The end of an era

[Nik da Greek]

No, not Uncle Era fortunately He\'s going strong with many good years in him Nor the demise of my car either, that\'s just normal...

No, rather more trivial, this is an era with a small "e". No, not the type with smiley faces on either. This isn\'t going well, is it :o? OK, I\'ll just come out and say it...I bought the last EVER issue of M*x P*wer today and it\'s actually made me a bit sad. Not for the usual reasons it makes you sad ie that its full of really crap cars and appears to have been written by an eight year old, but because it is genuinely the end of something great and, well, British!

Stick with me here....I can sense you shuffling away lol. I know that over the years the mag\'s been guilty of some of the worst crimes against car modding imaginable (promoting Saxos with "Jap Combat" bumpers, bigging up fibreglass abortions with more speakers than Dixons, writing down to the level of the Special Brew damaged sink estate single-figure mental age exceptionally average readership etc etc) but was a voice for the modified car culture in this country, and it was somehwere you could see what was about, take ideas from it and discard the rubbish. You could, in a sense, browse the shop windows and sometimes be surprised by a genuine 1897 Max Laeuger porcelain vase amongst the chipped Tescos saucers and handle-less cups in the junk shop. You cant browse like this on the \'net, you have to know what you\'re looking for in order to type it in very precisely to your search engine, then think "page one of 10292834, I can\'t be smegging arsed" :mad:

More importantly, perhaps, its symptomatic of a decline in published magazines that seems to be ever-accelerating. The internet is to a greater or lesser degree, killing the printed word and I think that\'s a bad thing. You see, the magazines are written by professional writers who have to (at least nominally) research and/or know something of what they are writing about. And be entertaining. The internet, on the other hand, is written largely by utter fdukwads who are killing a few minutes between searching for grot and assassinating complete strangers on BookFace and do not offer any guarantee that anything they write is informed, factual or even existed before they plucked it from the foetid sewer of their mind twenty seconds ago. Magazines are bound by law and moderated to be accurate (to a degree) and non-defamatory without due cause...the internet is largely an unpoliced mire of people you would probably avoid in the real world and in fact might avoid urinating on were they burning, all of whom have a vested interest...or they wouldn\'t be bothering. Once a mag has pleased their sponsors their only real interest is being interesting enough to sell copies, whereas Joe Internet wants to post up about how he bought a bag of guaranteed authentic gribble widgets from Trader A and they aren\'t even though they were 23% of the price theyd normally be and I\'m too stupid to wonder how unless they\'re nicked or knock-offs and hes a crook and I want to slander him at every possible opportunity and.....

In addition, there\'s the more elusive loss of shared cultural identity that goes with losing such a mainstay of publishing. It\'s like this, in the old days when we had only four channels of telly and you had to get up to press a button to swap them lol (actually, I\'m old enough to remember there only being THREE, but its not funny getting old so fduk off :p)...where was I? Oh yeah, in those days, everyone watched Top of The Pops, everyone watched Doctor Who, everyone watched the Generation Game (it wasn\'t all good back then, y\'see) and then they chatted about what they\'d seen at school/work/the hairdressers/bus stop the next day. And because they\'d all seen the same thing, they all shared the same cultural identity. Now there\'s no such thing, you can\'t watch TOTP even if you want to, there\'s a choice of twenty eight music channels on cable and the odds of your mates having seen the same video are infinitesemally small....OK, some things still penetrate the nation\'s conciousness, but generally only the ones that buy enough media sledgehammer coverage to keep in the ever-more dilute public psyche, like your X-Factor, Celebrity Dancing on Jungle Worm Eating Vote Me Off Whatever The Fduk Gimmick We Can Think Of In A Half Hour Production Meeting Up The Pub.... On Ice.

And let\'s face it, they\'re all shlte! What things like Max Power did was give a nationally-level playing field for people to use. It was a shared ground, even if you didnt like what they were featuring, you were aware of it and you could discuss it and know if you met someone from the other end of the country at a show, they could discuss it too. Now the only chance of that is if you happen to frequent the Outer Hebridies Obscure Model Of Toyota Starlet No-one\'s Ever Heard Of Forum just like your new mate.

No-one\'s still reading this torrent of nonsense, but I think the constant watering down of our shared identity into a brown melange of internet putrid sewage is a sad thing. I think it\'s sad that the mag that introduced us to the Midnight Club is gone, the mag that featured Smoky Nagata of Top Secret doing 200 mph in his Supra on the A1 then having to flee the country, the mag that featured all those Dragon demo cars on the cover and in articles. It\'s sad because all we have left now is inbRedline and their Oh-so-mature "we only do performance" stance (forgetting they once were a pale imitation of Max with half the pages) and Barryboys. And that is frankly no fduking substitute at all. I thangkyoup

Utter borrocks...or deeply profound? discuss......

