A few months ago, I was going through a storage bin at my childhood home. A bin of old NASCAR stuff. It was filled with shirts, ticket stubs, die casts, and whatever else my Dad collected over the last 40 years. It feels like a collectors dream, but I’m not particularly interested in memorabilia anymore. I’m interested in memorable stories.
That bin contained countless issues of magazines and what specifically caught my eye was Stock Car Racing Magazine. Maybe I live under a rock, or maybe I’m just a millennial, but I had never heard of SCR.
It was pretty incredible. Full page features of Richard Petty, local dirt track legends, motor builds, and anything that a gear head would want.
So what the hell happened to it?
Well, like other print media companies it struggled to survive and eventually got sent to the junkyard.
Jayski says the publication sold 220,000 copies a month in 1999. One of the issues I have from 1992 has a price tag of $2.95. With 2026 inflation, that’s roughly $7.00.
That would be around 18.5 million a year today.
It wasn’t a small operation and neither was NASCAR in 1999. Yet, SCR still maintained a local lens. It featured part-time drivers like Rick Scribner and his attempt at making the Winston Cup.
I can’t find much about Scribner now, but I do know his wife worked at a Days Inn and helped get lodging discounts for the pit crew. Just look at the caption!
On the flip side, our brains have become so accustomed to video content. I can hear in-depth stories straight from the drivers on TikTok. With a flick of my finger, I can watch another piece of tailored content.
The decline of print media started once the Internet became available to everyone at home. We watched newspapers and magazines slowly die in the mid-2000s. It’s not surprising that in ‘99 220k copies were sold—it was pre-Internet and peak NASCAR.
However, it wasn’t only a magazine. It also had an official website: StockCarRacing.com. It was first registered in 1995 and lasted through early 2009 before closing. Today, it looks like Hearst Autos Inc. owns the domain, according to Whois.com.
The 2008 financial crisis was probably the last straw for SCR. It isn’t directly connected, but we can assume when Source Interlink sold off its motorsports publications that SCR wasn’t exactly a shining star in its portfolio.
This isn’t as high-profile as the story of The Big Short, but it is a loss of racing history. For motorsports enthusiasts, the disappearance of Stock Car Racing Magazine was the end of an era.
Now they collect dust in storage bins waiting for someone to pick them up again. Check out a few of the pages I captured for inspiration.
