Pour One Out For Road & Track

by Jack Baruth

Published: May 31st, 2012

It’s the end of an era, as perhaps the best of the remaining American color car rags moves from Newport Beach to Ann Arbor. As the slightly snobby California counterpart to Motor Trend‘s unhappy mediocrity and Car and Driver’s wild swings between brilliance and boorishness, Road & Track has always provided pleasant, well-illustrated automotive content with a motorsports focus. No doubt part of that was due to the magazine’s distance from the Detroit manufacturers and its proximity to West Coast racetracks and the car-club culture.

No longer. Hearst Corporation is choosing to geographically merge R&T with C/D, and just in case there’s someone out there who isn’t getting the memo about what’s expected, they’re changing leadership as well.

According to the Hearst press release, former C/D editor Larry Webster will be calling the shots are the newly relocated magazine. Mr. Webster’s resume includes several impressive results in manufacturer-funded race appearances as well as a variety of legitimately interesting columns and features over his career. He is a legitimate “car guy”, not a “lifestyle guy” or a marketroid who endlessly bounces between both sides of the PR/journo buffet table.

Even with Mr. Webster’s legitimate qualifications taken into account, it’s hard to see this as anything other than the same sort of broken thinking that has over-promoted the current leadership at the other American magazines. Combine that with a move back into the sordid orbits of the PR machine, and it’s easy to conclude that Hearst is simply preparing everyone for the inevitable merger of their two automotive properties.

I will miss the old R&T. There was always a quiet dignity to their leafy photography and painstaking specification sheets. Let’s hope Mr. Webster makes this slide into oblivion as painless as possible.

Jack Baruth

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05lgt on Jun 01, 2012

Someone give Jack a car to drive and write about. This is getting ridiculous. How long has it been? Was the rental Corolla really the last one? Am I forgetting a car?

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Jeff Snavely on Jun 03, 2012

I think R&T is currently the worst of the mags - all their new car previews & reviews read like press releases with no opinion or commentary to be found. The big comparos are good, but I only skim R&T vs. reading all the other mags.

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- NMGOM on Jun 04, 2012
  
  Sometimes I wish they (R&T, C&D) wouldn't turn everything into a contest of rankings with winners and losers. Why can't they just generate the test numbers, and then take the car out on its own merits for a drive and comment about its attributes?... Let us take that info and do the comparisons, if we wish. Now, they sometimes compare cars I would never compare, or omit comparing some that are obvious head-to-head competitors. --------------
  
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- Highdesertcat on Jun 04, 2012
  
  @NMGOM "Sometimes I wish they (R&T, C&D) wouldn’t turn everything into a contest of rankings with winners and losers." They're in the business of selling magazines. That's why they chose that format. And they each have their favorites, driven by the amount of ad dollars spent with them. My recommendation is to test drive each of the vehicles you are interested in and then decide for yourself. One example was a friend of ours whose Murano CVT had died for the second time and was no longer covered under warranty. My wife let her drive our 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee to Albuquerque to buy a new car and the woman fell in love with it. Instead of buying a Pilot, as she had intended to do, she ended up driving another Grand Cherokee home. Mags are good for entertainment value, not much else. The final decision should always be seat-of-the-pants.
  
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