Racerrob

I recently joined the BMW club and have been enjoying their excellent magazine, Roundel. My understanding is that their racing program is much smaller than ours yet they get coverage in every issue. Racers entail a large body of the PCA membership but all we get is a schedule published in our magazine. We even have a PCA racer and professional writer, Patti Moscone, who covers PCA for other publications but not ours. Why cant we get any love

chancecasey

not as interesting to "most" p-car owners and pano subscribers as what's in there now would be my guess. it gets old after a while. i don't even read the results in the scca mag anymore except once in a while to check up on a couple of guys i know. so many events and people around the country - 99% of them you wouldn't even know.

FlyingDog

Race cars don't make pretty concours picture subjects.

mooty

why???
b/c the whole rag is full of advertising. there are no articles in there.
the most interesting part is probably the classified section with stupidly high prices. those always gives me a good laugh. $50k over msrp for RS, $60k 993C2s.... $55k RSA's

smlporsche

Mooty-

I have a personal belief that the only guys who place car ads in Pano are those who's wive's are after them to sell some of their garage inventory and they can tell their wives "Look honey, I'm putting it in a national magazine and nobody's interested"

It's sort of like the secret handshake...

Chris M.

Did you see the $10000 set of wheels recently? Hilarious.

Exactly. I don't know about most regions but in my region the vast majority of the members aren't interested in driving their cars on the track, let alone reading about other's racing results.

DrJupeman

But it is to BMW owners?

I also am a BMWCCA member and I have to say that Roundel blows Pano away, imo (including that they have continual race coverage).

Circuit Motorsports

Bahh.... My race shots are 'prettier' than 90% of the stuff they have in the magazine. They just have never shown any interest in club racing and were lukewarm at best about pro level stuff.

There are two ways to change it in my mind.

1. Editor level changes. Change the person or change the mindset.

2. Get the money to start talking. Advertisers are key to any magazine. If the advertisers start making enough noise (which shouldn't be that much) then the magazine should change. It would only take a couple of the larger ones.

Willard Bridgham 3

So.........you can't read the PCA website?

http://www.pca.org/clubrace/

Plenty of racing results there, plenty of pictures, plenty of rules.

George from MD

Because Panorama is a thoroughly scripted tightly controlled piece of Porsche propoganda. The editors have no interest in changing it- the membership doesn't seem to care- and I think most of the people who put it together have been doing so for years and are probably fossilized.

You will not see race results, criticism of Porsche, Porsche dealers or the club, or articles that are even mildly provocative. You will NEVER see objective Porsche road tests or write ups- much less comparison tests with competitors products.

You will find all these things (and more) in Roundel. IMO they work for the club and the caar owners- and not the manufacturer.

I shouldn't imply Pano is all garbage- I've seen some pretty good articles- usually historical but sometimes contemporary- but they are few and far between. But there is no comparison to Roundel.

bgiere

PCA has a publication called "Club Racing News" available on the website...I think that is why you see little coverage in Pano.

Racerrob

Agreed, even if you are not a BMW person, Roundel is a great "car" magazine.

Racerrob

Yes, I read it. I also look at the website or mylaps to see results. I think it would be nice, however, to get the story behind the race sometime rather than just reading a list. We probably have too many races for a story, per, but how about some of the bigger races, Sebring, the Glen, RA etc...I dont mean to slam Pano but I just think it could be better after seeing what others are doing.

Circuit Motorsports

Grassroots Motorsports does PCA club racing reports. It would be nice if the PCA publication would do the same on a slightly larger scale.

TR6

I receive both Roundel (BMW club) and Pano also and agree that Roundel does seem to have more interesting articles including race articles. And I would guess that the average BMW owner is even less track oriented than the average Porsche owner. The average BMW owner drives a 3 series 4 door sedan. I don't race and probably never will (don't have deep enough pockets!) but I still enjoy reading about it and following it.

I also like that Roundel does sometimes does comparison articles between BMW products and competitors' products and seems to be objective in the reporting. In fact, there was an article some time last year comparing the BMW M3 (6cyl) to the newest Audi (I think it was) competitor and they gave Audi the slight upper hand over the M3. There followed some harsh letters to the editor printed in the next edition complaining that Roundel seemed to favor a non-bmw in that road test. But the editors stuck to their guns and pointed out the things the other car did better. But they also pointed out that BMW has a new M3 in the works and expected it to up the bar and surpass the competition once it was released (the new V8 M3). Sounded like a fair article to me. I respected the magazine for it.