Editor-at-Large Don Fuller benefited from a widely circumvented Petersen Publishing policy that for a time seemed to forbid staffers from racing. Fuller wrote about racing a Mitsubishi Mirage in Japan, a Barber-Saab at Del Mar, and a Porsche 944 Turbo in Quebec. He described taking a front-drive, four-cylinder Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme to a class record at Bonneville at 213.442 mph, earning the right to wear the coveted 200-MPH Club hat, jacket, and boxer shorts. Race team owner Jim Feuling then added a bigger turbo to the Olds, and Editorial Director Len Emanuelson pushed it to a whopping 221.663-mph, making "Motor Trend the only magazine with two guys in the 200-MPH Club," reported Fuller. Before I joined the Motor Trend staff, Fuller and I co-drove the Archer Brothers' Eagle Talon at Nelson Ledges, and Emanuelson joined us in the car for the Mosport 24-Hour in what turned out to be my job interview. Fuller chronicled everything but my salary negotiations in "48 Hours Flat-Out Summer." (Don and I later co-drove to back-to-back overall victories and a class win at Nelson in a Mosler Intruder.)
Before he joined the staff, now-Editor-in-Chief C. Van Tune earned the Rookie of the Year award in his class at the '90 Pikes Peak Hill Climb, driving IMSA multi-champion Paul Rossi Racing's all-wheel-drive Eagle Talon.
Fortunately, we don't have to go fast to produce a memorable race car test as Executive Editor Jeff Karr proved in 1991, driving Ivan Stewart's Toyota off-road truck. "The vehicle and I were suddenly one, a cohesive fusion of man and machine," said Karr in the May '91 issue. "As I hung comfortably from my tightly cinched racing harness the truck felt completely and unyieldingly stable for the first time the whole day. Sure, it was on its roof, but at least I was in control of the situation at last."
Since I joined the Motor Trend staff in April 1991, I've tested some two dozen race cars, not counting an inestimable number of racing school machines. Highlights include a run in the Comptech Reynard I95-Honda CART ("When those Firestones hooked up, the world instantly got very narrow, like looking through a rapidly shrinking mailing tube," I recounted in the April '96 issue. "I was fanning the sequential shift lever like it was an M-16 trigger and the bad guys were swarming the wire."), machines from NASCAR's Busch and Craftsman Truck series, a Chrysler Viper GTS-R Le Mans racer, a World of Outlaws sprint car, and the MT-sponsored Pep Boys Indy Racing League car, with which I lapped Texas Speedway at 204.7 mph ("I'd gone for a gallop on the back of a Jurassic Velociraptor: We were getting there in a hurry, but if I fell off I was going to get eaten").
After 50 years of it, we can report that testing race cars is not really so much different from what we normally do. In fact, we often drive far more valuable and irreplaceable cars: manufacturer's prototypes. We sometimes manage to crash those, too.