Back in early December, when I found out that I hadn't gotten the SCCA web page contract, I realized that things were going to have to change a lot around here. The mass conversion of the old "Unofficial SCCA Web Pages" into the new project was only the first step. I quickly came to the conclusion that some sort of editorial content was necessary as well. After some dithering, I hit upon the rather simple and obvious idea of an online magazine about motorsports, mostly about participatory stuff. No need to try and do the Indycar or NASCAR news thing; that's already being done, and well, by others. The goal, rather, was to deal with the club events, the ones that don't get on the TeeVee. Credit for the name "North American Motorsports Journal" itself goes to Jim Burke, who also designed our header images and buttons.
This first issue isn't quite as grand as I imagined it could be, but between having a 2 month old daughter in the house, trying to build Krusty its own web server for these web pages, and still having a full time day job, I can't put 40 hours a week into web page development. The next issue should be bigger and better. As it is, we have a bunch of good articles by good writers on interesting topics. Jeff Zurschmeide will continue to talk about his circle track Camaro project in coming months; Scott Fisher (our resident multimedia geek) will continue to write entertainingly about various topics, and maybe top the slideshow at the end of his article; Russell Jaslow will continue to examine interesting and sometimes controversial topics from racing history; and Rocky Entriken will continue to blather about whatever is on his mind. Our Vintage Columnist isn't up to speed yet, due to some minor communications glitches, and we have an autocross columnist or two lined up for future issues.
If you want to talk about things from this issue, head over to the Discussion areas and tell us what's on your mind. I think we'd all like to hear what you, the readers, want to see here. It's important to us that we produce a site that people want to visit and and will tell their friends about, purely because if we don't manage that, we're out of business.