I heard it was a lot better and bought a copy a while back (as they covered a RR day at Zen I was at) but it was still way too over the top for my liking.

I used to like ccc myself and some of the ford mags (even in between cossies) many years ago.

Last max power mags I remember buying were one with an F40 in, and project xs bmw, the yellow carlton on 3 spokes etc..

I actually saw project XS (the e30 bmw with wide kit) up in Camden parked on the street, must have been 1994/95

 

THE PROBLEM WITH CAR MAGS WHEN YOU HAVE BEEN IN THE GAME A LONG WHILE IS YOU HAVE seen it all and read it all before, i like the fact though after loads of badgering to see foreign stuff in cf and ff that there is a good percentage of it in.

my mate was saying today that max power got rid of the fanny and it went down hill. max power was great in the early days and was like fast car.

 

When it came out is was bang on the money! It was the best selling car magazine in the UK for a long while.

I still remember being in WHSmiths and seeing my first issue, with a purple 205 Dimma on the cover. As I flicked through it in the shop I said to myself - "This is what I want to do for a living". I then made it my mission to work for a car mag, and here I am!

I also met my future wife who worked on Max when I was on Revs, and we've now got two beautiful daughters and a great life so I guess I owe Max Power an awful lot!!

 

didnt know dan had left redline!!

i seen bearsy and stav at a shoot the other week and they didnt say anything!

whats he up to now then?

ps, since leaving FF a year ago, i think i have seen about 2 issues for sale in the shops!!

 

i probably had all the early max powers, i prefered fast ford and performance ford though,i also got occasionally tripple c.

its funny when you read the 10 years ago bit in ff and i think i read that on the bog last week

also...............

the first ff i bought and read would pass for classic ford no probs today,them were the days

 

Don't get me wrong fella I think its a good mag, or I wouldn't buy it every month

Sorry for any offence, just I am very anal about reading things through, and seem to spot stuff that others wouldn't. It's hardly riddled with errors maybe just an occasional incorrect caption or something of that nature.

Maybe you should make me a proof reader and email/send a pre-production copy each month - anything I spot you pay me Ł20, anything I miss and others spot I'll pay you Ł20.

 

Bit of a difference in the comments

No offence taken

 

I have never been into the max power scene.I hate big over the top body kits.

 

Mate if you think that is a proof reading error, you really havent seen what the little companies churn out.

Go and read Dave Moss (madyum) FRONT PAGE article in performance ford, it says in one part of the advert that he has a hayward and scott exhaust, says in another bit he has a simpsons exhaust, and there is a paragraph they are halfway through and when you turn the page its starting a new sentance, or on ZeeTee's article where you can barely read the white text on the white clouds in the sky.

You are talking about stuff that a proof reader would need to be a car techy to spot, where as these mistakes are things that anyone who can read would spot.

BIG difference!

 

Especially in a scene like the ford scene where so many people love the standard look.

Pretty much any ford mag you pick up will have a stage 3 saph on a safe set of mo's or similar in it.
Only thing that varies is the colour of the samcos

But I would imagine a lot of readers like seeing that, even if it is a bit repetitive to those of us who have bene getting the mag every month for years and years.

Its always a delicate balance, as an example, I have a lot to do with the Q&A section of Total Vauxhall, every month someone writes in and asks how to put a calibra engine in a corsa, I cant possibly justify replying to that every month as subscribers would get pissed off at paying for the same content again and again, but at the same time I also cant ignore it and expect people to locate a 4 year old back issue, so its the sort of thing we'll touch upon now and again.

Very hard making something which covers the major bases to satisfy the new reader, without keep repeating yourself for the established readers.

