Back in the heyday of print-media, Road & Track was the venerable authority on automobiles. In the 1980’s when I was a salivating teen obsessed with cars, Road & Track was the defacto go-to source for road tests, racing results, and spy photos of new models. Back then, I had the trifecta of car magazine subscriptions: Car and Driver, Road & Track, and in 1986, added the then-new publication Automobile. On the pages of Turtle Garage I have even done retrospectives of old issues of Road & Track, looking back in history at advertisements, road tests, race results, and photographs from the 70’s and 80’s.
Michael Sheehan’s Ferraris-Online has been around for decades and maintains a loyal following. Michael has written countless Ferrari related columns for the Ferrari Market Letter, Cavallino, Sports Car Market, and Forza. I first wrote to Michael back in 2008 when I had a question about an article he had written for Sports Car Market. In a recent Ferraris-Online post, Michael provides his perspective on the demise of the once-invincible Road & Track print magazine.
What follows is Michael’s account of the history of Road & Track as well as a perspective on the publication’s inability to adapt to the New Order of the digital age. The article below is posted with permission from Ferraris-Online.
Road & Track: The end of an era and the error of the end—January 17th 2019
On Tuesday Kim Wolfkill, the current editor of Road&Track, mentioned in an email to Stan Mott, one of the two creators of the R&T Cyclops (Robert Cumberford is the other) “…that Hearst is closing the Ann Arbor office and moving operations to New York City. The print magazine will now be run by the digital team. We’ll complete the current issue and then we’re all done at the end of the month.” Former R&T editor, John Dinkel, learned of this because he has been in correspondence with Stan regarding an until now secret effort by the Cyclops Faithful to attempt to set a world land speed record at Bonneville next August. But that’s another story for another day.
Hearst’s New York office, which now handles the digital edition, would be the last remnants of the Road&Track Dynasty. For those under 40 reading this, it’s just another lumbering dinosaur put out to pasture. To those over 50 reading this, it’s the sad end of our automotive era and the end of what was once the auto enthusiast’s bible.
A Brief History:
Road and Track, as it was then known, was founded in 1947 in Hempstead, Long Island, by two friends, Wilfred H. Brehaut, Jr. and Joseph S. Fennessy. They published only six times from 1947 to 1949. By 1952 contributor and editor John Bond had become the owner of the magazine, which was moved to Southern California. By the late 1960s Road&Track was a cash cow and so John Bond built their damn-the-costs, ocean view, flagship building in Newport Beach. For those into publishing trivia, the “&” in the title was introduced by then Editor Terry Galanoy in 1955 for better newsstand recognition.
Thanks to a focus on introductions and road tests on then-rarely-seen European exotics from Aston Martin, Bristol, Ferrari and Maserati and on far-away European races such as the Targa Florio, Le Mans and Formula One, R&T found a hard-core cultish following of then 20 “ish” baby boomers. Irreverent writers such as Henry N. Manney III and Peter Egan plus road tests of the Goodyear Blimp or a San Francisco cable car or Stan Mott and Robert’s 1957 to 1992 articles on the Cyclops added the right level of flippancy. Readers accepted a three month lead time to read about unobtanium dream cars such as the 365 GTB/4 Daytona introduced at the 1969 Paris auto show; or the Ferrari 512M versus Porsche 917 battles at Le Mans; or the Lamborghini Miura S high speed test in the Nevada desert. Even better were the back page classified ads which offered no lack of 50s and 60s Ferraris and other exotics at prices that now seem mind-numbingly cheap.
A move to the epicenter:
In 1973 I moved my shop from Santa Ana to Costa Mesa so that I could be closer to R&T, as they were then the automotive nucleus of southern California around which dozens of specialty automotive shops opened and flourished. Since we were only a few blocks from R&T we had a ritual of driving the latest and wildest exotic in our inventory, from 330 P3/4 s/n 0854 to a Tyrell 007 F1 car s/n 074 in one side of their parking lot, around their building, out the other side and then back to our shop. We often helped R&T get the latest cars for testing, from the first Lancia 037 Rally car in the country to a then-new, bright orange McLaren F1.
