Letter of the Month
This month's Letter of the Month will receive an exclusive eurotuner T-shirt for his effort. If you'd like the same, email us at eurotuner@primedia.com or write to: eurotuner Magazine Letters, 6420 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles,CA 90048.
Greetings From The Sandbox
I thought you might like to see photos of my three babies - my '04 R32, '04 Aprilia RSV1000R and my beautiful wife, Cassie. Both the R32 and RSV are bone stock, save for a K&N for the Veedub. The Aprilia is almost brand new, with only 1,500 miles on it, but I'll begin modifying it in the spring with pipes, a chip and maybe some carbon bits.
I bought the bike in July when I was home on leave from Iraq as sort of a "good job on not getting your ass shot off" present to myself. Of course, none of this would be possible without the love and undying support of my wife, so everything I am I owe to her.
I've been subscribing to your magazine for more than a year now and I love it. The only problem is, I couldn't find any issues in Iraq! I had Cassie redirect my subscription to the desert. Being able to read my favorite mag really helps to keep my spirits up, so I also included a pic of my love-away-from-home, a turret-mounted Browning M2 .50-cal machine gun, affectionately known as "Ma Deuce".
Justin S Burd
St Louis, MO
Students 1
For the love of god, please stop featuring cars with ridiculous amounts of mods where the owner's occupation is listed as "student". This type of person doesn't embody the majority of your audience. Anybody can go out and spend money like it's going out of style, but let's see more projects from people who've done at least some of the work themselves and have invested their time into their car.Andy Bogdanskiemail
Students 2
With regard to your featured rides, I frequently see the occupation listed as "student". I know this has been mentioned before, but when you are under 30, drive a car worth $80K or more and list your occupation as a student... well, it's absurd. How about adding another point of information about the car's owner: "Source of Funds". Then all of these students can list: trust fund, daddy, bank loan, etc.
It seems to me that a lot of the Euro enthusiasm comes from guys working in their garage striving to improve their cars. They slowly change piece after piece until they feel the car is personalized enough for them. Then you see students with $80K cars they paid somebody to modify for them all at once. It just doesn't seem to have the same sort of dedication or perseverance.
Tony Bergelt
Vancouver, BC, Canada
As we said in last month's Editorial, cars are chosen on individual merit. We only discover the owner's occupation afterwards. We agree that a self-built car has more credibility and we enjoy featuring them but we're not going to discriminate on any grounds. Inevitably there are people in the world more fortunate than us and we're not going to stop featuring cars that belong to people with wealthy parents or whatever. We seem to have a romantic notion of guys with skinned knuckles working on their projects in cold garages at night, but who wouldn't sacrifice that for the money to do it differently? Some of us have different opportunities but don't doubt either the enthusiasm or dedication of somebody who has the money to pay somebody to do the work. We're all in this together. Euro group hug.