An Oral History of Super Street

Motor Trend

12-05-2025

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Among the bounty of import and tuner magazines that dominated the late '90s and 2000s, Super Street stood out as the aspirational yet everyday achievable one. It took you across the country and around the world, showcasing builds everywhere from international stages to your buddy's backyard.
Super Street existed in print from 1996 to 2019, and seeing as those are arguably the most influential years, they will be the ones discussed in this oral history. MotorTrend sat down with Richard Chang (associate editor, features editor, and editor-in-chief from 1998 to 2001), Jonathan Wong (associate editor, features editor, technical editor, and editor-in-chief from 1998 to 2014), and Sam Du (senior features editor and editor-in-chief from 2011 to 2020) to chat about the magazine's rise, crowning moments, and lasting legacy.
[Editor's note: Super Street is part of MotorTrend, now all under the Hearst Autos umbrella.]
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Pictured: Matt Pearson
Ideation for Super Street began in Los Angeles in 1995, when Matt Pearson was an editorial assistant for Hot Rod and driving a 1990 Honda Civic Si, according to this recounting from 2006. As Pearson told it, he suggested a new tuner and import magazine to John Dianna (former Petersen Publishing executive and publisher), since Turbo and Sport Compact Car were so big and successful. Dianna reportedly said something like that would never work at Petersen. Back then, Pearson would have had an easier time starting a Chevy title there, not one that showcased Honda or Acura imports.
So Pearson stopped by that weekend's local Battle of the Imports event to take some pictures and brought them back to show Dianna. Impressed by the crowds, Dianna had Pearson put together a magazine proposal that befit the scene. Weeks went by without a word, and suddenly Pearson got the green light: The magazine was a go.
Pearson departed Petersen in 2000, and Super Street's reins eventually passed to Chang, Wong, and Du.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Wong: I think the one thing that separated Super Street from Turbo and Sport Compact Car was coverage of a lot of events outside of California—drag races on the East Coast, big car shows in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—which was unique. I remember when I read Super Street for the first time on the newsstands, I thought it looked like a hot rod magazine. It taught you how to install things like a hot rod magazine. It wasn't like the other titles it competed against. That made it unusual.
Chang: But there always was, like, this carved-out section for import cars. I think at that time, Super Street was much bigger on the East Coast than it was in California, right?
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A scene from the 2002 NDRA BFGoodrich Northeast Nationals in Reading, Pennsylvania
Du: The NOPI stuff.
Chang: Yeah, we were at that big NOPI car show outside of Atlanta. But then in New York, it was crazy, too. Like, going for the first time to cover drag racing and everybody there would know our names? We were really big out there.
To Matt Pearson's—the first editor—credit, I think very early on he knew it would be a struggle to compete with Turbo and Sport Compact on their own specific merits. He's like a branding genius in how he understood that they were focused on the SoCal scene, and there was this groundswell on the East Coast that was coming in.
The most interesting thing is one of the most popular sections of the magazine at the time was Readers' Rides: readers just sending us photos of their cars. You would get the sense right away who was reading the magazine because they were all coming from, like, Voorhees and South Plainfield, New Jersey. They were building very, very different cars on the East Coast: Florida to New York, to Texas, to Pennsylvania. It's kind of like hip hop. Every area has its own style, and [Pearson] very much leaned into that. He listened to that audience and steered the magazine that way.
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Pictured: Richard Chang
Chang: Honestly, a lot of credit to Johnny Wong for bringing on board a lot of the SoCal audience when he introduced JDM to the magazine.
Wong: The JDM thing was a trend that came along at the right time. Because I was so interested, I thought it could be something different to add to the magazine to create some street cred. In the effort to be unique from the competition, some people weren't respecting us on certain levels. I thought that by adding this into it, it would help: bring some of those people that were talking shit on us to open up to us finally.
It worked. Rich [Chang] would go off to Japan with photographers to start covering trends, and that's when we really started to switch the gears after Matt [Pearson] left. The things people were attracted to at that point were coming from Japan, JDM stuff. After Rich [Chang] left [in 2001], John Naderi came in and did his thing. After he left in 2007, I said, 'I'm gonna go 100,000 percent into the JDM thing and really turn it around.' So when [people] say that's what [they] know Super Street for, it's probably from this 2007-to-2010-and-beyond point.
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Pictured: Jonathan Wong
Kristen Lee: Is it fair to say there wouldn't be as big a JDM scene in the U.S. today without Super Street?
Wong: I think we just amplified it. There was no social media. We were basically the social media of the day. It wasn't like it wasn't available on the Internet. It would have made its rounds eventually, but being able to reach hundreds of thousands of people from the newsstand every month, that's quite a platform to speak from.
Lee: Would you say Super Street embraced digital and social media long before the more traditional outlets did?
