[h=2]RACER@25: Issue No. 241, May 2012 - Game Changer - the RACER 3.0 era begins[/h] Friday, 28 April 2017
By RACER staff
This is the 22nd installment in RACER's ongoing 25th anniversary celebration during which we share the 25 most important issues from our first quarter century.
[HR][/HR] It's been said you can't go home again, but
RACER founders Paul Pfanner and Bill Sparks had the opportunity to do just that when Haymarket Media offered them the chance to reacquire the company they had started twenty years earlier. The fateful call came in early December 2011, and the next 100 days saw a flurry of activity to make the improbable deal happen. Working secretively with
RACER's editor-in-chief, Laurence Foster, Pfanner and Sparks put together a plan they named "RACER 3.0" and secured the backing of
RACER-1.0 era investors Rob and Chris Dyson. Their goal was to relaunch the company with the 20th-anniversary edition of
RACER magazine and then focus on rebooting RACER.com, in-house agency Racer Studio and reviving the flagging fortunes of
RACER's sister title, SportsCar, which had been published by the company for the SCCA since 1984. The deal was finally done on March 18, 2012, and Pfanner and Sparks walked into the office late on the morning of March 19, 2012 to reassume control of the company.
RACER founder Paul Pfanner reveals the 20th anniversary issue, and RACER 3.0, at Long Beach. (Walt Kuhn/LAT photo)The company they returned to was a faint shadow of what it once was commercially.
RACER circulation was less than a third of what it had when the founders left the company in December 2005, but thankfully,
RACER still had a world-class creative team in place. With barely a month before an all-new
RACER was to be revealed to the world during the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach weekend, Laurence Foster, editor David Malsher, executive editor Andrew Crask and art director Rob French set to work on a totally revamped magazine that carried the theme "Game Changers." The cover feature spotlighted the recently introduced DeltaWing Le Mans and ALMS prototype that was the striking vision of designer Ben Bowlby, ALMS entrant Duncan Dayton, the original game-changer Dan Gurney and serial entrepreneur and game-changer Don Panoz. An expansive In Focus photo section by Rick Graves gave
RACER's readers full access to this radical sports car that polarized the racing world.