Goodbye Hot Rod Magazine?

[Rockford]

After the silent cull of Car Craft, Musclecar Review et al a few years ago I've just learned that Hot Rod magazine has become a quarterly publication. Only found out when no March issue landed. I thought after all the other titles slipped away unannounced HR was safe but it seems not. I've been reading it since I was 16 years old, I'm 60 now. I wonder how long it can survive in this format. Next thing they'll be telling us that they're going to stop making Pontiacs!

[deuces wild]

1 hour ago, Rockford said:

After the silent cull of Car Craft, Musclecar Review et al a few years ago I've just learned that Hot Rod magazine has become a quarterly publication. Only found out when no March issue landed. I thought after all the other titles slipped away unannounced HR was safe but it seems not. I've been reading it since I was 16 years old, I'm 60 now. I wonder how long it can survive in this format. Next thing they'll be telling us that they're going to stop making Pontiacs!

Or, Oldsmobiles....?‍?

[stitchdup]

are you sure its gone quarterly? it might just be sitting with issue 222 in a usps warehouse

[The Junkman]

Same sort of thing with both Car and Driver and with Road & Track.  I'd been reading both diligently since 1969.  No longer receive either in the mail.  And I get Vintage Motorsport on my iPad.

Edited March 1 by The Junkman

[GoodbuildNY]

When I received a renewal notice a few months ago it said they were going quarterly but each issue will be “packed” with content…. We’ll see 

[Dave Van]

At one time I took 12 or so magazines a month. 

I am down to three now. But the magazines are killing themselves.  Many of the mags I took went from 12 issues a year to 4....at a higher price!!!! So it's death by killing themselves as much as anything

[vamach1]

Hemings Muscle Machines is still delivered monthly and at a good price.  There I probably jinked it.  ?

[Force]

It's not a good time for magazines nowadays, less and less people buys them and they are dropping off one by one, one certain clue is when a monthly magazine go bimonthly, then quarterly and then...no more...it's sad.
I for one hate to read magazines online and if that's the only option left I will for sure opt out, I like to sit in my favourite chair with a paper copy magazine in my hands, flip through the pages and read...not on a device of some sort that needs power to work.
 

[espo]

As a long time subscriber to many of the Auto Enthusiasts magazines I also have become very disillusioned with the whole quarterly magazine issues for more money than before. As Rockford pointed out the many different tiles started going away, usually just after I had renewed my subscription. This past year I decided to not renew my Motor Trend subscription that I have had for more than 50 years since their main story line has been EV's and very little else. I'll keep Hot Rod for now, but they are on thin ice with me anyway. As for Car & Driver as well as Road & Track, their changing formats and coverage of mostly cars costing more than my home, 401k, and life insurance combined. I no longer find them relative to anyone in my station in life. I used to subscribe to Ol' Skool and they went BK right after I renewed my subscription as well. You might think that I'm the kiss of death to monthly publications, but I think it has mare to do with the organizations that are running these magazines. I'm still holding out with Hemmings as long as they keep sending me their Muscal Car and Collector Car publications. Their writers seem to present a far more compressive article about each car they present. 

[Rockford]

I've always found the quality of the journalism in the US magazines superior to UK titles, the tech articles and series on vehicles like the Wilshire Shaker or the Disco Nova were just so well written and photographed. I do really miss the gentle irreverence of Car Craft though, remember the Anti-Tour against the Power Tour of Hot Rod? Cheeky! Some of the articles still stick in the mind now:- "The Car That Put the 'ick' in Buick", "Polishing the Fireturd", "This Car Makes Little Children Cry" - this was about a hemi Dodge that was very loud; they did a photoshoot outside an art-deco ice cream parlour and forgot it was full of children. When they fired it, up the poor kids in the shop wet themselves. There was another article about someone building a car and he had an obscure Eastern European name, it was something like Hrbrzyk, and regardless of the article content they called it "Tom Hybrzyk Can't Pronounce Hybrzyk". Just fantastic stuff. Imagine how pleased I was when I discovered that the owner of Hot Rod,  Robert E Petersen was married to a girl called Margie McNally - obviously a distant relative! 

[Ace-Garageguy]

No surprise Hot Rod is going away.