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A 1999 Nissan Silvia from an August 2002 story
Wong: For web? Definitely not. I think we did a horrible job on web. [Source Interlink Media, a subsequent owner of Super Street] never really gave us great resources to work with. They treated us very low class at the company, only pretended to care about what we did. They were always trying to monetize web, and that never really worked.
Wong: But social media? Nobody knew what to do with that, and we didn't, either. It was the Wild West. We did whatever we could to make that pop off. Nobody ever gave us recognition for it, even when we did break the million-follower mark. I like to say we were the first automotive brand to do a million followers on Instagram and Facebook. They never even sent out a press release. They should have, to let the world know.
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Jonathan Wong, Sam Du, and others celebrating 1 million social media followers in 2013
Lee: Arguably, no one knows how to monetize social media, but a million followers is still a million followers.
Wong: We were very proud of that.
Du: Yeah, I remember we were on the list with GQ and all these other brands. We had no reason to be on that list, but we were, like, top 10 for a while.
Lee: Why is it that Super Street was not intended to be an Asian-car-interest magazine, but it sort of wound up feeling like one?
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Pictured: Sam Du
Chang: There was an interesting analytics situation back in '99 in going to Japan and why it was so hard to get JDM cars on the cover. They were generally subtle and not flashy like what was needed to sell on the newsstand. We had to, like, battle with the powers that be on a different floor about it. We were always featuring these flashy show cars and things like that. But we were struggling with circulation against Sport Compact Car and Turbo. I was looking at the covers that did the best for them, and they were always JDM cars—more of the drag cars, like a Signal [Auto] or Top Secret car. One of those tuners.
I brought that up to the heads and said we wanted to do some of those Japanese cars because they're doing really big numbers on the covers, and there was so much pushback. That was because, at the beginning, it was all about getting cars on the cover people could own, drive, and build.
These were, all of a sudden, shiny halo cars nobody could ever build or drive back in the day. So, we started putting these on the cover, and they just knocked it out of the park. Now people are building these things like crazy, which is nuts.
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From Chang's February 2002 story about Signal Auto president Kousuke Kida's Nissan R34 Skyline GT-R daily driver
Chang: To [be declared] a good cover back then, you would sell, like, three of every 10 issues on the newsstand. That was a really good month. But these JDM cars wound up selling through 60 or 70 percent. And at that point, the people at the top were just like, 'You guys do whatever you want. Clearly, this is working. Just go for it.' There was just not as much pushback on JDM cars [after that].
Lee: So, you gave the people what they wanted?
Chang: You couldn't get Japanese things as easily as you can nowadays. People were still buying videotapes of drift cars and drift competitions. They were hungry for these cars they saw in the videos, and for anything more they could get.
Lee: What would you say marked the peak of each of your careers at Super Street?
Chang: Should I go first because I'm the oldest? For me, I think it's when we did the drift issue [in June 2000]. Drifting had been around, but I don't think it was as published in a magazine before. We did an issue dedicated to drifting, and that was a hard-fought magazine to put together. Not only because of the difficulty of the material, but it was such a push. Hot Rod was the big magazine [in the company's aftermarket division]. Trying to pitch this concept of drifting nobody at the company had ever heard of—to do a whole issue on it—and put a 240SX on the cover was very taboo.
There was almost a mandate at that point that we had to put either a Honda or Toyota on the cover because those were what everyone owned. We hardly ever put a Mazda on there because people didn't own them. Putting a Nissan on there like that was a big fight.
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From Chang's June 2000 story about drifting a 1989 Nissan 240SX and 1989 Honda Civic
Chang: But then, when that magazine did really well on the newsstand, that bought a lot of political capital for me. A good life lesson is: Budgets are only suggestions if you come back with the goods.
Wong: I came in at a weirder time than [Chang] financially because of the 2007, 2008 recession, where the budget was being cut. Magazine newsstand sales weren't doing so hot around 2010. But because of what [Chang] had set forward for us, we still had the freedom to do whatever I wanted. So, I took advantage of that.
I felt like I could have tapped out earlier, but the social media thing held me in a little bit longer. I was curious to see how much further I could go. I was actually ready to try to take on an editorial director position and have Du come in to replace me. But the company went ahead and just cut me anyway to make the job easier, so to speak.
Du: Yeah, and I was gonna add in: Our peak was where we had the magazine, but we were really strong on social, and we were really getting good at video. We kept trying to pitch video and do more with that but never got that chance. But I felt always the peak of Super Street was when I was in high school, which was like late '90s, early 2000s. That's how I picked up the magazine. I was the guy who became a reader who became a freelancer. Then I was editor for Eurotuner eventually. I always wanted to be at Super Street.
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Pictured: Sam Du
Du: Magazines never recovered after that recession, but the peak of Super Street was, for sure, when it introduced the whole JDM scene. It also was, I felt, the best at reporting on the import scene and culture as a whole compared to all the other magazines. It was more engaging and approachable, where you could see your friends' and readers' rides and event coverage. You could go to a show in Seattle (where I'm from), and I'd see my friend's car there. We all bought that magazine because our friends were in it.