In the 1970s and into the 1990s R&T featured columns and articles by former and current race car drivers from 1960s drivers Paul Frère, Innes Ireland and Formula One champion Phil Hill to 1970s drivers Brian Redman and Sam Posey to 1980s driver Bob Akin. All conveyed the essence of speed and brought their high speed runs down the Mulsanne straight, in the rain, at night, alive.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls:
In 1972 the Bonds sold R&T to CBS and in turn CBS sold R&T to Hachette Filipacchi Media in 1988. In the very early 1990s John Dinkel, then the Editor in Chief in charge of new products, worked with AOL (remember AOL) to put R&T online but his plans and pleas were a missed opportunity upon deaf ears. In 2011 Hearst Magazines bought R&T and in 2012 gathered the staff together to announce the magazine was moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan and none were invited along for the move.
The Road&Track building at 1499 Monrovia in Newport Beach sat empty before being sold to the city of Newport Beach who then sold the building to LA Lakers basketball star Kobe Bryant in 2014 for his business headquarters. Kobe then ran into zoning restrictions from the same city that had sold him the building and so the building continued to sit empty and derelict. The building was most recently sold to a local private school in need of expansion.
In the 1990s the print edition had 750,000 plus subscribers and sold 45% to 50% of retail-priced newsstand issues, making the newsstand issues the profit center. Today a one-year, 10 issue subscription to the print edition is a mere $12, which struggles to cover the printing and mailing costs and too many pages are filled with Tire Rack and Weathertech ads. Newsstand sales, once the profit center, are only 10% to 12% with the rest as land fill. Will the New York offices attempt to continue publishing the print edition? Perhaps, for a time, but that business model has failed. Killing a small forest for every issue is becoming politically incorrect and print is dead or dying.
As Howard Cohen wrote: Rather than bemoan the things that are no longer what they were, think how lucky we are to have lived in such interesting times, played with such fantastic and demanding cars and known such passionate, eccentric and accomplished people. We’ve crammed a lot into our lives and enjoyed almost the whole of an entire golden age!
Road&Track slowly died around the turn of the millennium, losing direction and relevance, failing to evolve in a fast changing world, overwhelmed by an endless stream of competing online columns. As former R&T editor John Dinkel wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday, 15 January: “I think Jim Morrison said it best…
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
In this case one door closes but another one closes behind it”!
Thanks, in alphabetical order, to Ed Brown; Howard Cohen; John Dinkel; Paul Duchene; Tom Harbin; Alistair Henderson; Mike Matune; Bill Orth; Glen Smale; Thor Thorson; Giovanni Tomasetti and Bruce Trenery for their feedback.
Late to the wake, just got a postcard that was so I could get some other magazines as replacements for them no longer sending me my issues of R&T as I guess my subscription still had issues left that were owed to me
I’m heartbroken but sadly not surprised in this ever evolving and vanish of things in print
A few quick bit
I would pay good money for a book of nothing but the car data pages from the reviews and double as much if they included all the April Fools reviews!!!
I had the good fortune to have a Dad that kept his subscription up from my grade school days til long after I had left for college. It was alway extra cool when there were articles on the exotics and European races I found far more interesting than Indy & NASCRAP
I freely admit to being a sports car snob, but can you blame me? In our garage was my Dad’s 1965 red convertible Stingray (to this day I still only have 17 solo drives in it and I’m 53) and my favorite Hot Wheels was a blue GT40 MKIV sizzler that when I played “Speed Racer” with my other cars was always the Mach 5 and against those 2 cars I judged everything else that ever came along
It was years before I could figure out what the hell a MKIV was as that didn’t have an entry in the encyclopedia britinanica much to my chagrin. It wasn’t until I got a coloring book calendar in 4th grade that I discovered that the kind of racing where I would find cars I liked was at LeMans and another year before on a spinner rack at the library I found a copy of Black Tiger at LeMans, which I promptly checked out and devoured in on long night where I stayed up til almost 4am on a school night (this was a first as later figuring out I was dyslexic I read kinda slow)
Then I started looking forward to the articles that covered that race each summer and discovered the BMW Art Cars which sent my imagination over the edge again (big fan of Alexander Calder and kinda nuts for the BMW M1 for some reason)
Then I started paying attention to by lines and discovered Phil Hill and Sam Posey as writers I could constantly count on to send my imagination into over drive turning laps around tracks and in cars I would plaster my walls with posters of
In my early college years I would head to the newsstand in the university book store hoping for a new Exotic Cars Quarterly to drool over
Once employed and with means I could never quite swing a true sports car but I did start a slot car collection that at this point is getting close what Nick Mason has a garage full of real cars
Anyway, all this is a long way to say thanks to all those that put in the time and effort to put out a great magazine for as long as they could and that while I am greatly saddened by its passing I have countless priceless memories of and they should no what an impact their work had and that it was greatly appreciated
Cheers to road still going around the bend and over the horizon and may the party that travels with it never end!!!
