RoadRUNNER Magazine
RoadRUNNER Magazine, formally RoadRUNNER Motorcycle Touring & Travel, is a bimonthly American magazine devoted entirely to motorcycle touring, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was founded in 2001 by Christian and Christa Neuhauser, Austrian-born professional photographers who had moved to North Carolina in 1999 after falling in love with touring the United States by motorcycle. Each issue combines tour stories with maps readers can follow, motorcycle tests, product reviews and travel features covering sport, touring, cruising and dual-sport bikes, vintage machines and scooters. Independently owned and family-run, with the founders' son Florian Neuhauser taking over as publisher and editor-in-chief in 2025, RoadRUNNER survived a period in which many American motorcycle print magazines closed, precisely by serving one kind of rider completely.
Founded in 2001 by Christian and Christa Neuhauser
RoadRUNNER first appeared in bookstores in 2001. Its founders, Christian and Christa Neuhauser, were professional photographers from Austria who moved to the United States in 1999 with their two sons after spending weeks travelling throughout the country and absorbing its motorcycle touring culture. Settling in Winston-Salem, they continued to use motorcycles as a primary mode of transport, spending long periods on the road and researching touring routes, with Christian spending countless hours studying routes to find ideal rides. The magazine grew directly from that experience: a publication built around the tour itself, rather than around racing or machinery alone.
The company behind it was listed as ECC at its founding, and the title was published bimonthly — six issues a year — available by subscription in the United States and Canada as well as through bookstores. The Neuhausers' photographic background shaped the product from the start. A touring magazine sells places as much as machines, and RoadRUNNER's identity rested on vivid photography of roads and landscapes paired with practical route information a reader could actually ride.
After Christian Neuhauser: A Family Magazine
In 2005, only a few years after the magazine's launch, Christian Neuhauser died in a tragic accident. Christa Neuhauser continued RoadRUNNER as publisher and editor-in-chief, running it with their sons, Manuel, who served as a technology consultant, and Florian, who worked as a contributing editor and in marketing — arrangements described in profiles of the magazine's first two decades. The family's Touring Weekend, an annual open-invitation event for motorcycle lovers organised and sponsored by the magazine, was created in memory of Christian.
In 2025 the second generation formally took over: Florian Neuhauser became publisher and editor-in-chief, as recorded in conference biographies for the Concours Owners Group national rally and in the magazine's reference entry. Few American magazines of its size remain family enterprises across a generational handover, and that continuity is central to RoadRUNNER's story. The title was a family project before it was a business institution, and its survival after 2005 was a deliberate family decision.
The Tour as the Unit of Editorial Content
RoadRUNNER's contents are organised around tours. A typical feature follows a route or region — a mountain road, a coastal highway, a historic trail — describing the riding, the scenery, the towns, food and lodging along the way, and crucially, providing maps for the featured tour so readers can reproduce the journey. Additional content includes product reviews and tests of new motorcycles, but the machines are framed by travel: the question is not only how a bike performs, but where it can take its rider.
The magazine describes its mission as serving active motorcycle enthusiasts with a comprehensive resource of national and international tours, exciting and picturesque places to ride, and valuable information on new motorcycles and products to enhance the riding experience. Its book, Riding America's Backroads: 20 Top Motorcycle Tours, distilled years of scouting highways and byways in all 50 states into 20 top routes, each with logistical detail, a map and accompanying service articles on trip planning, group riding and packing a bike, with online links to printable maps and downloadable GPS navigation. The book shows the editorial method in concentrated form: scout it, document it, map it, and equip the reader to ride it.
Bikes Covered: From Tourers to Scooters
Although touring is the lens, the machinery covered is broad. In addition to sport, touring, cruising and dual-sport bikes, RoadRUNNER covers vintage bikes and motor scooters. That inclusiveness reflects touring reality: riders cross the country on everything from large luxury tourers to middleweight adventure bikes and restored classics, and the magazine's loyalty is to the journey rather than to a single category or manufacturer.
