I owe Hotrod for me finding this place. October 2003 issue.
I owe Hotrod for me finding this place. October 2003 issue.
Jim Pettengill said:Sports Car Graphic - oh, wait, we have GRM!
FWIW, I grew up reading my dad’s Sports Car Graphics. And now we have them here at the house. :)
Here is what I get for the $30/quarter for Sick the Mag...
Padded sealed shipping envelope:
Both front covers because double issue:
Inside content:
In reply to Ranger50 :
Nice shirt. :)
This philosophy did not work for Cycle World...
In reply to Ranger50 :
Another thumbs up for Sick the Mag. No sponsored builds, it's just pictures and stories of the people and cars from Drag and Drive events. I like paying a little more for a high quality print magazine with very low filler.
In reply to David S. Wallens :
Not me, just happened to stumble across it looking for content. 
Sick the mag looks awesome, I've never heard of it. I'm subscribing. I love print when I can still get it and it looks like a very GRMesq outfit but with drag racing. I was never inti drag racing until I went to some vintage drag event at Orlando speed world and kinda got hooked on gassers. These dudes were (for the most part) running 12 second E36 M3 boxes and it was superbfun to watch. If anyone has any other print media they can point me to that would be cool.
docwyte said:In reply to j_tso :
I grabbed boxes of R&T's from another local enthusiast that dated back to the late '70's. It was interesting to go thru them and see just how good they used to be. That stopped around 15 years ago.
I recently picked through a few of the mid 70's Hot Rod Van and Truckin' issues. Those were kinda painful.....but I see you started after that era.
I also got here because of a passing reference in HR to "our friends at Grassroots Motorsports" and a tiny photo of an immaculate BRG Spridget at the Challenge. So I thank them for that.
And since we're eulogizing Car Craft, let me pay tribute to the ridiculous saga of Freiburger buying a semi-derelict '61 Buick Invicta convertible from a sketchy guy in a bad area at night, breaking all known rules for successful used-car purchasing. There were, of course, complications (such as "You didn't think this thing came with keys, did you?") but for some reason he persevered, and eventually produced one of my all-time favourite photo captions: "Notice how we carefully positioned a drain pan and still managed to get 4 or 5 quarts of ATF all over the shop floor. Yeah, we got skills." (That's from memory, but it's close.)
You guys need to check out Magneto magazine
I've been a Hot Rod subscriber for over 40 years, and have collected most issues going back to the mid 1950s, so understandably I'm not happy about it. However, contrary to what other people have said the content in the last few years has been pretty good in my opinion. Yes, there's a lot of high dollar, pro touring stuff, but there's also been a significant amount of vintage coverage - reprints of articles from the 1960s, actual traditional style hot rods, barn finds, Bonneville coverage, and so on. My biggest complaint (outside of the magazine getting skinnier and skinnier) has been how often the articles are written in tiny white type on a black background, which is really difficult to read. The editorial staff has pretty much been reduced to John McGann doing 98% of the work, along with some articles provided by a handful of contributors. I've sensed he's been struggling to keep the place afloat.
There's hope that the quarterly version will allow them to provide higher quality content, and that may happen in the short term, but I suspect it's going to be the last step before it goes to online only. Cycle World magazine did the same thing not that long ago; the quarterly issues were quite good but it only lasted a couple years and then the print version went away.
Just got my Car & Driver magazine yesterday, it must be all of 75 pages. That's how large it's been for months now, I don't see them surviving much longer. Especially when their big article in the magazine, the 0-150-0 was posted on their You Tube channel earlier this week for free....
docwyte said:
Especially when their big article in the magazine, the 0-150-0 was posted on their You Tube channel earlier this week for free....
And thats the problem , a big car show that was 5 color pages in the mag years ago is all over the Net the same day and if its in the Magazine its 4-6 weeks later ,
Same with car features , they are all over the Net with much more detail than a few pages in the magazine will have ,
Years ago I built cars for our one big car show of the year , I tried to keep the builds secret for the WOW factor at the show . That worked great 20 years ago without the Net being so strong , it would not work today with everyone wanting to post stuff on Instagram etc everyday ......
Have fun with what we have , Hot Rod at $30 a year is probably not making them much money , the old days of $5 a year Hot Rod was to get the numbers up to sell print ads , those days are gone .
stroker said:This philosophy did not work for Cycle World...
Came here to say that. Or Motorcyclist, although they already started out more premium. Kinda turned into a last hurrah for either magazine.
californiamilleghia said:Have fun with what we have , Hot Rod at $30 a year is probably not making them much money , the old days of $5 a year Hot Rod was to get the numbers up to sell print ads , those days are gone .
I think that's an important point - the European magazines I grew up with had advertising, but compared to US magazines of the same time period, it felt like the split between advertising and editorial content was close to being the inverse. As a result, they also charged much more for the magazine subscriptions - usually there was a discount over buying the issues one by one, but we're talking maybe 10-20% and not "five bucks for the annual subscription when the newstand price for a single issue was six bucks".
Even so, ad revenue was a substantial part of the magazine revenue, and the shrinking ad revenue killed off a bunch of my favourite UK magazines like Banzai, Japanese Performance and Practical Performance Car.