I still have all my R & T magazines (has to be at least 50 years worth). Now that I’m retired I’m starting to go thru them month by month. FASCINATING !! I read 3-4 every day and the articles, THE WRITING, is amazing. You realize now why you paid that $10 per year. The ads by BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, they’re all classics, some I frame up on my own and hang on the wall. WALL ART. You can see how near the end of the run the writing fell apart. Let’s face it, all those classic writers all died. No one replaced them. and the cars (the Ferrari’s and all the rest), those cars today sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s truly a way to go down memory lane and why you bought certain cars along the way. IT’S A BLAST !!
I will miss this publication, that I have been reading in print form since I was 13, I’m 67 now
who else reads a magazine that long.
next they are gonna tell me Sterophiles will cease publication.
i feel like im the young one here but i started subscribing when i was in high school (1999) and before the birth of online magazines and pre- youtube. this was the only source about racing outside the US i could find at the time. at the time the only video media that could be found was Speedvision or Motorweek ( quite boring to be honest)
i do remember the test data with the cutaway drawings to be my favorite. for some reason a Jaguar F1 car with an interview with Bobby Rahal….
First Cycle World became a “lifestyle brand” magazine. Now Road&Track succumbs to the same millenial fate. Cars and motorcycle are not a “lifestyle” for me. They are a way of life. I have plenty of my own style without some weenie “influencer” trying to tell me how cool something is that he just discovered that we’ve known about for 50 years. It breaks my heart to this happen. I guess 45 years (since I was 15) of subscribing is not enough to be considered a “Founder” level patron. I’ll miss Mr. Egan’s brilliantly understated missives from this world. I already miss Sam Smith. I now know why he got out. Good job, Sam.
R&T went out not with a bang, but a whimper….
My Dad was an early R&T reader, introduced my brothers and myself to the interest seen in special autos, Europeans seemed the most interesting. I had owned and ran a automobile repair shop for 45 years in Madison, P Egan was an early employee. When he and wife, Barb, moved to Newport Ca, we remained friends, visiting often and got to know the crowd at R&T pretty well. Pete and I did a lot of things together, trips, races and had some crazy adventures, some of which we wrote about and some became the ‘Trip-Stories’ seen printed in the occasional magazine. We’re still good friends and neighbors. I haven’t kept with the recent issues or stories out there, sadly find the articles lacking at some mechanical/historical level.
So sad but agree, R&T has lost direction and relevance. I decided earlier this year to let my digital subscription lapse.
R.I. P. R & T
A sad state of affairs indeed. Truly the end of an era.
This is a sad day.
But first a personal note to Kim Wolfkill. In another life, I ran a car dealership in Princeton, NJ and first met your dad, Grant. He visited us many times over the years, often with his young son — yes, you. A few months back I was heartened to hear that Grant was still with you — at 92! Godspeed to both of you.
What I have missed most over the years was Rob Walker’s detailed reporting of each Grand Prix — maybe only 10 a year at the time. He was a privateer in the days when the sport was populated by many well-heeled gentlemen. Rob offered a detailed report form each race, often lap by lap that made the reader feel that they were there.
So, another era comes to an end. Hopefully, cars will continue to give us enthusiasts the same entertainment as did R&T! In the meantime, thanks for all the joy and pleasure you provided over the past 50+ years.
Once David e davis died, even though he moved on to automobile magazine. Peter egan retired Road and track lost something that couldn’t be replaced.
