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When I was growing up, I was an avid Road & Track fan like just about every single Alfa enthusiast I know. Like most, I used to peruse the “For Sale” section looking at all the great cars for sale, but on occasion in the “Other” section I would see “Complete Road & Track collection for sale, in binder, Umpteen dollars”. “Umpteen” would usually be an astronomical value to your typical teenager and I would laugh and close the magazine, and it would migrate to the circular file some months later.

Now that I am older and wiser, I started to re-read vintage Road & Tracks and they really are great! But even better are some of the magazines that most have never seen—the ones that were in publication just a few years and simply disappeared. Fantastic auto and racing stories, lost forever in these dusty magazines. So today I am going to tell you what to look for … and where to find them …

My first excursion into the less-than-vintage mainstream of automotive reading was Sports Car Graphic. Sports Car Graphic was an outstanding magazine published from the late 50’s to the early 70’s. Not only did this magazine have great road tests of everything coming from foreign soil, but it also had outstanding coverage of race events. It really was the Swiss army knife of automotive publishing. It was also a prolific magazine, so issues are cheap and collections are easy to start. As you can imagine, after accumulating most of the 1960’s SCG, I needed to expand my horizons.

I can’t remember which came first—a collection of Sports Car Illustrated from eBay or a really moth-eaten collection of Motor Trend. Either way, both were good but they would become mainstream. The mid-60’s were clearly Motor Trend’s finest hour—before commercialism took over. Sports Car Illustrated main-stream? Let me explain: SCI was renamed “Car and Driver” by then editor Karl Ludvigsen to show a more general automotive focus. By the 70’s, both of these magazines suffered from professionalism and the desire to make a profit. If you’re collecting either of these magazines, clearly the late-50’s to mid-60’s were the best vintage, where stories might not have been written for their commercial value but for the sake of automotive journalism.

Now here’s where we delve into the off-beat and oddities: On-the Grid, Today’s Motorsports, US Autosports, and of course Competition Press. All of these magazines are relatively tough to find but occasionally pop up on eBay and at automotive flea markets. They are well worth the search and you might pay dearly to own a specific issue. These were magazines that really covered the U.S. racing scene and also had some decent automotive test drives. Absolutely fantastic reading if you really want to get a feel for racing in the 60’s. These are the magazines I live by these days.

You may be asking yourself, “Competition Press—didn’t they become Autoweek?” They did, and I jokingly say, “It was just flat-out wrong when the Autoweek title became larger than the Competition Press title!” As you can imagine, as Competition Press moved into the 70’s, their focus shifted from covering the racing scene and the publication became directed at the general automotive population.

There just isn’t anything better than a 60’s vintage issue of Competition Press. The best issues are mid-year since race coverage is more prolific. Even the classifieds can hold your imagination for hours. This was the publication in which you posted your race car if you wanted it sold—RSKs, Listers, Maseratis, and more. Here’s the catch: Competition Press was more of a newspaper than a magazine. Most issues, assuming they survived, are very fragile. You almost have to take an archival approach to preserving these, but it is well worth the effort.

There you have it—the best vintage reading around for just a couple of dollars. Next time you are at a flea market, race event, or even on eBay, just spend a moment to check out some of these old magazines. I think you will find yourself captivated for hours by the stories they hold.

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