At The Magazines, Everything But The Photography is Fake

Well, sometimes the photos are fake as well

The author at 122mph, when 15 would have done. Image: Andrew Trahan

This is a story about naivete. My own.

As a child I thrilled to the stories of high-speed back-road derring-do in the pages of Car and Driver and resolved to duplicate them at the earliest teenaged opportunity. I totaled my first car, a 5-speed Datsun 200SX hatchback, the first time I drove it without adult supervision, trying to “powerslide” my way through a right-angle turn in my neighborhood long after night had fallen.

(The drift was fine, and about 75% in control, but there was a four-door Stanza parked illegally at corner exit, and I punted the Stanza onto the front porch of a nice old lady’s house.)

After I survived a freshman year at Miami my long-suffering father ponied up for a new four-speed VW Fox two-door, and I immediately pointed the thing at the Hocking Hills of C/D legend. In the five years that followed I came to know every turn, every declining radius, every tricky downhill loss of traction.

By the time I signed on as a “Contributing Editor”, meaning freelancer at the bottom of the food chain, at Road&Track, I’d driven those roads at about 9.7/10ths in everything from a 911 to a Phaeton. Imagine my excitement when I found out we’d be doing a group test, the first-ever “Road&Track Performance Car Of The Year”, in the Hocking Hills! I had a strategy to avoid being embarrassed by all the great drivers on the magazine — I’d start in front and say there were animals in the road or something, so that way I wouldn’t get left behind by the group. I think I was in a Fiesta ST or something like that. Behind me I had a Corvette, a Porsche, a supercharged Jag, all sorts of hardware. This was going to be bad, so I pushed pretty hard from the start. Not as hard as I would in my own car, because I didn’t want to ruin PCOTY by crashing one of our contenders, but pretty hard.

Twenty minutes later, I looked back and realized that the group must have gone in another direction. This was even worse than being left behind! I had no cell phone signal. I pulled the car over by the roadside and started weighing my options. Did I have a paper map somewhere in the car? We were all supposed to have one. I’d look through the map and start making a plan.

There was no map. No signal. I might as well just… start looking around for people, right? As I was getting back in the car, a train of R&T editors came by. I waved to let them know I was okay, then joined the pack at its tail.

At the next meal stop, I heard people excitedly describing their battle with the Hocking Hills in the same language I remembered from those old C/D articles… but they’d all been going so slowly! How had they determined all these precise little facts of understeer and camber change and braking behavior at a pace roughly equivalent to what I’d run in an 81-horsepower VW on 155SR13 tires twenty-three years ago?

Reader, I was naive.