Um... Pilote Withdraws His Road & Track Rant

A few posts back I mentioned how useless Road & Track had become, and how I could get through an issue in an hour, including ads.  What I didn't say was that I was thinking about letting my subscription (since 1959!) lapse.  Let me withdraw that rant, at least provisionally.

 The latest issue showed up a few days ago.  It took me two hours to get through it.  Two of the road tests (and their data panels) were the kind of exhaustive pieces I've valued for decades.  The format seems to be moving back toward "magazine" and away from "web page for those with attention deficit disorder."  Some of the pieces are longer and continue without jump pages.  More text, smaller pictures.   All things that I like.

There's a new editor, who, it turns out, is a former technical editor for Car & Driver.   Back in the day, Road & Track made its bones on technically-oriented writing for laymen.  And its rigid, "call 'em as we see 'em" objectivity.    You could take what R&T wrote to the bank.  It didn't know how to do gee-whiz journalism, or purple prose about how a car made you feel.  (What we need is data and objective observations; we can figure out for ourselves how cars make us feel.)

I phoned a Chicago advertising manager to express appreciation for the changes and to encourage R&T further along these lines.  (There was no Editorial Office contact info on the masthead.)  And got my "ahhhhh...." moment.  For several years, R&T was owned by a French magazine conglomerate who's principal product was a fashion magazine.  Although the management policy was largely hands-off, this explains the graphics changes and "flip the pages" short articles.  A year ago, R&T was purchased by Hearst, which actually knows and cares about publishing content.  Significant changes are underway in editorial management and policy.  The magazine's editorial headquarters are moving from Newport Beach, CA (where it has been since inception) to Detroit. 

So we shall see.  No way is R&T going back to the old Founder's Days of John R. Bond (Editor & Publisher) in the '50's and '60's, when you could read a 4-page piece on cylinder head design and valve train actuation, with helpful illustrations.  Or similar pieces about slip angle, understeer and oversteer, and polar moment of intertia.  You know: the stuff that educated us about our cars and driving techniques.  But we can hope for the Petersen Publications days of thorough road tests (as opposed to "driving impressions"), insightful pieces on racing, and practical technical information.

I hope they do keep Peter Egan's column for my sentimental side.  It's only 2% of the page count.  His writing "voice" is usually touching, sometimes funny, and always stylish.  The problems started when the rest of the staff tried to write like him while, at the same time, dumming down the content.