Room for Friends – Letter From the Publisher
The winter letter is always the hardest to write and comes with a twinge of envy for our friends who have a year-round driving season. The memory of last year’s brutal winter in northern Michigan is still too fresh, and most of us didn’t even have our cars back on the road until well into May. That said, we hope this issue provides some comfort for gearheads in less hospitable climes.
Four-door sedans never seem to get the love they deserve. They’re eminently practical, and in the case of the cars we’ve profiled here, they’re just as cool as coupes and convertibles of the day. Executive Editor Jonathan A. Stein picked a particularly compelling group of sedans — three American and one French — and we are grateful to the Gilmore Car Museum (gilmorecarmuseum.org) for its help in making this story happen.
After eight years of publishing this magazine, there are few topics we haven’t touched in some way. The neo-classic is one of them. They’re flashy and they turn heads in droves, and writer Jim Koscs takes a look at both the cars and the celebrities who wouldn’t be seen in anything but a Clenet or an Excalibur in the 1970s and ’80s.
Speaking of unturned stones, Managing Editor Stefan Lombard delves into the curious world of forward control trucks of the 1960s. Not quite van, not quite pickup, theirs is an interesting and appropriately brief story.
Emily Thomas is someone you’ve seen on the masthead (as Emily Black) for a long time. She has the thankless but critical job of keeping a team of creatives on task — the magazine equivalent of keeping an Austin-Healey’s three SU carbs in sync. She’s also a very good writer, and she finally got to prove it in our experiential story about ice boating. For fans of speed, it’s an utterly fascinating sport — and a great read.
Happy motoring…
