Draft:Street Racer Magazine

Street Racer Magazine was an independently published magazine that covered the import and 4 cylinder car culture in the United States between 1996 and 1999.

Publisher and creator of Street Racer Magazine, Mike DeFord

Created by Mike DeFord (Associate Publisher and Editor) and his wife, Hilary in the fall of 1996 to serve a segment of the car culture that was rarely covered by the big magazines, specifically the club style road racing sanctioned by groups like the SCCA, NASA and the TCCRA. While the magazine was only published for two years before selling out to a larger publisher, it made a large impact in exposing the market to autocross, road racing, rally and drifting. The Second issue of Street Racer, published in the spring of 1998 is the first time that a U.S.A. based magazine covered drifting thanks to their Assistant Editor, Wilson Tae visiting Japan and witnessing drifting first hand.

Street Racer booth at the SEMA Import Auto Salon

Street Racer Grand Prix Laguna Seca

While being meagerly funded, the magazine, thanks to Mike DeFord and his editorial and creative teams, Street Racer was able to build alliances with key players in the industry to ensure their success. NOPI, the countries largest performance parts distributor of compact car parts at the time distributed every issue of Street Racer in their mail order shipments large enough for the magazine to be packed in. The small magazine became sponsors of Hot Import Nights (the largest car show in the World at that time for compact/import cars), Goodtimes, a car show and racing series owned by the same family that owns the Goodguys hot rod events, the National Autosport Association/NASA (Mike DeFord later became the co-creator and marketing director of NASA's Hyperfest and US Drift events), the Sports Car Club of America/SCCA and the Touring Car Club Racing Association/TCRRA which all organized and sanctioned racing events across the country. Cars racing is various classes of these races carried Street Racer Magazine logos on each side of the car. In an interview with Mike DeFord (summer of 2024), he stated that with so many cars across the country carrying their logo, he still to this day meets racers that thank him for the support and coverage because the magazine was the first to cover amateur road racing.

But maybe their biggest alliance was with the video game Gran Turismo. The game was released in the winter of 1997, right after the first issue of Street Racer was to be published. After receiving pre launch marketing assets from Polyphony Digital (publishers and creators of Gran Turismo), DeFord held the magazine going to print so that an in-depth article could be written about the new game. That first article led a series of articles using content provided to the magazine to showcase the now very popular video game as a tool to educate readers about how to modify and race their real World street cars.

Bay Area DJ, Ray Swifty Fong

The magazine also covered the readers lifestyle beyond cars. It featured an action sports section written by BMX legend Todd Lyons and a music section written by a Bay Area DJ named Ray "Swifty" Fong.

After just two short years, Street Racer had made an impact in the market and larger publishers were starting to feel the effect in regards to ad sales, in August of 1999 Street Racer was purchased by a large international publisher who wrote Street Racer off and rolled the advertisers into their magazines.

References

Interview with Mike DeFord in August of 2024. Speaking to previous advertisers/partners Folia Tec and Mark Meadors of Goodtimes/Goodguys. Reading each issue of Street Racer published between 1997 and 1999 that I found for sale at the Pomona Swap meet which led me to finding Mike to get the story of this great magazine.