Yew wanna do whut with mah whut?" That's one of the common responses to our request to test a race car. (Also popular: stunned silence followed by wild laughter.) See, most race car owners would rather loan us their teenaged daughters than their shiny machines, especially after they learn we don't fix broken race cars, no matter how they get bent. Even after they've acquiesced to our advances, we've arrived at the track to find that, sorry, this is really an old short-track car not set up or geared for a superspeedway, or, gee, your five minutes in the car started four and half minutes ago. Even when the car owner and sponsor are excited about reaching the six million adults who pick up each issue of Motor Trend, the team mechanics, worried they'll have to repair our bone-headed indiscretions, often make us feel as welcome as O.J. Simpson at a Goldman family reunion.
Still, Motor Trend staffers and contributors have tested every type of race car, from Formula One, Indy cars, and Winston Cuppers to go-karts. Our editors have set records at Bonneville, gone fast enough to qualify for Trans-Am and Craftsman Truck Series races, and won races and championships. But we've also flipped an off-road stadium truck and failed in our attempt to drag race an NHRA Pro Stock truck.
Testing race cars is a natural for Motor Trend: Our core business is driving cars and telling people what we think about them. Also, race car tests, with real acceleration test data, give readers a behind-the-scenes perspective they simply can't get on television.
Our first-ever test of a race car wasn't billed as a race car test. For the Jan. '52 issue, New York Editor John Bentley drove a Cunningham C2 sports car that placed fourth in the Watkins Glen Grand Prix: 47 years ago, race cars were closer to showroom stock than are today's street-stock race cars. "Acceleration in low gear is of the catapult variety," said Bentley of the Chrysler V-8-powered Cunningham's 6.3-second 0-60-mph run, performance now considered mundane for street cars. "I saw 124 mph in top [gear] at 4500, 1000 rpm shy of the redline [and] there was an embarrassing amount of throttle left."
In the May '55 issue, Detroit Editor Don MacDonald described how he set a class record in NASCAR's flying mile competition on the Daytona Beach sand at 112.295 mph in a DeSoto Fireflite. (On a recent family vacation, I went faster than that in a '99 Honda Odyssey without awakening my wife.) For the Oct. '55 issue, Editor Walt Woron sampled an Arnolt roadster that had run the 12 Hours of Sebring. Powered by a 130-horse 2-liter Bristol inline six, the car ran 0-60 mph in 9.9 seconds (slower than the '99 Odyssey). In July '57, Woron wrote of testing a Porsche Spyder, "strictly a race car," on the street: "Oh, the looks I got from the cops!" (Oh, that today we should get only looks from the cops!) The Spyder ran a 15.9-second quarter mile at 110 mph. (A new Camry is just as quick.)
In the '60s, even the Motor Trend salesmen were racers: Advertising Manager Bill Burke wrote about his 205-mph record run at Bonneville in the Sept. '61 issue. Publisher Ray Brock was Ak Miller's navigator for a class-winning run in the '68 Mexican 1000 in a '69 Ford F-100. Meanwhile, the writers were building drag cars. In '63, MT's Pro Stock Dodge ran the quarter in 12.3 seconds at 115 mph. With no obvious embarrassment, Road Test Editor Steve Kelly even built a '67 Rambler American that turned surprisingly quick 13-second quarter miles.
For the April '68 issue, Feature Editor Julian Schmidt rode with Dan Gurney during hot laps around Riverside in a Can-Am Lola. One of my first duties at Motor Trend was similar: a ride up Pikes Peak during race practice with Roger Mears. "When Editor Jeff Karr assigned me to ride Up the Hill With Mears in a propane-powered Nissan 300ZX twin-turbo, I asked, 'My work has been that unsatisfactory?'," I wrote in the Nov. '91 issue. On returning, I promised that, if I received another such assignment, I'd vomit in the driver's lap.