[Grant Monkhouse]

I used to really enjoy reading MP when I was at school, 9 years ago, but I only ever got it fOr certain feature cars, rx7, skylines etc. what made the magazine non appealing to menwas the fact that the amount of corsas which had £40,000 spent on them and only had 90 BHP, now to me for a magazine that\'s name is MAX POWER having cars so under powered made the magazine a joke to me.
The last time I bought MP was when the blue rx7 was in it a couple of months ago, now the information on the engine said it was street ported on the left hand page and bridge ported on the right hand page, to me that just proved that they weren\'t even trying to sell the magazine for peoples interest in cars it they were more interested in the 90 pages of adult sites and numbers out of 150 page magazine?!!!!
They have only themselves to blame for peoe losing interest in their magazine, it is a shame it is no more but making the mag more in the interest of the reader and not there profit from advertising

And I read your whole post, my head hurts now.

[Arnie_O]

Well that was an Epicky long rant post Nik

[captainbizzaro]

I am tempted to buy the last one, just as a salute to a sinking ship-they went from 250000 copies sold monthly to 25000 which is a tremendous dip in performance in anyones book. I agree though-the continuing demise of proper written material is very sad even if that mag in particular did bring us a lot of tripe. The Top Secret A1 run was a flash of greatness though, along with the Norris Designs Evo doing a similar run but through a tunnel (of which the name of escapes me).

[Will66]

How the mighty have fallen, Max Power used to be Britain\'s Highest Circulating Monthly Periodical.  Now it\'s dead, it\'s a bit sad but I think they did loose their unique-ness and didn\'t evolve.  Redline was a shameless Max Power clone when it started out but has now got all pious and "performance" orientated and magazines like Jap Performance and Banzai do Max style stuff without denigrating it with gratuitous women or frozen teenage talent with their boobs out.  There are now as many magazines for modified cars as there are cars being modified and Max Power couldn\'t compete.

As for Barryboys, they represent the worst aspects of the internet.  Spotty, useless work-dodgers who use the inscrutability of the internet to run down the efforts of others.  There are some shocking cars on there but equally there are some very nice ones that get run down for being other than as the manufacturer intended rather than poorly made.  They are not car enthusiasts, they are miserable excuses for humanity that entertain themselves by being offensive about the efforts of others.

[skybusr34]

i think max power has brought it on them selves.  instead of doing interesting reports on decent modified cars from all differnt manufacturers.. just adverts

bmw, pugs, vw jap etc etc.     they just put tripe in there pages.

back when i was getting into cars property.  15 long years ago they did project mad max .. things like that made that magazine great.  now just ....school boy reporting and full of adverts. .

[Dan Norton]

Wow, i secretly purchased aswell Nik.....i actually took out a £5 note and paid for it ( the paperboy normally gives me his copy, well used!)

Aug 2005....my RX7 got photo\'d at a show in Newark.
March 2006.....a full 5 page feature!

I was over the moon when at said show, Dan Anslow and Millsy made their way over, and said, "thats f**king awesome, fancy a feature?"
Of course i didnt say no!

From 2001 -2006, i think we had a goldern era in modifying.....people started building totally amazing cars, to high standards, and the whole big power thing was in full flow.
Running costs for such cars were cheap (back then), we could do litterally anything to our cars and still be road legal (one of the few countries in the world where such laws are so relaxed).
And Max Power was at its best (in my opinion).

Magazines nowadays are pure marque / model / origin specific, Max Power was never going to survive.

Reading the last issue, you can see why it hasnt survived....the whole "scene" has moved on, and the magazine just couldnt keep up with how its changed.
But, i think the generation that grew up with it, has grown up and moved on, and the next generation just have\'nt embraced it as much.

I think this is down to such online media being freely available, mainly criticising such a scene, and the ever increasing costs of motoring putting the younger generation off.

RIP Max Power.....a big part of my yoof, gone!

[trotter]

wow, didn\'t realise they were calling it a day. As said before, it used to be quite good. Bought it every month when I was at school, but soon turned to the likes of Jap Performance and Banzai when it started getting far too chavvy for it\'s own good.

I mind there was one guy who spent something like 60k putting two engines and a sequential \'box in a Nova ffs!!!

As an aside, if there\'s any pics from a Fast and Modified meet at the Humber Bridge in it that show a seemingly normal human being dressed up as a red indian chief that\'ll be me!!!

graeme