For a magazine to last, it has to be more than just a timely catalog of word and image. There is also the alchemical aspect.
When its features and photos and headlines and captions and story selection get stitched together with purpose, something akin to a personality emerges. That’s when a magazine comes alive, when it sits down on the couch with you and tells you exactly what it thinks.
Cars are no different. The great ones meet their deadlines, their price targets, and their demographic profiles, just like the unremarkable ones. But the great ones have a living, breathing quality that makes them loyal and lovable dogs.
I’m writing about the relationship between these two things here, at this moment, because the magazine you are reading is going to celebrate its 60th birthday next month. I have been fortunate to hold title to 10 percent of those years. And, like many of you, I wonder how I got so lucky. In a lifetime of irresponsibility, it has been my great responsibility. And in a lifetime of great joys, it is among my greatest. Not only because I get to live among cars and the people who make them, but because I inherited a tradition of writing and adventure taking that is unparalleled in the world of automotive journalism.
Davis, Yates, Sherman, Phillips, O’Rourke, McCall, Weith, Lindamood, Ludvigsen—they all made it so. They gave this magazine the place in our culture it occupies now. From Dan Gurney for President in 1964 to the first Cannonball Baker in ’71 to Save the Manuals! in 2010, C/D has earned its longevity with its bullish, boundary-pushing personality. Often irascible, sometimes wrong, but never in doubt, C/D has, for six decades, been more than a second-order commentary on cars and their business. It has been a factor in that business itself.
If I am a steward of this tradition, then you are, too. After all, our readers are the reason this magazine exists. The entire point of this long-range field study is to make you happy and/or irate, to feed your thirst for information, to make sure you win every damn bar bet about roadholding numbers and quarter-mile times. Remember, all of us working here were part of the audience at one point. When we’re doing research in the office library and come upon Enzo Ferrari’s autobiography, ex libris Brock Yates, signed in the purple pen of il Commendatore himself—the chills, how you say, they are going up and down the spine.
We are all reading from the same hymnal. To celebrate that affinity, we want your stories (and photos and videos) about your cars and Car and Driver. When did you start reading the magazine or the site? What is your favorite car? What about the best or worst one you or your family has owned? We are collecting war stories, just as we do every month. But next month will be special.
Submit your stories here in the Backfires comments below, or via Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook using the hashtag #CD60. We’ll be curating and publishing our favorites to the site in installments, while those from social media will also feed a forthcoming livestream.
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