As car coverage in a magazine goes, there wasn’t any better magazine (ever) than GM High-Tech Performance.
A bit of history: this magazine was originally named “High-Tech Performance” and then went thru 3 different owners (and 1 publication name change) during its lifetime before it ceased to exist. Numerous employees also came and went throughout the different ownerships. When GMHTP ended it was merged into Super Chevy Magazine.
If any of the other car mags (at that time) had articles about any type of Buick Regal in them, most of the time they weren’t very informative. Sweet and short, perhaps a “reader ride” submission, was printed within. Maybe once every 3-4 years you could see a blurb or short story about an assorted TR or GN.
GMHTP featured stories about Turbo Buicks regularly.
Some of these Turbo Regals even made it on the covers!
And it wasn’t just a once or twice type of thing.
18 times there was a Buick Turbo Regal of some variety plastered on the front.
There were also numerous feature articles (34 of them to be exact) in many of the issues (which were announced on the covers via wording alone).
That doesn’t even count the number of times other littler stories (not titled on the covers) were printed inside.
That’s a pretty big percentage of coverage considering there were only 128 issues ever printed (from 9/1998 – 7/2014).
It helped that this publication even acquired their own Gbody Regal project car (an ’87 GN which they named “Wicked6”). The timing was unfortunate however, as this was near the end of their publication.
Rick Seitz (who was the last Editor-in-Chief of GM High Tech Performance) actually always owned “Wicked6” but after GMHTP’s end, it went on to be used in SuperChevy magazine (which folded as well), and finally now on to gm-efi.com (owned by Rick). You can read current updates about this Buick GN on his website.
[ you can see the (Jan 2014) SuperChevy story about the GN: motortrend.com/how-to/1402-1987-buick-grand-national-project/) ]
[ strange but true: all of the now defunct paper publications (SuperChevy, Hot Rod, etc.) stories are published on the MotorTrend website, which is the only name brand that still exists, and is an online-only source of information ]
The very last issue of this awesome car mag came out in July 2014.
We miss this unique magazine.
(it was created in paper form, are you old enough to remember this style of information?)
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Just FYI, The March 1999 issue was the best ever!
The entire magazine was devoted to Turbo Buicks, and ONLY Turbo Regals!
Titled “Buicks That Fly!” there were some excellent articles & stories inside.
If you are ever able to pick up a copy of this one, do it!
(it’s the second pic below, with the yellow Gbody Regal on the cover)
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[ you can see/read some of these issues on the disc we have available here: Buick Literature Disc ]
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MAGAZINE COVERS WITH PHOTOS OF GN’S OR TR’S ON THEM:
(in their order of appearance, date wise)
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MAGAZINE COVERS WITH STORIES ABOUT GN’S OR TR’S ON THEM:
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[ check out other Buick themed magazine stories we’ve posted on here ]
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UPDATE:
So Rick Seitz is one of our friends on Facebook, who happened to catch this story & shared with us some comments about this magazine (and the “wicked6” car).
He says:
I bought the car in May of ’09, and still own it.
I think the only GMHTP story we ran an article on, was the “introduction” article that announced it was a new project car. But I don’t think we actually ran any tech on it. It would later be reused in the digital version of the “Super Chevy super site” that’s no longer a thing. GMHTP was one of the “brands under Super Chevy” after the print title was killed.
About six months after GMHTP was killed, the parent company realized the catastrophic mistake they made, so they tried to implement a “Super Chevy High Tech Performance” section into the print version of SC every other month, mostly because their advertisers were irritated with the situation, and readers were upset.
The damage had already been done though, and the decision was made. They never had any intention of bringing GMHTP back in full form, and nobody ever reached out to me to come back.
gm-efi.com was started as a digital-only “replacement” for GMHTP, started by yours truly. Still going strong!
The first few tech stories ran on the car in GM-EFI, were originally intended to run in the GMHTP magazine (Spoolfool fillers, and one or two others).
It’s come a LONG way, and we still have several stories yet to publish on it.
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[ Editors note: we’re looking forward to seeing what happens with Wicked6 in the future, we love checking out what others do to their Turbo Buicks! ]
[ if you haven’t already, you should visit Rick’s site, take a gander at his Buick GN, and read about all other things related to GM’s EFI vehicles! gm-efi.com ]
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