What have we been doing the past 40 years? Making magazines and building a lot of project cars. Through these projects–and here we’re presenting just some of them–you can trace the magazine’s lineage as we’ve grown and expanded through the decades.
The year was 1984. Tim Suddard had just competed in his first autocross. It was time, he figured, to create a magazine dedicated to the sport. The first issue of Auto-X, the magazine that became Grassroots Motorsports, debuted in November 1984. On that first cover? Tim and his Datsun 240Z. It became the magazine’s initial project car by setting the basics that have endured through today: maximizing the budget, championing open access to the sport, and focusing on fun.
Lesson learned: Anyone can play with cars. You. Us. Anyone. It doesn’t take piles of money or insider connections. It just takes the desire to get involved.
GRM was born in the salvage yards and discount racks, but soon we had some corporate partners–real ones, like Honda. The OEM worked with GRM to introduce its then-new 1986 Civic Si. We brought in some names that quickly became legendary in the early days of Honda tuning–Mugen, Jackson Racing and RC Engineering–while earning a national SCCA Solo title along the way.
Lesson learned: Working alone might be fun, but teaming up with experts can pay big dividends and open doors to future projects. That Civic wouldn’t be our only collab with Honda, as others would follow.
Randy Pobst isn’t new to GRM. Not at all. Back in 1987, we teamed up with Toyota on a factory-backed Corolla FX16 GT-S project, and we put our local hotshoe–a real up-and-comer–behind the wheel: Randy Pobst. Together we won an SCCA ProSolo title. The following year, Randy was road racing a factory-backed MR2.
Lesson learned: We jumped into the deep end of the autocross pool with this one–even in the ’80s, competition was tight–but fortunately we had the driving talent to pull it off.
Times were tough for many of us during the very early ’90s, as the economy wasn’t exactly chugging along. So we concentrated on a pair of low-buck BMW 2002 builds: one for the road, one for Improved Touring racing, a hot property for the SCCA at the time.
Lesson learned: Neither build went easily as we were working out of primitive facilities at the…
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