
Writing for Cars Illustrated was tough at times.
As a hard core Street Racer with Top Fuel aspirations, it was awesome. I got to fill many pages with stuff I absolutely loved.
And then, there was “The Box”.
See, the Editor really wasn’t much of a car guy. He didn’t hate cars, per se, but he certainly didn’t have much of a grasp of how the Gearhead’s mind worked.
He was a photographer, and he would go to shows and shoot hundreds of pics of cars that, to him, looked cool. Those pics would end up in a box marked “Car Features”, and every issue we would have to rummage through this box and pick out a few cars that would dress out the color pages.
Finding pretty was easy…coming up with words was not!
This led to what became known as the Cars Illustrated “Slam of the Month”.
To be honest, even then I felt bad about doing them…but it was an act of frustration and defiance , and it ended up actually selling magazines. You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?
Most of these stories are creatures from my past I’m more than happy to leave dead and buried, but this one I’m actually kinda proud of! A lot of readers thought the Sidepipe “Tech” was real!
Story below…