to that some humour from Stan Mott and Robert Cumberford, who marvellously satirized Italian racing car manufacturers with heir ‘Cyclops’ series, Dick O’Kane and the incomparable Yr Faithfl Srvnt aka Henry Manney, and the magazine became an engaging and entertaining read.
Intelligent letters to the editor, comprehensive road test summaries, and a classified section that will make you weep today, rounded out the package.
None of these columnists were 30. They all had a lifetime of experience with which to write about. They were experts in their field. These were people that you could learn from.
To me at least, that is the heart of the automotive hobby: soaking up knowledge. And you can’t do that from millennials with creative writing degrees. Not that there isn't a place for different generations, especially on the current technical subjects, but you can't substitute a lifetime of experience.
Who was it who thought graphics and highlights could substitute for information, or that the articles were too technical and needed to be dumbed down? Or that experience and knowledge didn’t matter anymore? When I was kid half of all the content went over my head. But this made me want to understand - somehow I knew that these R&T contributors were the ‘real deal’, and I worked hard to understand all the technical terms.
There are certainly no shortage of great automotive writers out there. Jay Leno writes a column for Octane, as does Derek Bell. Miles Collier writes for Sports Car Market. Peter Egan wrote a piece for the current issue of Road & Track. Dennis Simanaitis writes an entertaining blog to this day (https://simanaitissays.com.) Karl Ludvigsen still writes articles for the Posrche magazine Excellence, which was no doubt named after his definitive Porsche series, “Excellence Was Expected”. It would not be impossible to assemble a great group of columnists that have actually been there and done things - and could pass down this knowledge to the next generations.
That said, Road and Track shows signs of life. Certainly the art direction and layout has taken a massive step forward. The articles are more detailed than they were a year ago, with actual information in them. I’m buying it again. I don’t know about paying $1,000 to be part of a Road & Track founders club though.
A few years ago I gladly paid to be part of a Sports Car Market Symposium where we heard from David Gooding, Miles Collier and other classic car heavyweights. I wish the current owners could understand the difference.
My Advice: Bring Road & Track back to California and share space with Bring a Trailer, who are based in San Francisco. Create a digital archive for old issues. Add the original road tests to the Bring a Trailer auction descriptions. Pair the the old and the new and add Road & Track into the BAT community. Try to form an association with Miles Colliers REV's Foundation (https://revsinstitute.org/) and nearby museums such as the Petersen and Mullin. Share the knowledge. I think the old guys would be more than willing...
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