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The SHELBY AMERICAN
Spring 2019 9
The magazine is not what it once
was; nearly everyone old enough to
have read it in the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s knows that. Today it seems to
have lost its way, lacking a sense of
relevance to its readers. Possibly
this is a result of the corporate suits
having pushed aside the enthusi-
asts who, while they may not have
had their eye firmly fixed on corpo-
rate goals, they sure knew who
their readers were and what they
wanted. So the dear old girl will
continue to hobble around, until
she becomes an embarrassing
milquetoast that means nothing to
anyone, and will quietly disappear.
Time spent bemoaning the loss of
the finer days in our past might be
better used to contemplate how
lucky we are to have lived through
this Golden Age of automotive ex-
citement and how it fueled our four-
wheeled fantasies until we became
old enough and successful enough
to reach out and grab some of what
we, as glassy-eyed youngsters, had
dreamed about.
We expect that it won’t be all
that long until the printed version
of
Car and Driver
will also bite the
dust. Like
R&T
, it is not the maga-
zine we remember. However, once
both of these printed magazines are
gone we will still have the best
ones – the musty issues we have
kept forever – to hold in our hands
and read again and again. It’s not
the same as hitting “find.”
START ‘EM OFF YOUNG DEPT.
HOT WHEELS 50TH ANNIVERSARY
When Jeff Burgy’s granddaughter,
Shelby, was a year old it was time to
get her acquainted with the Cobra.
This was done by spending some time
in the Cobra arcade game at the local
mall, where players sit behind the
wheel in a cartoon Cobra and “drive,”
watching the screen which is made to
look like the car’s windshield. That
was a eighteen months ago. Fast-for-
ward to today: Shelby has her own
Shelby (suitably customized by
Gramps) and she is already tearing up
the asphalt (driveway).
Do you suppose she already knows
that there is a candy maroon Cobra
289 FIA replica waiting patiently in
the garage for her to take possession
of as soon as she is of driving age?
The most successful auto maker in the
world? Mattel. Since 1968 they have
built over 6 billion cars. To celebrate
their 50th anniversary they assembled
a massive display on the Lexus Velo-
drome, an indoor bicycle racing track in
Detroit. No word from Ken Young yet,
that he found the Cobra.