About Corsa

Corsa

Corsa was an Argentine motor-sport weekly published in Buenos Aires, first by Editorial Abril and later, in a second life, by other publishers. It was founded as a specialist offshoot of Abril's motoring magazine Parabrisas and became, for generations of Argentine enthusiasts, the paper record of Turismo Carretera, national touring-car racing and Formula 1. It followed Argentine drivers abroad with particular intensity, above all Carlos Reutemann during his Formula 1 years, and it sold, at its height, around 100,000 copies a week — a figure recalled by one of its own road-test journalists, Carlos Figueras. Corsa appeared in two distinct epochs: a first epoch from 1966 that survived the closure of Editorial Abril in 1992 and ended with the closure of its successor publisher in 2002, and a second epoch from a relaunch in 2007 that became monthly in 2012 and ended in print after its 2015 annual.

Foundation by Editorial Abril in 1966

The first issue of Corsa appeared on 19 April 1966, published by Editorial Abril in Buenos Aires. It was launched as a weekly of the magazine Parabrisas, Abril's established motoring title, and for much of its early life it was known in citations as Parabrisas Corsa. Editorial Abril was one of Argentina's major magazine houses of the period, publisher of news, women's and general-interest titles as well as motoring magazines, and the launch of a dedicated racing weekly reflected the size of the Argentine motor-sport public in the 1960s, when Turismo Carretera road races drew enormous roadside crowds and Argentine drivers were returning to European single-seater racing. The magazine's first director, in the recollection of Carlos Figueras, who joined the founding staff at the age of nineteen, was Raúl Burzaco, who corrected Figueras's first race report — written on an Olivetti Lexicon 80 typewriter after a race at Capilla del Monte that Figueras had attended as an enthusiast — and gave him the advice he repeated throughout his career: in writing, the simple is better than the complex.

Coverage: Turismo Carretera at home, Formula 1 abroad

Corsa covered motor sport in Argentina principally through Turismo Carretera, Turismo Nacional and, in later decades, TC 2000 and its successor Súper TC 2000, and it covered international motor sport with the emphasis on Formula 1. That double focus defined the magazine. At home it reported the great road-racing tradition of Turismo Carretera, the championship that made household names of its drivers and filled the routes of the Argentine interior, as well as the circuit championships that grew in importance as road racing declined. Abroad it followed the Argentine presence in Europe. It covered extensively the careers of Argentine single-seater drivers in Europe, in particular Carlos Reutemann during his Formula 1 period, when Reutemann contended for the world championship and every Grand Prix result was major news in Argentina. The logistics of that coverage in a pre-internet age were formidable, and Figueras recalled a system in which film rolls from European races were entrusted to travellers flying to Buenos Aires, to be collected at Ezeiza airport by someone from Corsa, so that photographs could reach the weekly on time; in more than a decade of that improvised system, he recalled, the material failed to arrive on time only once.

Journalists and road testing

The first epoch of Corsa was written by a group of specialist journalists whose names recur throughout Argentine motoring literature: Germán Sopeña, Alfredo Parga, Jorge Augé Bacqué, Carlos Figueras, Enrique Sánchez Ortega and Carlos Marcelo Thiery, among others. Their work combined race reporting with road testing, technical explanation and a close knowledge of the Argentine industry at a time when Ford, Chevrolet and other manufacturers built cars in Argentina and Turismo Carretera rivalry between marques — the classic Ford versus Chevrolet duel — carried a strong popular charge. Figueras's career illustrated the magazine's culture: recruited at nineteen in early 1966, he became a road tester who drove test cars for tens of thousands of kilometres, including a nearly 10,000-kilometre test of a Ford Falcon Sprint and a 1969 journey in a Peugeot 404 that began a lifelong association with Patagonia. The authority of Corsa rested on that accumulation of driven kilometres and attended races, reported in plain language for readers who were themselves mechanics, drivers and enthusiasts.

