A Bit About VeloceToday’s Editor

This article appeared in “Next Door Neighbor” magazine, published in Williamsburg, Virginia. Perhaps our readers would like to know a little about VeloceToday’s Editor.

Story by Narielle Living

“To do what you love doing while making people happy is extremely gratifying.” – Pete Vack

For Pete Vack, publisher of VeloceToday, an online magazine for Italian and French Classic Car Enthusiasts, the above quote embodies his approach to life and business. Pete’s unique skill set and experience with both cars and publishing made him the perfect choice to manage the magazine. “Since 1970, I was involved in the purchase, restoration and racing of classic cars, even working for Ferrari of Washington for a while as a mechanic. My experience with classic cars, racing and mechanics plus my knowledge of the Digital revolution, computers, writing and publishing, gave me the tools I needed to publish and edit VeloceToday,” he says.

Pete is originally from Duluth, Minnesota, where he says as a child his parents and teachers allowed him a great deal of freedom to explore and do what he wanted. In 1966, he joined the Navy and spent the next four years aboard the USS Newport News, a teakwood-decked heavy cruiser home ported in Norfolk. Between two tours in Vietnam the ship traveled around the world. Eventually, he found his way back to Hampton roads. “After the service I settled in Norfolk, marrying a local girl, Mary Decker, found a job with AT&T on Bute Street and helped raise three children while attending ODU at night with a major in European History.”

In 1984 Pete was promoted to engineering manager, and he and his family moved to Oakton, Virginia. It was here that more opportunities opened up for both him and Mary. “I had always been writing automotive stories on the side for club journals but living in northern Virginia opened up new horizons, writing a monthly column for Car Collector magazine in my off hours,” he says. “Calling the White House operators (who knew everything about everybody in those days) I asked them to contact Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. for a Car Collector interview. The ex-president’s son returned my message and invited me and Mary to his home near Poughkeepsie to discuss his years as Fiat distributor in Washington; Mary did the photography while I conducted the interview. After that our career went forward quite rapidly. Before long we were working for four or five different national and international automotive magazines. As a team, we traveled to cover vintage race events, car histories and personalities. Later, the FDR interviewed helped me to obtain access to Bill Marriot, David Letterman and the family of Italian director Roberto Rossellini for further in-depth magazine features.”

Pete remembers publishing before the industry became online and digitized. “In 1986 we were doing work for a vintage race car magazine called Vintage Motorsport, using a typewriter and white-out. Then the publisher sent a Mac 512 for us to use to put our stories on a floppy disc. We would return the disc in an envelope with Mary’s black and white photos — developed by her in our kitchen darkroom. It was the beginning of the digital revolution and Vintage Motorsport got a mention in Time magazine in an article about desktop publishing. At the same time, as an engineer at AT&T, I was involved in digitizing the telephone and data networks for large customers, which would help pave the way for what is today the internet.

After 18 years of working with AT&T, early retirement loomed for Pete. He and Mary had raised their daughters in Oakton but decided it was time to move. “We knew we should move south, but how far? We considered Florida but most of the family was still in Virginia. While looking for a house on the beach in Norfolk we stopped in Williamsburg and in a real estate flyer found a house with a five-car garage and a pool near Colonial Williamsburg. Plus, I loved the historic aspect of Colonial Williamsburg. We never regretted our move.”

By the year 2000, Pete’s articles and books had attracted the attention of west coast entrepreneurs Stephen Glenn and Allison Reed, who called one day to ask if he would be interested in starting an online newsletter. “We met at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’ Elegance; Allison was fascinated by a new website called Daily Candy, a new email newsletter featuring a boutique, restaurant or product a day. Why shouldn’t we do the same, with Italian classic cars as our focus of our articles? Hence the name Veloce (Vel o che, meaning fast in Italian). By 2002, once a day was changed to once a week but the name stuck. The concept became an online magazine as we developed four new feature articles each week for the website rather than for the traditional print magazines as we had been doing. Today we remain exactly that; an online magazine delivered via the internet.”

Pete says that the correspondents who write for VeloceToday are truly the heart of the publication. The writers are from numerous locations around the globe, including the US, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and Argentina. “That is our strength — many informed, educated voices contribute to the magazine on a wide variety of subjects; today our tag line is ‘Exclusive Articles About Extraordinary Automobiles.’ Our topics include selected event coverage, personalities, automotive histories, book and museum reviews from around the world. The cars we cover range from Abarth to Zagato to a Corvette with a Vignale body; all admittedly fairly exotic, esoteric or just plain rare.”

VeloceToday is a digital subscription magazine. A subscription enables readers to access all of the thousands of articles archived. “Type in a subject or car model into our search function and the appropriate articles will appear, but most will be blocked by our subscription service note,” he says, adding, “99 percent of our income is derived from paid subscriptions.”

For many entrepreneurs, Pete acknowledges the complexity of marketing within social media. His advice? Stay focused. “In today’s world of small businesses, one is bombarded by the need for Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and a host of other new social media services. But if one gets too distracted by this it is easy to lose the focus of the business and then quality suffers. For a year we spent time and money creating videos for our YouTube site; it was fun but time consuming and hard to monetize while others were doing it far better. For us as a publication, it was important to remember that the simple combination of text and illustration has always been the most powerful tool in history, and that it still works very well today. Staying focused on your main product in today’s world is the key to business longevity.”

Although VeloceToday is a local business, their readership is worldwide. “Williamsburg is not a hub of classic car activity, but occasionally we get to do a local personality feature or significant car related event, which is particularly fun for me,” Pete says.

Pete Vack is certain that he is exactly where he is supposed to be. “Before I retired from AT&T, I attended a class which addressed life after AT&T. ‘Envision yourself five years from now; what would you like to be doing?’ we were asked. For me the answer was simple; I would continue to be engaged in research and writing about classic cars and sharing my passion with a larger audience on a full-time basis. It was pretty well on target.”