We have at least two generations who 1) have generally poor reading comprehension; 2) don't have much use for physical reality; 3) don't want to work on cars; 4) have few physical skills anyway; 5) don't even have much interest in driving; and 6) have little disposable income to support advertisers.

When your target demographic is disappearing, you throttle back production.

                                                        

Edited March 1 by Ace-Garageguy
CLARITY

[Rockford]

Just remembered another one about a turbo that drove the rear axle to add power,  it was branded Turbonique. They tested it under the headline "Turbonique, fantastique or junque?" Brilliant.  

[Ace-Garageguy]

13 minutes ago, Rockford said:

Just remembered another one about a turbo that drove the rear axle to add power,  it was branded Turbonique. They tested it under the headline "Turbonique, fantastique or junque?" Brilliant.  

Not a "turbo". A small turbine engine. Different things.

https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/hrdp-0403-turbonique/

   

Edited March 1 by Ace-Garageguy

[CaddyDaddy]

If Hot Rod were to go I’ll be sad. Not so much for its current reading value, but because it’s such a touch stone in our lives. Now Car Craft, losing that one really broke me up. There was a long time where I subscribed to both. I always enjoyed Car Craft more. I found the topics and the writing much more irreverent. Hot Rod, I thought, always spoke down to me. Now, for pure technical knowledge, no one ever beat Popular Hot Rodding.

[THarrison351]

My last subscription (one of the Hemmings, I had all three) ran out several of years ago. Those were the last subs I had. I used to have so many subs, but with the internet and me reading more books, I just found the magazines piling up and not getting read. In fact, it took almost a year and a half to finish my final Hemmings mags. When they canceled my SAE subscription what, four years ago, that was truly the end. I just had to let my others run out.

[styromaniac]

On 3/1/2024 at 6:19 PM, Ace-Garageguy said:

Not a "turbo". A small turbine engine. Different things.

https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/hrdp-0403-turbonique/

   

I remember that craziness from my childhood days. There was an ad in Popular Science featuring a '55 VW Bug called the " Black Widow", driven by Roy " Mr. Pitiful " Drew of Kansas City. At a Tampa dragstrip in 1965 he clocked 168 mph in 9.36 seconds. A match race was set up with Tommy Ivo's four Buick engined " Showboat". The VW came to an end in when it went airborne at 183 mph 200 ft short of the quarter mile traps. Roy survived, the car didnt. Turbonique was the brainchild of aerospace engineer Gene Middlebrooks of Orlando Fla. He studied mechanical engineering at Ga Tech and worked for Martin Marietta on the Pershing missle program. His company specialized in very compact low cost gas turbines...fueled by isopropyl nitrate ( aka Thermolene )...a stable milky white liquid monopropellant fuel that doesnt require atmospheric oxygen to burn. When introduced into the combustion chamber at 600 psi and ignited by a spark plug connected to an on/off switch...the immediate result being an intense release of hot gases to spin turbine blades. Thermoline cost $3.50 / gallon in 1967 and was selected because it was easily ignited, clean burning, compatible with most metals, storable for indefinite periods, and comparably safe to high octane gasoline. Combined with Turbonique's incredibly compact and light weight turbines...they had the ability to deliver incredible power for brief intervals. But as many users soon discovered...there was too much power. Extreme tire spin...even on the best slicks of the day...made the drag axle equipped cars difficult to control. Full quarter mile smoke shows and flaming night runs with impressive trap speeds...but mediocre elapsed times were the rule, not the exception. Being based on rocket fuel and technology... safety issues emerged...particularly if the operator left off the throttle and then reapplied it the device would essentially become a bomb. After a few incidents and some fatalities NHRA banned the use of Turbonique turbines in 1967. In 1968 founder Middlebrooks was accused and jailed for mail fraud mostly based on the goods he sold being more difficult and expensive to finish and install than described in his advertisements. An appeal in 1972 was rejected. Middlebrooks died in 2005. Every now and then one of his many Turbonique turbines would show up on places like eBay. Now...where can I get a canister of Thermolene?

[styromaniac]

[oldscool]

What bugs me is there are no car mags on the rack yet I can still purchase a half dozen different gun mags. I own guns so this is not an anti gun thing just an observation.