 

yes your right there thay were good but fook thay went high on price i then stopped buying them as i was allways buying fast ford and performance ford........

i stopped getting fast car max power and redline as there crap

i buy ff and pf now and some time's classsic ford but to be fair guys there getting to expensive now and im thinking of stopping it now and not getting them anymore..

when you add it up every year its alot of money and i cant be doing with all this crap moden day shit i like my old fords and thats it, im not willing to read about some guys mondeo or focus with all the crap on it

 

I find alot in Fast Ford the text is hard to read, as like Chip said it's too close a colour to the background. I buy it now, but purely because Dan helped me with my English. Heh! It's great.

P.S - I look for the photoshop errors, Ha Ha.

 

Benni, fast ford is one of the better ones with regards to text readable against the background IME!

 

It's the only magazine I read now mate, so wouldn't know.. I find it's fine, until it goes over something, like a pavement or something, and it's aukward for a while, until it's past the pavement. If that makes any sense.

Benni.

 

Used to read Revs back in the day... thought the DIY guides and features were decent and well written. Max Power never really floated my boat. Only magazines that I'll buy are Fast Ford or EVO these days.


Cheers,
Grant

 

It was loads of fun to work on back then too! Less issues per year, a huge team, and a huge budget. It barely even seemed like a job. It's a very different game now. Still fun but a LOT more work!

 

Used to like Revs, shame it went tho.

Didn't like it when it went like a test mag ie comparing cars etc and only having a couple of feature cars.

 

Nor did the rest of the readers! Which is why it died!

 

is that when you worked their or did you leave before then?

 

I left when it had it's first 'change'. Think my last issue was the one with the 4 car test between an Esc Cos, Pulsar, Integrale and Scoob.

The Editor changed, and so did the magazine's direction. It never really recovered.

 

Whats happened to the other guys that used to work on the old skool magazines then Dan?? There is likely to be a mixture of Max Power, Revs and Fast Car below cause I used to buy them all from time to time...

Bit bored so without digging out old issues, here are the names I remember:


Scary Steve: Bald, had an MX5

Pazza: Asian guy that drove a Silver WRX with a pretty extreme exhaust system.

Dave(I think?): Was like the Revs version of The Stig... always gave cars to him to get his opinion on their drive and performance. Had a flat-top haircut and liked to knock almost everything sideways for the camera.

Big Trev: Ginger and liked his RWD stuff, 200sx, Bimmas etc.


Anyone remember any others?? lol... think I'll go dig out a copy and have a re-read of it.


Cheers,
Grant

 

what was the score with the first editor of max p, graham something, didn't he become a publisher and had buckets of cash or something like that?

steve

 

Guys i remember were from max power years ago are

Hans: who claimed he had a quad turbo fiat

Proby: had the red nova sr

cant really think of any more

 

Scary is the current Edior of Fast Car. Top bloke.

Pazz left to do something in the city, dunno what

Dave Clarke was hired by Revs to drive cars. Funny fella and bloody handy! Works for/owns (owned?) Racelogic.

Big Trev worked for Fast Car until very recently, left to work for his dad's business.

Hans - Was one of my mates at Uni oddly enough. Got the job on Max that i went for (I got the Revs job a few months after). Knows absolutely nothing about cars! Left to work on Nuts, currently (AFAIK) is the Editor of F1 racing magazine.

Proby (Jon Walsh) worked for Redline after Max, then went to work in PR for Volkswagen, Mercedes, Silverstone and currently Kia.

 

Graham Steed - He (along with the photographer Fly) came up with the original Max Power name and concept. Became the publisher of Max and Revs (interviewed me for the Revs job) then was shoved onto Publishing Land Rover Owner. No idea what he's doing now, and not sure where the 'buckets of cash' came from?

 

g reg emmerson and vbh did max power in the early days, iirc jim blackstock did mp and fc too.

Dan seeing as your well into this post can you say is it a doddle doing your job or a right pita,the travelling and the writing, ford fair and track days etc and sorting the mag out, give us ff buyers a insight into your job pretty please

 

Haha.. well it's certainly no doddle. There's a huge amount that goes on behind the scenes that you never see - the actual mag you get in your hands is the tip of the iceberg. There is however a lot of messing about that goes on, mainly because we sit in a big open plan office with Fast Car, Redline, Total Vauxhall and Classic Ford, so you can imagine the pisstaking and practical jokes that go on!