Back in the day, Sport Compact Car magazine was over 300 pages. Pages and pages of ads, the Nopi ad alone would be 6 pages.
I miss the old Subie Sport mag....
In reply to Stealthtercel :
If Freiburger worked for Consumer Reports he could find a way to make it interesting. He's got a gift for storytelling, and I've read magazines just because he was involved in them.
It's disappointing what has happened to most magazines. I learned to read with Car and Driver, Stock Car Racing, and Hot Rod. Seeing them shrivel up has been sad. There's a lot of good content out there to read now, but having it edited and delivered to a newsstand was satisfying in ways that Facebook and blog posts are not.
BoxheadTim said:stroker said:This philosophy did not work for Cycle World...
Came here to say that. Or Motorcyclist, although they already started out more premium. Kinda turned into a last hurrah for either magazine.
I also suspect the motorcycle market is much smaller as well.
In December, 2019 , before COVID , TEN publishing shut down 19 automotive magazines leaving Motor Trend , Hot Rod and FourWheeler ,
There is a list on Google but I am on my iPad now , But when you see the list you wonder how many of them did not make a good profit !
One of the deals with owning this many magazines is that you could bundle ads across the whole group to get bigger Corporate advertisers and offer a better price per reader.
So be glad we have Grass Roots Motorsports and Classic Motorsports and sign up for another year or 2 .......
Unfortunately, most magazine content (not all) is directed at the person who is new to the hobby. That's a good thing because every hobby needs new people coming in to keep it alive.
The problem is, as others have stated, how many times can you read about the next Chevelle with a 383 stroker.
After people become experienced enough, the content becomes repetitive.
I don't know how a magazine would go about fixing that other than having other publications that a reader could graduate into.
ShawnG said:The problem is, as others have stated, how many times can you read about the next Chevelle with a 383 stroker.
The sad thing was, Hot Rod used to be good at avoiding that. Losing Marlan Davis really hurt the tech stuff. They used to do some really in-depth dives into cool engine builds, like Ford 400Ms and FEs and Boss 429s (and even a 427 Cammer!), Buick-Olds-Pontiacs, and 500 Cadillacs. And they would do all the Junkyard Jewel build-ups of engines that were really relevant to the average Joe. You could go "Okay, if I grab a 5.9 Magnum, I now know that headers aren't worth a damn and a set of rocker arms and an intake give me the most improvement for the least money."
I also really miss that Hot Rod Rescue segment they ran for a couple of years. Those were brilliant. A guy would have a car with a long-standing issue that drove him nuts and no one could figure out. Hot Rod would hook them up with one of their trusted shops and those guys would go through it and present a terrific write-up of all the diagnostics and the effect of each little change, and eventually get it running right. That was where I learned that about 75% of all performance shops are scam artists, because you'd have cars that all these "experts" had looked at previously and couldn't figure out, and then it'd be simple stuff like the choke wasn't hooked up or it had way too much ignition timing.
Stealthtercel said:I also got here because of a passing reference in HR to "our friends at Grassroots Motorsports" and a tiny photo of an immaculate BRG Spridget at the Challenge. So I thank them for that.
And since we're eulogizing Car Craft, let me pay tribute to the ridiculous saga of Freiburger buying a semi-derelict '61 Buick Invicta convertible from a sketchy guy in a bad area at night, breaking all known rules for successful used-car purchasing. There were, of course, complications (such as "You didn't think this thing came with keys, did you?") but for some reason he persevered, and eventually produced one of my all-time favourite photo captions: "Notice how we carefully positioned a drain pan and still managed to get 4 or 5 quarts of ATF all over the shop floor. Yeah, we got skills." (That's from memory, but it's close.)
My favorite era of Car Craft actually had a guy named Matt King at the helm. When Freiburger went back to Hot Rod, he left King in control of Car Craft. He was like a "Freiburger Jr" and participated in a lot of the same antics, but under his tenure, they embraced the go fast for cheap mantra that really appealed to me.
I mentioned it in a previous post, but their trip to a local junkyard to pull an engine was an eye opening story for my friends and I. They walked through how to yank the thing with a couple of hand tools and a Sawzall, including cutting the coolant hoses with said Sawzall and letting stuff drain to the ground. They also recommended that readers do the same! They actually got in quite a bit of trouble for that one and had to issue an apology and warning not to do that in the next issue. But man, those were the days. The junkyard ID guides and the how-to articles on selecting a good engine from the junkyard are things I still use to this day.
The "new format" trend in car enthusiast magazines seems to be thicker product from heavier paper stock and higher subscription price with less actual editorial content. Nice glossy ads. The new and improved R&T failed in my opinion. "Linkage" magazine, a new startup from Audrain, is the same format, and also fails miserably with high subscription price, way too much advertising and very little editorial content. Kudos to GRM and Classic Motorsports for maintaining the same format with decent editorial content at a reasonable price, and staying true to their base. For my personal bang-for-buck hard copy magazine, I also read Octane. Typical UK enthusiast format with excellent editorial content. A bit pricey, not a "how-to" or "hands-on" car magazine, but highly informative with top notch and in-depth content we don't usually get here in the US anymore. I learn something new every month from it.
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