Wong: For as long as I worked there, even with [Chang], the attitude we always tried to have was never talk down on the audience. Just be the reader. Be at the same level. I never took that for granted. I always wanted the reader to feel appreciated and special. We would, to Du's point, feature cars or write little funny lines and inside jokes—things so people could feel like they were part of our family even though they were just the reader.
Chang: Yeah, the community they built was really the community that was behind Super Street. I think that's why it did so well on Instagram. The photography was awesome by that point; there was so much young talent. It's so interesting to hear [Wong] and [Du] talk about the struggle, because from afar, I thought they were killing it with the 'Gram. There's that link between culture and community and why I think the brand has outlasted all the other competitors. It was built in a community; that brand identity has always been there and continues to be.
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Pictured: The Super Street crew during Chang's time
Du: Toward the end, it was shrinking and shrinking, and we were barely getting it put together month after month. But yeah, I think to this day—for the people who weren't just casual enthusiasts or Fast & Furious fans, people that actually got into cars—everyone remembers and loves Super Street.
Lee: What would you say caused the decline of the magazine? Would you say it was lack of readership, or was it just another victim of contractions in the media industry?
Du: Like Wong said, once recession hit, magazines never clawed back. We put all our eggs in the website [basket], and then Wong started Instagram and Facebook, where we succeeded. There was a point where we wanted to invest in YouTube and video, and we didn't get that support, so it was a mix of media changing but also not getting the support to evolve. What do you guys think?
Wong: Yeah.
Chang: That time you're talking about, 2008, 2009, 2010: That when the car companies were struggling. They were advertisers, right? And those big wholesalers, I think they were losing money. There was this old saying when I was there that, even as big as Super Street was, I think Hot Rod was still making, like, 20 times the amount of ad revenue. And if Hot Rod coughs, then everybody [in the aftermarket division] gets a cold. So, if the bigger magazines were not doing well, then the smaller magazines would feel the pain. I don't know if it was exactly a product of Super Street not doing well or the fanbase disappearing, but maybe just the overall landscape.
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Pictured: Sam Du
Du: I remember times when our numbers were good, our ads were good, but we were still getting cuts because of companywide things happening.
Chang: I have a different hot take. Not about why it failed, because I think that era is over, but there's probably room for something else. Magazines hold a different place now for people. It probably depends on what age group you're in, but people are still putting out new magazines, they're just more limited-run and there may be more appeal to a specific community. It's not this mass-newsstand thing. I definitely think there's an audience for the type of content the Super Street brand can create, but it's just a different style of magazine. Maybe it's a glossy, maybe it's a more limited-run-type of keepsake magazine.
Lee: Looking back now, what's the Super Street legacy mean to you?
Du: I'll just repeat that Super Street was probably the best, best time of my life. For 10 years, I got to travel. We would save up our budget so we could go to every show we wanted, every event. Or go shoot a cover car. It was like living out our dreams while also building the car scene and culture. It was one of the best rides of our lives.
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Pictured: Jonathan Wong
Wong: For me personally, it changed my life. When I first started, I was super young and very much trapped in my own bubble in Southern California. I hadn't left the state. They sent me to these weird places, on my own, for the very first trips. That's where I started to grow as a human being, like you meet people from all walks of life. But modifying cars is what brought us all together. I'm super appreciative of Matt Pearson taking me on, taking a chance on me. And I'm forever grateful to the people the read and supported us and still support us to this day.
Chang: There's one lesson Matt Pearson taught me that I carry to this day. He was like, 'Rich, there's no real world. You know the things we're doing? In a real world, you wouldn't think these are things you can or should do.' Now that's my approach to life. [Don't] think you can't or aren't supposed to do something, because there's no real world where you can't.
But from the outside? Just seeing how the brand has grown. The fact that it's 2025 and I'm still talking about it blows me away. It was a couple years of my life in the late '90s or early 2000, and people are still talking about it. People are still talking about drifting. That's pretty amazing.
Lee: Did you guys think it would become such a big cultural phenomenon when you worked there? Did you expect it to become as big as it did?
Chang: I definitely didn't.
Du: I wanted to be a magazine editor. It was my dream, and it was when Super Street was at its peak. It was cool for me to aspire to the things Johnny [Wong] and everyone were doing in the magazine but then eventually be able to work there.
Wong: Maybe not by what today's standards are, but I knew. There was that point of time where Fast & Furious came along, when John [Naderi] was leading the book—that was truly like a time where they were letting us do whatever. The budgets were crazy. We had 300-page-count magazines. That was unheard of. That was when I knew it was big.
All photos courtesy of Richard Chang, Jonathan Wong, and Sam Du.