Motorcycle tests and product reviews therefore emphasise travel-relevant qualities — comfort, range, luggage, weather protection, reliability and the gear that supports days on the road. Product coverage extends to the touring ecosystem of helmets, clothing, communications, luggage and accessories that long-distance riders depend on. For manufacturers of touring-oriented machines, the magazine offers a rare environment in which every reader is a prospective traveller.
Photography and the Visual Identity
Because its founders were professional photographers, RoadRUNNER built an unusually visual identity for a specialist magazine. Tour features pair route reporting with photography intended to make a place legible and desirable: the road surface winding through a pass, a main street at dusk, a diner stop, a campsite. Profiles of the magazine note that the Neuhausers' photographic work was the seed of the enterprise — they discovered American motorcycle touring through travelling and photographing it, and the magazine continued that practice.
That visual strength also helped the brand online, where striking route photography travels well through search and social media and where prospective readers first encounter a tour as an image before they read a word. In a market where touring content competes with free blogs and videos, a reputation for beautiful, trustworthy presentation remained a differentiator.
Surviving the Print Motorcycle Magazine Shakeout
RoadRUNNER's durability attracted industry attention. In October 2020, RevZilla's Common Tread published an examination of how RoadRUNNER had survived as other print motorcycle magazines died, at a time when larger titles were closing or abandoning print. The factors that story and the magazine's own history point to are consistent: independent ownership with low overhead, a family staff, a sharply defined niche, a loyal subscription base, and content — tours with maps — that readers keep and use rather than discard.
Touring also proved a resilient subject. Racing results date within days and are better served online; a well-documented route through the Blue Ridge, the Rockies or the desert Southwest remains useful for years. By anchoring itself to that evergreen material, and to readers who plan trips months ahead, RoadRUNNER made a bimonthly print rhythm an asset rather than a liability.
Touring Weekend and Reader Community
Beyond the page, the magazine built community through events. Its annual Touring Weekend, created in memory of co-founder Christian Neuhauser, is an open-invitation celebration for motorcycle lovers, organised and sponsored by Christa Neuhauser and the RoadRUNNER team. Such events convert readers into participants, generate tours and stories for future issues, and give advertisers and tourism partners direct access to committed travellers.
The community dimension extends to partnerships with rider organisations. Florian Neuhauser's role as a keynote speaker for the Concours Owners Group's 2026 national rally illustrates the magazine's standing among owners' clubs whose members are exactly its audience — riders who organise their leisure around long-distance motorcycle travel. For a niche title, those alliances are both editorial nourishment and commercial infrastructure.
Digital Presence at Roadrunner.travel
RoadRUNNER publishes online at roadrunner.travel, where tour stories, motorcycle reviews, product coverage and travel features extend the print magazine, alongside digital subscription options for readers in the United States, Canada and beyond. The site presents the brand as an independently owned and published print and web motorcycle magazine bringing readers the best stories, tours, reviews and lifestyle articles. Route material online can carry the maps and GPS resources that print first popularised, and the archive of tours functions as a planning library for riders researching a trip.
The digital operation keeps the same editorial centre of gravity as print. Where general motorcycle websites chase daily news, RoadRUNNER's online value lies in depth of place: a documented ride, with photographs and a map, that a reader can save for a future season. That consistency between the 2001 print formula and the current web presence is a notable feature of the brand's history.
Significance Among American Motorcycle Magazines
RoadRUNNER Magazine's significance is that it proved a small, independent, family-founded title could define a category. Before 2001, American motorcycle magazines treated touring as one department among many; the Neuhausers made it the whole magazine, with maps, photography and practical planning as standard. Based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, far from the traditional Southern California centre of motorcycle publishing, it also showed that authority in a niche comes from doing the activity — riding the routes — rather than from proximity to manufacturers.
For worldnm.com, RoadRUNNER completes a picture of post-2000 American enthusiast publishing: focus narrowly, serve readers with usable material, keep ownership close and costs controlled, and build events and digital archives around the print core. Under Florian Neuhauser since 2025, the magazine his parents founded a quarter-century earlier continues that formula for riders who measure a good publication by the trips it inspires them to take.
