Even as the BMW kept braking down during the comparo?

 

I subscribed to C/D's forerunner Sports Cars Illustrated back in the late '50's. I remember Ken Purdy, without question the dean of American automotive writers (who was simultaneously the Automotive Editor for Playboy), set the tone for SCI with some of the finest prose ever to find its way into an enthusiast magazine.

SCI became Car and Driver with the rise of American challengers to the sports car mystique in 1961, and the irreverent style of David E. Davis, William Jeanes, Dennise McCluggage, Brock Yates, began to color (or pollute) my own writing style. After over thirty years, these people were like family and frequent contributors like P.J. O'Rourke and Jean Shepherd were to my mind, some of the great literary talents of the late 20th Century.

Sadly after the mass defection to Automobile by David E. and many of the old-timers, C/D began to change from a literate amalgam of Road and Track and Mad Magazine to something more akin to Hot Rod - embracing performance at all costs, with no regard for the culture of the automobile. It became a fan magazine, a house organ for Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, and lost both objectivity and its famed independence in the move to Ann Arbor.

Automobile is today a faint wraith of the original C/D, and it is difficult to witness the decline of a once-brilliant art form. I no longer subscribe to automotive magazines and haven't for years - perhaps out of mourning for my first love.

 

I was about to reply but then I saw your sig..

btw, no hate here.

 

Uh, no . Even when Lexus does well in a C&D comparison, it makes no difference; they're still a bad magazine, only a former shell of what the magazine used to be.

 

just wait and see.