[Bainford]

Thanks for the Turbonique info. Such a cool device.  I was always curious about these things when I would see them as a kid in car magazines., but couldn't quite understand their operation. In that era of cheesy performance add-ons for cars, even then I had wondered just how legit the power claims were. Years later, as I came to better understand turbines, I realised that the power potential was significant, and wondered if any were successfully employed.

[Ace-Garageguy]

Hot Rod magazine in the late postwar era and all through the '50s could have just as well been called "Hot Rod Engineering". I have a fair collection of mags from the era, with in-depth articles on the various types of ignition systems from battery/coil to magneto to early electronic setups, the theory and practical application of supercharging and its effect on volumetric efficiency, modifying and tuning Hilborn mechanical injection for the street, carburettor theory, design analysis of American units, and practical mods and tuning, theory and practice of header design...much of what anyone could need to know to become a competent and knowledgeable car builder...or just a good mechanic with a firm grounding in basic concepts...was covered at one time or another.

In the last years, most of that stuff would have been nixed by the dumbed-down editorial policy, binned in the TLDR can.

It's a shame, because much of my engineering interest was inspired by periodicals like Hot Rod, and the tech stuff lit a fire in me to learn as much as I could absorb into the workings of automobiles and machines in general...and by extension, the workings of the physical world we all inhabit.

From what I've seen lately, I can't imagine much of what's out there now having the same effect on a young person.

EDIT: One of the earlier magazine flags to fall was Sports Car Graphic, whose tech editor was Paul van Valkenburgh, author of the classic Race Car Engineering and Mechanics, a tech wizard if there ever was one. One standout article I vividly recall took a DeTomaso Mangusta from a relatively unreliable, overheating, typically finicky Italian exotic, corrected a multitude of smallish issues, and turned it into a useable daily driver you could actually go someplace in. How cool was that?

SCG folded in 1971, and later my entire collection was lost along with the contents of a storage unit when I was occupied elsewhere.

 

                                    

Edited March 25 by Ace-Garageguy

[espo]

My subscription for Hot Rod is still in effect for another six months and I recently received the latest issue that is focused on the Pro Street movement. The way Hot Rod presented the changes to subscribers was the quarterly issues and better content. I'm still not thrilled about the situation with Hot Rod, Motor Trend and all, but I was impressed with the manner in which the magazine covered some of the iconic early Pro Street cars. Time will tell if I renew my subscription or not, but if anyone is building a Pro Street model or is curious about them, they might want to pick up this issue. 

[1972coronet]

I agree re: the digital format bollocks. I'm tactile - staring at a screen while scrolling is not the same as holding a book, magazine, etc. while flipping pages. 

I miss Muscle Car Review quite a lot. A close - and very good - periodical is Canada's Muscle Cars : Bone Stock & Modified.

I understand that Mopar Action was axed (again) recently. 

On 3/1/2024 at 7:46 AM, GoodbuildNY said:

When I received a renewal notice a few months ago it said they were going quarterly but each issue will be “packed” with content…. We’ll see 

Translation : more pages of ads for shaving kit subscriptions, colognes, and cutlery.

[stitchdup]

50 minutes ago, 1972coronet said:

I agree re: the digital format bollocks. I'm tactile - staring at a screen while scrolling is not the same as holding a book, magazine, etc. while flipping pages. 

I miss Muscle Car Review quite a lot. A close - and very good - periodical is Canada's Muscle Cars : Bone Stock & Modified.

I understand that Mopar Action was axed (again) recently. 

Translation : more pages of ads for shaving kit subscriptions, colognes, and cutlery.

and it looks really bad if you take the laptop into the toilet for a time, but its still the comfortable reading seat

[bobthehobbyguy]

I'm not surprised that HOT Rod magazine a aine is going away. When Petersen sold to Source Interlink a number of years ago all of their magazines started on the death spiral. Higher prices and excessive ads killed my interest.

I'm glad I had an extensive collection of paper magazines to read. I only need light to read them and I don't have to worry about charging of replacing batteries.

[webestang]

I still get just 2 mags. OldCars Weekly changed to bi-monthly a few years ago. Still a great mag and now they are no longer a newspaper type print but glossy color. Hemming's Classic car is still monthly.....for now......?