The Abril years and the size of the readership

For its first twenty-six years Corsa was an Editorial Abril magazine, published from Buenos Aires alongside Parabrisas. The figure of 100,000 copies a week, recalled by Figueras as the magazine's sale in its strong period, placed it among the substantial Argentine weeklies of its time and explained both its influence with the motor industry and the effort invested in its European coverage. In the Argentina of the 1960s and 1970s, motor sport was not a niche interest: Turismo Carretera was a national spectacle, the Buenos Aires Grand Prix tradition was living memory, Juan Manuel Fangio was a national hero, and Reutemann's Formula 1 campaigns of the 1970s and early 1980s gave the magazine a continuing international story with an Argentine protagonist. Corsa was the weekly that connected the local circuit and road-race reader to that world championship story, issue by issue, in Spanish, from Buenos Aires.

From Abril to Editorial Ver, 1992 to 2002

In 1992 Editorial Abril closed, and Corsa was acquired by a group headed by Domingo Cutuli, Editorial Ver. The magazine continued under that ownership for a further decade. Editorial Ver closed definitively in 2002, and that closure ended the first epoch of Corsa. Several of the journalists left without work by the closure then founded a magazine called Coequipier, in a style similar to Corsa, but the venture lasted only two years. The sequence — Abril to 1992, Ver to 2002, a short-lived successor to about 2004 — is the verified chronology of the magazine's first life, and it reflects the wider contraction of Argentine magazine publishing through the economic crises of the period, in which many long-established titles changed hands or disappeared.

Relaunch in 2007 and the Suple Corsa

In February 2007 Corsa was relaunched by the businessman and former driver Alejandro Urtubey. The relaunch restored the historic title as a weekly and added a new product, Suple Corsa, a weekly supplement distributed inserted in newspapers in the interior of the country, which extended the brand beyond the Buenos Aires kiosk market where the original magazine had been centred. In 2009 the magazine adopted Twitter as a communication channel, noted in its own institutional history as one of the first Argentine media to do so — a small but telling marker of the transition the relaunched title attempted, from a purely print weekly toward a multi-channel motor-sport brand, at a time when Argentine motor sport itself was centred on TC 2000 and its televised categories.

From weekly to monthly and the end of print

In April 2012, the relaunched Corsa changed from a weekly to a monthly. After its 2015 annual, the magazine ceased to be published in print. The Suple Corsa supplement continued in circulation until June 2019, outliving the parent magazine by more than three years, and in January 2020 the magazine's website stopped being updated. Those dates close the second epoch: relaunch in 2007, monthly from 2012, print ended after the 2015 annual, supplement to 2019, website silent from 2020. The seed record for this profile, which described Corsa as closed around 2015, is therefore confirmed for the print magazine itself, with the qualification, verified from the magazine's own history, that its supplement and website continued afterwards.

What Corsa documented

The historical value of Corsa lies in the completeness with which a specialist weekly, appearing fifty-two times a year, documented a national sporting culture. Its pages recorded Turismo Carretera in its road-racing prime and in its circuit transformation, the rise of Turismo Nacional and TC 2000, the Sport Prototipo Argentino experiments of 1969 to 1973 — whose cars, designed by figures such as Oreste Berta and Heriberto Pronello, appeared as cover subjects in Parabrisas Corsa — and the full arc of Reutemann's career from Formula 2 to the front rank of Formula 1. For researchers, runs of Corsa provide dated, illustrated, contemporary reporting that cannot be reconstructed from later summaries: entry lists, technical changes, road-test figures and the language in which Argentine enthusiasts understood their sport at the time. Academic work on Turismo Carretera's great era cites Parabrisas Corsa issues of the 1960s directly as primary sources.

Legacy

Corsa was remembered, in the words of one tribute to its journalists, as a magazine that became a myth — “una revista de automovilismo que se convertiría en un mito”. Its legacy operated at three levels. For readers, it was the weekly companion of Argentine motor sport for thirty-six years in its first epoch and nine more in its second. For journalists, its staff — Sopeña, Parga, Figueras and their colleagues — set a standard of specialist reporting and road testing that later Argentine motoring publications measured themselves against, and its diaspora carried that standard into Coequipier, Parabrisas and the digital motoring press. For the historical record, it left one of the most complete print archives of Argentine motor racing in the second half of the twentieth century. A directory of Argentine magazines that omitted Corsa would omit the principal paper witness of the country's motor-sport culture.