IS TURBO MAGAZINE THE LATEST VICTIM OF THE BAD ECONOMY?

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As the Detroit 3's "Drive On Washington" has arrived and the honchos of the General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Chrysler are fighting for the very life of the U.S. Auto industry, here's a grim diversion.

The Turbo Magazine message board has a post questioning whether Turbo Magazine is about to be shuttered by corporate parent Source Interlink.

While the poobahs at Turbo apparently can't put down the latest "JDM" bits off the boat from Tokyo long enough to squelch or confirm this nasty rumor, the question did prompt this prescient response from one reader:

It wouldn't surprise me if it did [shut down].

I started reading Turbo with Volume 1, Issue 1 back in the mid '80s. I have a copy of every issue of Turbo ever published (except one that the post office lost back in 1993).

The quality of the magazine has declined precipitously over the past fifteen years. When Turbo started it had a balance of American and import cars, as well as D-I-Y hacks and all-out pro builds.

When the U.S. automakers abandoned OEM turbocharging in the early 1990s, Turbo started changing into a blingy Japanese tuner rag. At some point, it even became hostile to power-adder V8s, notwithstanding huge advances in big-inch turbocharging and an explosion of "heads-up" V8 turbo cars in drag racing.

Turbo missed out on grassroots legends such as Mike Sitar They ignored the huge "turbomustangs" message board and on-line community. They never covered the sorts of budget hacks and hops common to Australia's Autospeed magazine. They ignored a whole generation of American high-tech performance cars.

Instead, they concentrated on trying to push Japanese products and bottomless-wallet professional builds.

If someone relies only on Turbo these days, they'd be mislead into thinking only four- and six-cylinder cars of 3.8 literes or less are ever turbocharged.

Sure, Turbo had to do what it took to survive and it needed to serve its advertisers (readers are the product magazines deliver to their real customers -- adverstisers). But Turbo's myopic shift to an exclusive focus on the trendy "JDM" tuner "lifestyle" has left it very vulnerable.

The latest USPS report on subscribers, sales and readership shows that Turbo is not delivering very many eyeballs to their advertisers anymore.

TURBO DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO ACKNOWLEDGE OR CELEBRATE ITS 25th ANNIVERSARY! That ought to be a sign that the current editors don't really have a clue.

The collapse of the Japanese tuning scene hurts the American imitators,too(In Japan there's been lots of bankruptcies, fewer big-buck builds, too much "youth market" action in the 660 cc micro-vehicle class).

One of the Turbo editorials this month attempted to downplay the collapse of the tuner scene, claiming that the "hard core" would keep advancing the sport. But it sounded a bit like whistling past the graveyard to this "OG" reader.

Now with the American economy in the tank, weak books like Turbo are not well-equipped to weather the crisis.

A broader readership base might have saved Turbo. But spending 15 years running off almost all of the readers interested in "turbos and high-tech performance" as applied to (a) V8s,(b) cheap used cars, (c)American cars, and (d)in innovative home-builds is a formula for ruin.

Perhaps I fall outside of Turbo's coveted Wii/PlayStation demographic (after all I'm still ticked over that Pearl Harbor thing & post-WWII Japanese protectionism in their domestic auto market), but my subscription money spends just as well as the duckets of somebody born in 1990.

If Turbo folds, I just hope that they don't start sending me garbage like Super Street or Sport Compact Car to fill out my subscription . . . .

Well said! Let's hope that the staff of Turbo takes this criticism to heart.