Funny, I was just trying to read the latest issue of Road & Track and decided it has gone from meh to just plain bad. I used to read it cover to cover when it arrived, now it sits around until I have a really slow day, then I still don’t get through it. I have all magazines from about 87 and have acquired many magazines and most of the road test annuals back to ’61.
For me it is a combination of things. Not too many new cars interest me, SUVs, crossovers and trucks, just no. Superexotics, will never afford, Racing results and commentary was great, but at this point everything, even commentary is so dated it just seems fairly irrelevant by the time you read them, I can stream the F1 on demand on my TV.
Lastly there is the internet, I get all the news with Jalopnik, good entertainment and a great comments section. I think they could still do something with more great writers more of the general present and historic focus that brought them to greatness in the last century, think it is too late though, too bad.
In 1964 my cousin came to live with us while he was in college. Along with his few possessions, he smuggled in a few magazines… magazine that were the fantasy of every red-blooded American boy. No, not THAT magazine… R&T!
“Dad, how much does a new Chevrolet cost?” I was amazed to discover that I could buy a new Chevrolet… that car driven by the proletariat masses, or for the same price, buy a used Ferrari, or Maserati from the morass of sellers in the back pages of R&T (I lusted more for the 1968 Mistral drop head than for Lisa’s curvy backside in English Lit. 101). I could look happy, and be happy too!
Since 1964 I followed formula one. I knew the drivers and their cars, and mourned the all too frequent passing of the parade of drivers. Lying across my bed on a hot summer afternoon I was right there, at the pits, or relaxing at a Monogasqe outdoor cafe with Rob Walker or Innes Ireland. Road & Track… as much a right of passage as that first kiss, swimming in the river on a hot summer day, and with friends as we stared up at the the stars while talking about who our favorite girl was in school. I can now find an occasional old Road & Track in an antique store, and immediately be taken back to the exact time and place while reading that particular issue.
It’s now gone.
An old friend has passed.
We shared so much of life together.
WELL-WELL YOU DIED! Actually a long time ago And deliberately planned, it seems. beginning with that move to the east……….
The spark and magic that fired our imagination to see something of the great cars of yesterday, today, and the future,.. you guys gave us that ‘in the bag knowledge with feeling.
I went to a few P.C.A. events and John Bond jr would bring out something interesting like the memorable Carrera Abarth. and run it in a small autocross laid out in a parking lot in Newport Beach. Then open it up and show us what it is under the ‘skin,” explain driving it and how it’s quirks dictated driving. Like Road & track did in articles….
This is what brought so many into the world of “sport cars.” Road & Track would get us enough insight of sport cars that it made a deciding decision for me and in fact, a life changing decision, to remain in the sport cars…for life.
A Sport car is personal. It is close fitting to the human anatomy, it is decidedly designed for driving,…not operated. Any moron can operate, and now few know or care to know how to drive,……. anything.
Apparently the fake news have almost convinced the world that anything with engines is not only evil but immoral.
I feel Road & Track has had a hand in this as well.
YOU SHOULD go look in your closets and files at yours and the other great “‘sport car’ magazines. Look at those if you desire to know what happened?
Those articles written in the late 1950s, 60s, and 70s where we were shown inside views and cut-a-way drawing of cars you drove, tested, and wrote about. That excited us!
You should have dwelt on “SPORTS CARS”. You should have done extensive series on living with sports cars and reported the good, bad, ugly. Not the side slap shot of zero to sixty and G-Forces in turns stopping, colors of seat stitching etc… etc.
You failed to get into it, You fail to know these cars and give us a sample of that.
I wonder IF you actually drove the darn things?
Now-a-day you, like the other ‘mush rags’ are into SUVS, trucks, and other “Vehicles.”
its all MUSH!
And we haven’t cared for ages.
IT is too darn bad you self imploded.
Oh, and you last readable print issue. July 2019 THIS is one of the best-ever and that especially pains me!!!
It is only evident of WHAT YOU COULD DO, but didn’t!
Fortunately for me, I just received my renewal. And there’s not a chance in hell I’ll spend any more time staring at a silver screen than is an absolute necessity.
