| Climb in, select first gear and lets get underway. Auto Aficionado is your magazine. It is about you and the cars you own, love, drive, show, and restore. It will be a celebration of the best of the automotive culture. Your life. We will share our memories and yours. We will expect to see you on the pilgrimages to the great automotive shrines. I'll spring for a couple of coffees so we can wander around Piazza della Vittoria looking into the great treasures about to take off for a thousand miles of Mille Miglia history. Let's share breakfast on the terrace while Bill Warner and his crew place our favorite cars on the lawns at Amelia Island. I'll loan you my copy of Peter Egan's "Side Glances" in exchange for your "Henry Manney at Large" for those two or three unscheduled hours during the Monterey fortnight. This will be fun. The age of "trailer queens" and "dead car shows" is over. Everything that was a car is now a car again and we can drive or chase them all over the world. Auto Aficionado will celebrate that latest element in the elaborate equation that is automotive culture. Our heroes made our history, but they left us their toys so we can make our own. Here is a preview of our plan. Ten of the most exciting and rewarding years
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of my life were spent in a little office just around the corner from the office of David E. Davis, Jr. DavidE is a hero, a mentor, a great connoisseur of life, and a friend. He helped me see the automotive world and focus my attention on what was important. He suggested (strongly) that a motor journalist's job, while being critical of the hardware, was to celebrate the culture in all of its myriad tangents and evolutions. Auto Aficionado will drive and test the classics and the future classics. We will include road test data as an important part of our driving experience. It will be fun to see how far the great manufacturers have come-or how well they had done it in the beginning. You will see us where the action is. We will introduce you to the characters; the cool and the cantankerous. We'll discover places you may never get to see except in these pages, but you'll feel like you've been there. One of my favorite places on earth is in David Love's 250 Testa Rossa. He has invited me to race it several times and it is a place I love to describe. You will very likely hear about it. But, remember, this is your magazine. It is a dialogue. Our job will be to document the continued evolution of your enthusiasm, and our own.
Larry Crane |