Don't do as much travelling as I used to, but Neil and Jamie are all over the place. Having said that I drove 400 miles today to pick up our new project car from Sheffield.

It's hard to know what to say really, it's an unusual fun job, but very stressful at deadline time and is a lot less glamorous than it (hopefully) appears. It's all I've done for the last 12 years, so I suppose I do take some of the fun aspects for granted though.

If I think about it, I've driven a massive range of performance cars, been round the world in the process, witnesses countless awesome cars, and done some incredibly fun things - Who else gets paid to spend the day jumping a car over a humped back bridge for a photoshoot, or gets flown to Iceland by Kenwood and taken out to an Icelandic strip joint...twice...and who else's boss would walk past their desk and be surprised if PF wasn't open on their screen!!

I've never paid to get into a car show, and one day I drove to work in a Skyline R34, and back home in a Caterham R500, so I suppose I'm very lucky in some respects.

It is still 'just a job' at the end of the day so I also have all the regular grumbles about pay, management, internal politics etc etc... But one thing's for sure, I bloody love it!

 

fair do's ^^^ a honest reply and you enjoy the job, it shows by the way

 

Revs was the nuts of a mag wehn it first came out! Absolutely brilliant. Then sadly went T&A, with plastic fantastic bodykit cars.... and went all Max Power.

 

When revs was launched it was very much "we're not doing all the chequebooks cars, its going to me mk1 escorts built at home in a shed"

few years later, it was just max power with a different title

 

Didn't know that! Guessing Fly must have some kind of stake in the mag as he's still shooting for them to this day? Or maybe it's just because he's as integral to the mag as the old logo?

Haha, remeber an old fitting guide from an early Max where Fly's mondeo got a 15" sub fitted to the parcel shelf so he could still get his gear in.....

Max and Revs were brilliant back then.

 

It made sound business to do so at the time - Max sold shit loads, FC sold shit loads, Revs didn't. The (understandable) thinking was that if they did the same (or similar) thing then they'd get a slice of the pie. Unfortunately they put shit ingredients in their receipe, and did it at a time when sales were tailing off so lost out massively.

Then EMAP did their knee jerk trick of getting in a bunch of people who know shit loads about magazine craft, but fuck all about the scene and completely redesigned the mag. As a result the readers weren't sure what the mag was anymore, and sales slid further.

The thing which baffles me is that they're doing exactly the thing with Max! IMO EMAP killed both mags via their own stupidity.

 

Anyone got any of the old Revs?

 

No stake, he doesn't do that much work for them any more. As happens, teams change and snappers fall out of favour. Don't worry though, you'll always be my favorite Ade

 

Has anyone got the one with the silver 205 being 'shot' from a gun on the cover? It was my very first issue and I've not got one! Will swap for a FF mag

 

not as good as ff and pf though imo, if you were into your rs's it was them and then tripple c and then fast car. they were what i read in smiths and i usually bought ff and pf,then when cf came out it was ff and cf and occasionally pf.

 

I think most revs readers specifically bought it because it wasnt max power, when they tried to turn it into max power too, they pissed off the very readers who they had aquired specifically through promises they wouldnt go that way.

As a niche mag for the hardcore homegrown car enthusiast it worked, as just a shitter version of max power, there was no reason to buy it instead of the "real thing" and just get max power.

One thing you cant deny about max power IMHO, was it did do wonders for the standards of photography in mags.

 

Read on a forum a few years ago that he had "gone upstairs" as a magazine publisher and was loaded!

hence the question

steve

 

Let me look on the loft, might have it...

 

That's purely because EMAP are (were) greedy. They want market leaders, not niche titles. Future's speciality is special interest mags, niche markets are smaller, but easier to target, and easier to hold on to!