Just recently I found Sunset magazine more interesting than Road and Track . It took Forty years. How so very sad. Good bye old friend.
I’m glad to see that someone finally brought this up. I remember when having a copy of Road and Track on the coffee table represented the best in automotive photography, illustration, and writing.
Unfortunately, those days are now gone, and I’m embarrassed to even have the magazine around.
It now looks like it’s published by a junior high school year book team.
After over 30 years now, I won’t be renewing my subscription beyond 2019.
They don’t even have the Dear R & T section anymore…..I wonder why that is ?
To all of the Ann Arbor staff, you are sorely missed.
I could not say it any better.
Last year I attempted to sell or give away my Road and Track collection. Every issue from mid 1957 all bound. Contact with local sports car clubs got no interest. I cried but had to dispose of them. It WAS such a great magazine. Evidently the younger crowd likes the new content, hard to believe.
Unfortunately they still send it to me after it was canceled, I assume to make it appear they have a large number of subscribers…ad revenue. It arrives I thumb thru and verify nothing has changed and it goes directly into the recycle bin.
Related to this article I have recently acquired a large collection of Road and Track magazines complete from the first issue in June 1947 to 1973 and the Annuals from 1956 to 1972. I am selling them on eBay if anyone is interested, The title of the auction is “Collection Lot of 308 Road and Track Magazines, 1947-1973 + 1956-1972 Annuals”.
For me, as an avid Grand Prix racing fan, the best year of R&T was 1962. In each issue, a current GP car was analysed. For each car, there were 1/24 scale drawings to use as reference for model building, a full two-page colour photo of the car and, best of all, a fantastic cutaway drawing by James Allington. Ah yes, the good old days….
I grew up on Car & Driver and Road & Track. Automobile was a bit pricey so I would sneak read it at the newsstand before getting chased away. It’s sad that the print medio did not understand, underestimated and missed the digitization band-wagon. But such is life and I will hold on to the memory of anticipating the days when the newsstand would have those magazines on the shelf!
An interesting perspective on a magazine I grew up with–I still think about that 1970 issue with the Ferrari Daytona on the cover and the Lotus Seven inside. I was 14 at the time and never tired of reading about exotic cars and exotic people–Henry Manney III, Rob Walker, Paul Frere. But I think there have been two developments that have hurt R&T: the car industry is not as interesting now and the magazine business generally is floundering. My first example would be the amount of space now given over in R&T and C&D to pickup trucks and lookalike SUVs, the majority of which are really not much fun to drive or have interesting stories associated with them. Interest in motorsports is on the decline generally but you can go online and watch the 24 Hours of Daytona anyway. With respect to magazines, you only have to see how thin most magazines have become compared to what they were in the 70s and 80s–not just R&T, but also Flying or Playboy and, alas, the vanished Gourmet. We have so many alternatives now to what the magazines offered then and I am not sure even a purely digital R&T will survive when there are so many specialist websites for free. i don’t like to read magazines online in .pdf versions compared to websites but I would be happy not to have to flip through all those WeatherTech ads!
I too grew up with Road & Track in my mailbox. I didn’t subscribe to Car & Driver because I thought that it was a knock-off of R&T and didn’t add much to the data that R&T printed (other than blessing us with the Cannonball Baker Dash). I especially enjoyed Henry “Practice-was-the-usual-shambles” Manney. It seemed like a magazine for the few and the proud – those of us who drove underpowered and unreliable British sports cars. Sometimes I thought that R&T took everything too seriously, but now we have Sports Car Market and all is right with the world. I also enjoyed the ersatz “road tests” of such vehicles as an Abrams tank and a locomotive.
Instead of C&D, I subscribed to Competition Press & Autoweek. Printed on newsprint, and converting to color during my time, it covered the big events long before R&T could get the same events into print, like the Cam-Am series. It did little events too, including everything that happened at Mid-Ohio, where I did much of my early spectating. In those days, for a modest amount of money, I could buy a pit pass and wander around the cars in the pits, so everything in these publications seemed so immediate. I walked right up to Mark Donohue’s 917 and took photos of the engine bay. How long ago that was! How privileged we were compared to the antiseptic and safety-crazed restrictions of today! Come to think of it, at Watkins Glen, I walked right up to Jody Schecter’s F1 car, and Graham Hill’s car and shot photos of the driver’s seats.
