About Auto Bild Sportscars

Auto Bild Sportscars

Auto Bild Sportscars is a German monthly car magazine devoted to the lifestyle of sporty cars — from sporting production models to tuned machines — published within the Auto Bild family. The title covers performance cars as a way of life: the driving experience, the tuning scene, the design and the culture that surrounds fast cars. Since January 2025 the magazine has been published under licence by B&M Publishing; its digital home remains the autobild.de portal. The standalone domain could not be verified at research time, so no website is listed here.

Overview

Auto Bild Sportscars appears monthly and addresses the performance-car enthusiast for whom the automobile is passion as well as transport: readers who follow the sports-car market, who modify and tune their cars, and who live the culture of speed. Each issue carries tests of sports cars and performance models, tuning features, reports from the scene, and the lifestyle journalism — design, events, personalities — that surrounds the fast car.

The magazine's positioning is lifestyle as much as technology: where sport auto measures the lap time, Sportscars celebrates the world around it — the tuned Golf at the meet, the sports car on the Alpine road, the design details that make the heart beat faster. The tone is enthusiastic and scene-close, written by journalists who share the readers' passion.

History

Auto Bild Sportscars traces its roots to the mid-1990s performance titles of the Axel Springer Auto-Verlag — the publisher's records date the monthly Sportscars line to 1996 — and to AutoBild Test & Tuning, first published in 2002, which gave the tuning scene its own magazine within the Auto Bild family. The title evolved with the scene it covered: the tuning boom of the 2000s, the rise of the premium performance segment, the diversification of the sports car from the hot hatch to the hybrid hypercar.

A significant recent chapter opened in January 2025, when the magazine began appearing under licence from the Berlin-based B&M Publishing house — a move reflecting the restructuring of the German special-interest print market, in which established brands continue under licensing partnerships while publishers focus their portfolios. The brand's digital presence continues within the autobild.de portal, preserving the connection to the Auto Bild family's online audience.

The licensing model itself is worth understanding, for it has become one of the German magazine market's characteristic survival strategies. Rather than discontinuing a title whose print economics no longer fit the large publisher's portfolio, the brand is licensed to a specialist publisher — in this case B&M Publishing — which continues the magazine with lower overheads and closer scene proximity, while the brand owner retains the trademark and the digital integration. For readers, the continuity is what matters: the monthly tuning and sports-car magazine keeps appearing, the scene keeps its chronicle, and the brand's heritage — reaching back through Test & Tuning to the mid-1990s Sportscars line — is preserved rather than abandoned.

Content

Sports-car tests are the foundation: new performance models — the hot hatches, the sports sedans, the coupes and roadsters, the supercars — are tested and compared, with the driving experience at the centre of the verdict. The magazine's testers evaluate what the numbers cannot fully capture: the steering feel, the engine character, the emotional response the car provokes.

Tuning is the title's signature subject: features on modified cars from the German tuning scene — from the established tuning houses to individual builds — with technical explanations of the modifications and the culture of the meets, shows and events where the scene gathers. The Essen Motor Show, the great tuning fair, receives extensive coverage, as do the personalities and workshops that define the scene.

Lifestyle journalism surrounds the cars: design features, event reports, portraits of collectors and enthusiasts, and the travel stories — the sports car on the great driving roads — that express the magazine's philosophy of the automobile as pleasure. The monthly rhythm gives each issue the space for the definitive scene feature and the comprehensive test.

The Essen Motor Show deserves special mention as the scene's annual pilgrimage and the magazine's natural habitat. The great tuning fair — where the established houses unveil their latest creations, individual builders show their projects and the scene takes its own temperature — receives extensive Sportscars coverage, and the magazine's reporting from the show is part of how the German tuning community documents itself. Beyond Essen, the magazine follows the season's meets, the club events and the informal gatherings where the culture actually lives: the parking-lot meet on a summer evening, the Alpine tour with like-minded drivers, the workshop visit where the next project takes shape.

Coverage & Audience

Auto Bild Sportscars is sold throughout Germany at newsstands and by subscription, appearing monthly. Its readership is the performance and tuning enthusiast: predominantly young and male, hands-on, modifying their own cars and participating in the scene's events and online communities.

The title's scene proximity is its strength: the journalists know the tuners, the workshops and the meets, and the readers recognise their own world in the magazine's pages. In the segmented German car press, Sportscars owns the lifestyle-performance brief — the emotional, cultural side of the fast car that the measurement-driven titles leave uncovered.

Ownership

Auto Bild Sportscars originated within the Axel Springer Auto-Verlag GmbH, the Hamburg-based car-publishing subsidiary of Axel Springer SE, as part of the Auto Bild title family alongside the weekly Auto Bild and the monthly Allrad, Klassik and Auto Test titles. Since January 2025 the magazine has been published under licence by B&M Publishing, while the brand's digital home remains the autobild.de portal operated by Axel Springer.

The licensing arrangement reflects the broader evolution of German magazine publishing, in which strong brands continue under specialist licensees. The editorial identity — the tuning scene, the sports-car lifestyle, the enthusiast's perspective — continues under the new publishing arrangement.

Digital Presence

The brand's digital home is autobild.de, one of the most-visited automotive websites in the German language, where Sportscars content — tests, tuning features, videos — appears within the portal's performance and tuning sections. The tuning scene's natural habitat is digital: the build threads, the meet videos, the social-media communities where the culture lives day to day.

Video is central to the brand's digital expression: the tuned car, filmed at the meet and on the road, is made for the screen, and the scene's visual culture translates naturally to short-form video. The monthly print magazine remains the format for the definitive feature and the comprehensive test; the digital platforms provide the daily scene pulse. For the tuning enthusiast, the combination covers the culture from the workshop to the show.

The January 2025 licensing to B&M Publishing opened the current chapter: the Berlin specialist publisher continuing the monthly tuning and sports-car magazine under licence, preserving the brand's heritage while the market restructures. The licensing model — the established brand continued by the specialist house — has become the German magazine market's characteristic survival strategy, and Sportscars' continuation testifies to the scene's loyalty: the readers who want their monthly tuning magazine keep it alive. The Essen Motor Show remains the scene's annual pilgrimage: the tuning fair where the houses unveil their creations, the builders show their projects, the community takes its temperature — and the magazine reports it as the scene's chronicle. The tuning seasons structure the year: the spring builds, the summer meets, the autumn shows, the winter projects — the culture's calendar, followed by the magazine. The Test & Tuning heritage — reaching back to the 2002 launch and the mid-1990s Sportscars line — gives the current title its institutional memory: the German tuning scene, documented across three decades. In the autobild.de digital family, the brand retains its connection to the Auto Bild audience: the sports-car and tuning content, serving the readers for whom the automobile is not transport but passion.