The Century Mark

I find it really hard to believe that this issue of Vintage Racecar is our 100th! I recently had a full set of back issues bound and it is kind of amazing to look back at all those issues and the improvements that the magazine has gone through over these past nine years of publication. In fact, when we recently sat down and looked through our inaugural issue—32 pages, all black and white—I really had to cringe with embarrassment. However, since it shows how far we’ve come in such a relatively short period of time, I reluctantly agreed to reprint several sections of that first issue, here this month. If you don’t laugh at the amateurish layout, you certainly will laugh at some of the racecar prices that we also reproduced to give you a new sense of perspective on the market.

There’s a great line in the movie “Grand Prix,” where Jean-Pierre Sarti (played by Yves Montand) explains the philosphy of racing to a neophyte. He says that he believes that racing drivers lack a certain amount of imagination, because if they could really visualize what it would be like to hit a tree at 150 mph, they would never get in a racing car again. In the same vein, I firmly believe that starting a magazine requires a very large lack of imagination.