After suspending my R&T subscription while raising kids, I took it up again when I bought a Ferrari (John Bond’s obsession). Recently I have enjoyed the opening pages with nice action photos. However, I now skip most of the road tests because I just cannot get interested in reading about SUV tests and small sedan tests and tests of cars that don’t ring my chime. Also, they have been running articles lately about somebody driving a car around the mountains or the desert for three days and describing how it feels to drive such-and-such a car. I don’t have any interest in reading about somebody else’s driving experience in a modern car — unless the car is peculiar to drive such as a Caterham or a Morgan.
Today we are not so deprived. In addition to SCM, we have specialty magazines for the great Marques, and I get the Porsche magazine and four magazines devoted to Ferraris. Specializing is the key to publications. General interest magazines are doing poorly, but magazines for the aficionados are doing well. Plus we have great blogs like FerrariChat, immensely rewarding for the Tifosi such as myself. They are even splitting off a new LamboChat site.
So I will cry a bit for the loss of R&T, but not very much. We are heavily entertained by current media outlets (such as yours!).
I really liked the somewhat specialized Jennings Sports & Exotic cars, it did a bit (a lot actually) of what Road and Track did with their Used Car Classic and Salon pieces. Would read it from cover to cover like I used to with R &T.
R&T fan since 70s. And their recent (last year?) re-jig of the print mag was beautiful.
Phil – nice catch on this development! I have found no other source of info on the Demise. Yet.
As noted, Hagerty mag is great, tho different. I guess a publishing Model that is supported by Insurance is the only way to survive the death of Print. Jeez.
I have a garage full of past issues from the late 60s to the 80s when I ceased lusting after new automobile creations and turned my thoughts to motorcycles. This is a sad end of an era but . . .
Tell us why you think the massive OCTANE magazine from England thrives while our US car mags whither. I have subscribed to the well edited OCTANE for about ten years. Gave up on our domestic mags awhile ago. And the HAGERTY INSURANCE magazine is entertaining and informing me as well.
Mark, I’ve heard that OCTANE is in trouble as well … but I’m with you; the domestic mags quit interesting me ages ago, and since then I’ve looked overseas for inspiration and intelligent information.
Mark,
I think you hit on the nail on the head here—for any publication to thrive it must be well edited! Octane and Hagerty are good examples, however, I would also point you to Sports Car Market which is enjoying huge success in an era where magazines are dying. Why? Great writing and editing that is thoughtful, timely, relevant, and meaningful. SCM has organic writers from inside the sport that take the time to really do the work and write high quality articles. In this sense, SCM is almost like an organic “public good” given that the content is mostly generated by high profile experienced enthusiasts like Miles Collier, Donald Osborne, and Thor Thorson. Most of the writers for SCM are not employed by the magazine, but rather are called in from time to time for their specific expertise. Somehow the big U.S. magazines like R&T didn’t continously increase the qulaity of their content. They did not adapt and upgrade their offering. I tend to look at the iPad and the internet as a general benefit to print in the sense that newspapers are so much better to read on an iPad and I equally enjoying reading SCM on the iPad app. I still want and need the information and content, I just access it on a different platform. If I get my content over the internet or in print it is the same to me—I pay to get the New York Times, the New York Post, Sports Car Market and Bloomberg over an app. Print has been challenged for decades—first by radio in the 30’s then by television in the 50’s. The internet is just more of the same. I submit that its the content side that slipped at these big U.S. car magazines and that is the real reason for their demise. My niece who is a millenial works for a magazine called Dwell and they are killing it. Why? Great content for a fee that is accessable via print, the web, or an app.
Thank you all for being subscribers and providing this thoughtful dialogue.
Philip
I am a long time R&T subscriber and felt it odd yesterday when I received an invoice from R&T for an additional 1 year “Magazine” subscription for $7.00 ( how much lower can they go?).
Note that the invoice is dated January 16, 2019, the envelope is postmarked January 24 and, of course, they are encouraging me to pay for it online!
Thank you Philip for the heads-up!!