Speedhunters Went Dark

In April, I went to check the morning ritual site and the lights were off.

Speedhunters used to be coffee-within-coffee moment for me. Open a tab, get a big hero image, scroll through a rabbit hole in Japan or South Africa or somewhere I didn’t even know had a drift scene. This spring the feed just froze. Then the profile photos turned black. Then nothing. A few weeks later I’m reading this piece at The Drive and realize I’m not imagining it. The last post was April 3. The shop? Closed. The socials? Quiet. People close to it said the site had shut down. That little ritual many of us had was suddenly a museum exhibit behind glass.

The first emotions were the easy ones. Nostalgia with a side of denial. On Instagram, longtime contributor Matthew Everingham said the quiet part out loud: Speedhunters is “on ice” because EA shelved Need for Speed, which meant no more funding. It did not feel like internet rumor. It felt like an epilogue.

Reddit did what Reddit does. Some people poured out proper eulogies. Others posted Wayback links. A few said what I was thinking: this feels like the end of an era. One comment stuck with me. “Speedhunters and Hoonigan were an era. That era has now passed.” Short. True. A little blunt, like the click of a shutter.

If you want the longer version of what happened, The Drive’s deep dive reads like the oral history of a band that toured the world, then found themselves playing to empty rooms. Founded in 2008 with EA money, incredible access, and ridiculous talent. Then the 2018 to 2025 stretch where budgets shuffled, big names drifted to their own projects, video took over the world, and the site kept trying to be a magazine in a stadium full of vloggers. Eventually Need for Speed went on pause, which tugged the financial plug that had been feeding Speedhunters all along. The last story rolled in, and then the cursor stopped blinking.

Here’s the weird thing. The void that Speedhunters left has been filled for years, just not in one place. Larry Chen has a whole living universe on YouTube where he shoots, talks, and roams like the world’s friendliest car paparazzo. Donut turned explainers into an art form, plus chaos, plus merch, and you can lose a weekend on their channel. Dino Dalle Carbonare, a pillar of the old site, brings Tokyo to your couch on Dino DC. If you want the old long-read photo set energy, Narita Dogfight keeps posting time-attack stories and galleries like clockwork on its site. The diaspora is real, and it’s thriving.

What does it mean for car culture that the mothership went dark? For one, we lose the one-stop archive. Speedhunters had a knack for stitching together the weird corners of the hobby into a single page you could scroll at lunch. Now it’s more like a night market. You wander. You bump into things. You follow a link to a builder’s Instagram, end up on a two-hour build series, click over to a tiny blog with the best photos of the year. It is messier. It is more alive.

If you’re hunting for culprits, sure, you can blame algorithms and shifting attention spans and the death spiral of display ads. You can also admit that a site funded by a game publisher lives and dies with that publisher’s priorities. When Need for Speed went quiet, the moon that lit up this little media planet got smaller, then slipped behind a cloud. Not a scandal. Just gravity.

The real story is a baton pass. The people Speedhunters inspired are everywhere, and they brought receipts. The catalog lives on in books and hard drives and channels and Discords. The tone lives on in how folks cover a Wednesday-night meet without making it feel cheap. The photos live on as wallpaper on millions of laptops, a quiet afterglow for a site that taught a generation how to see.

So what’s next for documenting car culture? I think we already know. A creator films on Saturday, edits Sunday, posts Monday, sells a zine Friday, and launches a mini tour the week after. A small site does one story a week and makes it sing. A newsletter pairs 800 honest words with three photos that stop your thumb. Brands stop trying to own culture and start underwriting it in cleaner ways. The center spreads out, which is fine because the center was never the point.

If you loved Speedhunters, keep a tab open for the archive and another tab for the new stuff. Toss a follow to a small creator. Buy a photo book. Start that blog you’ve been threatening to start. Take your camera to a meet that nobody covers, and tell the truth about the cars and the people who built them. The site may be parked, but the chase is still on, and the map just got bigger.