In 1984 I was part of a publishing company and we were publishing a couple of firearm magazines and my partner's son, Larry Moore, and myself had both just picked up turbo cars. The main office was in Arizona and we were heading across the desert in my 300ZX. I had chipped it and did a couple other performance things it. I had a turbo Corvette before the Nissan and the Z was just not doing what I thought a turbo car should do and Larry started saying the same kind of thing about his Thunderbird turbo coupe. In the five hours we were on the road we had formulated what we were going to do to our cars and by the time we hit Phoenix we also had the idea for a magazine because there had to be a lot more idiots just like us out there who wanted to make turbo cars go faster.
I did some research and attended a SEMA show and looked to see how many companies offered stuff to make turbo cars go. Back then the market was more limited. HKS was in a building the size of my office back then and everything they had was written in Japanese. But the need was there even if the parts weren't. So we put a few cars together and that was the starting point. We started putting that first issue together. For the cover, the Maserati just sounded kind of exotic at the time. But by today's standards it ... I don't even want to say it. But that's what got it going. We did it more as enthusiasts than as a business and that's funny because if you look in that old issue some of the people in there are still in business today and doing very well. HKS, of course, Gale Banks, Turbo City still in the same building, Borla and a bunch of others.
Early Trends
I was originally looking at import cars myself with the Zs and when the 7MGTE Supras came out. There were some good people buying them but they weren't connecting, in all honesty. The biggest single car that came along was the Buick Grand National. It came out in 1985.
We did an article on it in issue two or three. The turbo was mounted in the back, it wasn't intercooled and it wasn't easy to make power out of. When they came out with the intercooled version in '86 it was a son of a bitch. I mean you could drive that car off the showroom floor and drop 13s and it didn't take much to get into the 12s or the 11s. And that car ... I'd say as far as the history of Turbo magazine goes, that car probably had the biggest effect at the right time. Because it proved to people ... you have to remember that up until this time turbos were still voodoo to a lot of people; especially to the domestic car buyer.
A lot of the perception problems that turbos had can be traced to cars like the turbocharged Corvair. The problems were not caused by the turbocharger itself. Well, some of it was improper oil supply but the biggest issue was proper fuel supply and engine management-basically it's hard to make carburetors work in a pressurized atmosphere.
I had my 1985 300ZX which was fuel injected and turbocharged and then this Buick comes out with sequential fuel injection and the turbo is mounted right up front where you can get at it, change stuff, swap it out whatever. It wasn't buried under the car. It was easy to work on and the car paid you back for your efforts with big performance.
We had a real high penetration rate with them, about 90 percent of those GN owners were Turbo magazine readers. They were good readers, they were loyal readers and they bought a lot of product. I mean its amazing, every once in a while I hear about a stock Grand National and know there are guys like Duttweiler Lou Czarnota, the Bartons and a bunch more that are still in business today ... but I don't see how there could be a stock Grand National left. Evidently there are a couple of them in a hay field somewhere. I would have to say that the GN was the biggest most significant turbo car period.
The Import Realm
There are a couple of things that happened here. We have to give some credit to Sy Akimoto. I remember how Sy used to hang around all the time. Sy had all the Japanese writing and JDM this and that, he was way ahead of the market with all that shit. Sy's Racing Sports Akimoto laid the groundwork for a lot of other import-oriented companies.
Sy drug me out to a street race and when we got there I saw two different divisions. There were the older guys with Supras and big cars. There was 20 or so people in that group. But there was another group off to the side. All younger guys with Hondas and other rice rockets and there was about 300 of them. I started taking notice at that time.
The big cars are neat and everything else but the numbers were in the smaller, cheaper cars. We started seeing more smaller, cheaper cars getting fixed up. More product made for them and Boom, the dominoes were lined up.