The first press of the throttle. The first twist of the key. The giddy, shaking-with-excitement, up-all-night bliss that comes with learning to drive and having your own first car.
The clank, thud or plunk of the worn-out shifter. The smell of fuel. The first powerslide. The windows that don't roll up. The slipping clutch. The first drive with a female other than your mother. The freedom. The day you realize cars will be part of your life forever. The passion you have for them now.
All these automotive memories, for me, are followed with the same emotions that came with my first day as editor of Sport Compact Car. However, in both cases, the reminders of what has been pale compared to what can be.
It doesn't matter how you started your fascination with cars, it only matters that you did and that you're reading this right now. Because it's that passion that makes this magazine every month. It's that passion that has car geeks sitting in cubes processing data for you to argue about. It's that passion that gets every car we test on a dyno and it's that same passion that keeps me running on five hours of sleep for weeks on end.
We like cars around here. In fact, we like them so much most of us don't have time for anything else. We spend our days writing about, photographing and testing cars. Then we go home at night and think about better ways to write about, photograph and test cars. And we do it because we've all been there. We still stay up at night thinking about twisting the key and pressing the throttle on a new car with the same passion we had for our first cars.
Recently I got so caught up in ways to improve what you see in these pages that I enlisted the services of a starving college student (read: intern) to post a series of content questions about Sport Compact Car to 11 different model-specific online chat forums.
The staggering pile of paperwork he produced is so huge I've yet to dig through it all. But in the few moments I spent gazing into the minds of our readers I've been flattered, insulted and amazed-quite a combination of feelings for such a short bit of time. This was a first at SCC. Never before have we made such conscious efforts to gather feedback from our readership.
Now, with the help of this informal survey and any information I might get from you via e-mail (josh.jacquot@primedia.com), we'll be certain that our efforts to bring you the best enthusiast magazine are spent in the right places.
That said, I need some feedback. Send me your thoughts. What kind of feature cars do you like best? What kind of tech stories are your favorite? Do you like adventure stories? Are Coleman's tales of rallying or Holstein's yarns about driving cross-country still fun? Which kind of content is most important?
What about driving? That's really what it's all about, right? We might spend hours wrenching on our cars, but if we don't spend equal time driving them hard can we call ourselves real enthusiasts? I'd say no.
I'm more of a driving enthusiast than a wrenching enthusiast anyway. I'll take a day on the backroads to a day turning tools anytime. What about you? I need to know.
This magazine has traditionally centered on exploiting the joys of small, relatively inexpensive, fun-to-drive cars. The opportunity to use these pages to share a passion for driving them seems like an obvious thing to do. And, to a certain extent, we've already done a bit of that.
Now, however, I'd like to really share that passion through more driving stories. That is, of course, if you'd like to see them. Or, if not, say so now.
Other firsts this month?
See page 24, where Coleman was allowed a first behind-the-scenes look at Cosworth's XFE engine. Naturally, the Cosworth folks were tight-lipped about the most intimate details of the race engine that powers the cars in the Champ Car World Series-a bit odd considering there's theoretically no competition. Still, this is an in-depth look at one of the world's most high-tech boosted engines.
And on page 52 Jared Holstein explores NISMO's Z Tune Skyline GT-R, easily one of the quickest production cars ever. With only 20 scheduled to be built, owning one of these cars puts you in a very exclusive club, as if that wasn't already the case with the GT-R.
In this space, "Slip Angle" takes a new twist this month. For the first time of any consequence, it's the opening editorial column in the magazine.
All of this is the long way to say I'm the new guy at the top of the masthead. And my passion for cars is bigger than ever. Let me know what you want and I promise to make it just like the first time you mashed the gas.