I agree with the person about the spelling mistakes. However, I've wanted to buy a CD for a whole year now but because it says "It's" instead of "Its" I refuse too, so that's just me and my issues. However, I do like FF and don't notice any mistakes until after the purchase.

Benni.

 

I've bought f/f and p/f for over 10 yrs and still do,some months they're good and some not,i've always enjoyed the features by stu and mike r etc.

 

cant please everyone

 

Well i think both mags have a very tough job

The ford scene is dying away quite quickly due to Ford not being a serious player in the sport cars world over the last 10years

The jap world is growing quicker by the day and this provides the jap mags with more and more cars with new technology to talk about ever day and new cars pop up in there hundreds

With the old dying ford scene there isnt much to shout about in the new parts / upgrades or complete cars as nobody throws tens of thousands at them anymore ( unless your a fool like me )

You also forget that with the world wide webb most new cars are all over it during the build and this takes the fun out of buying the mags as most cars are so well known before the feature is written

Another point is content

The cossie / BHP boys moan about seeing ( as quoted ) rusty old fiesta . and the fiesta owners are sick of seeing the same old 400bhp cossies
You have to try and cover the whole of this very small market thats left now

I have always prefered FF over PF but do feel PF has got better with the new team as before it was the same old tuners in there month after month after month ( i wonder why ) PF is now IMO getting back on track with veriety , not to all our tastes again but as i say they have to cover all corners of what remains of the ford scene , I still fell FF has the edge tho

A very tough job these fellas have and i wouldnt want to try and fill a mag month after month when there just isnt much new out there

Great effort by both mags and it would be a further blow to the ford scene if we lost them

Paul

 

well said paul ford need to get the fingers out and make more nice performance cars.

 

i agree with this

i love cossies but nice to see different cars

i sometimes think that show features are alittle shit in both mags .
rs day at santa pod feature in PF was shit this year

 

How would you change them/make them better?

 

i think that both mags need more homegrown stuff!! not all of us can afford 500bhp cossie!! more diverse stuff, xr2 turbos, orion turbos, and less on track cars! not everyone has a track car!! just my 2p's worth....

 

Altho i understand that mate , The problem is that those kind of cars were being built and featured 10 years ago , and altho it may seem snobby to you i dont want to see the same bodged up rusty shit i looked at 10 years ago

You see .. you cant please everyone

 

We can only feature what's out there. Despite what you may think there aren't actually that many good home-built cars. If they come up, then we feature them.

 

i wouldnt like your job mate must be very hard to get a mag out each month with a twist on it each month

 

i agree, at all the shows the mags only seem to have concours cars really mostly. there are lots of nice cars on local group stands that dont seem to get noticed by the mags which is a shame. also there seems to be alot of adveridge cars in the mags and not many really nice ones ive tried to get my cars featured more than once and they dont seem interested and all three of my cars are very nice modded and clean examples and im not the only person who seems to have this prob, so i cant see why they say they cant get nice cars to feature it seems more like they just dont seem to want to feature half of them, why is that

 

ive just bought classic ford mag with the blue mk1 fiesta n mk2 escort on the front. This is a top mag.

 

Count the number of Concours cars - They're never the ones most heavily featured. If 150 cars go to a show, we can probably only show 20-30. If we were to show every car it would end up being a 20 page feature! Not everyone can get in. Hopefully the best/most interesting make it in, but we simply can't show every car.

 

Maybe your view on what makes a feature car differs from mine. If it's a feature worthy car it gets in, if it's not, it doesn't. Feel free to send me some pics of your car and I'll offer you a feature, or tell you my reasons why I can't feature it.

Often a car can be a good clean example of a particular model, but it's nothing new, or out of the ordinary. Filling the mag with cars with mods that have been seen countless times (and for years) makes for a very stale mag that doesn't move with the times.

 

Best thing that happened to Performance Ford was that TWATT Nick leaving he new Fuck all about anything and found him rude and up his own arse tbh and never forget seeing him lick Andrew Gallaghers arse at ford fair lol lol

 

ref dan@ff

this month pf had julian godfrey's rs200 and a interviw with my rallycross,a high output weird looking cozzie and a load of other bits and bobs.

its obvious to me that the old stuff is still interesting so i'd like to see mike endeans ex mr rallycross xtrac gartrac mk3 escort or one similar with a turboed bdt cosworth.
or i'd like to see a genuine wrc escort,a proper one not a lookalike.
i'd love to see graham robson do 4 pages on works rally escort cosworths.
i'd also like to see the very first escort cosworth featured thats in the cathcart collection in ireland, what a super car that is and what a important bit of history that i'm sure people would love to read about.

tbh i feel the internet spoils the mags nowadays youcan find usually what you want and not pay for it,i'll still buy fast ford but that because i have been doing it since 1987 so its like a religion,its tough at the top lol

 

hi Dan mate how are you been a long time remember me Ryans dad (jwrc fiesta) hope you and family are well and you are still producing the best Ford Mag for up to date fords of course

regards Marc

 

So what makes a car worthy of a feature? Being concours? Being heavily modified? Being different? Having some history? Or what? I'm just curious as I know my car will never feature in a mag (although my Mk 1 Scirocco GTi did get a couple of pictures in the Club GTi magazine many, many years ago!).

For what its worth, the most interesting feature I've seen in either Performance Ford or Fast Ford of late was the restored 3-door Cosworth that the owner had put back to 'as good as new' with just a a few engine mods. I really liked that although I recognise that this was not a budget restoration.

 

I buy Fast Ford and Retro Cars. I can see that the Ford boys have a tough job as any single marque magazine does. I get a 3rd hand copy of a Land Rover mag every month and thats the same, theres very little that can set one modded 90 apart from another.

PPC is a good mag and Will is a really cool fella, a proper petrol head and his V8 Capris is awesome! The style of writing just doesn't quite appeal to me.

My personal favourite magazine is Retro Cars i love the variety of cars and the mag is generally well presented, the show reports are always varied too.

 

i think if fast ford or performance ford did a thrash at brunts that issue would out sell all the rest of the issues???

 

I agree Retro Cars is the best Mag on the shelves of W H Smiths great cars all so very different and all achievable cars unlike the big tuners cars that feature in Fast Ford and Performance Ford and we dont all have huge budgets like the tuners the mags get a bit like the Top Gear programme featuring amazing cars that most of us will never be able to afford to own

Wot we need are more reads on lower budget cars and how many more cossies do we need to read about the mags are still producing same type of cars we were reading about 10 years ago

 

in retrospect, maybe your right, he did use to come across as the sort of person who would talk to you on his terms!

but the twats who run it now aint got a clue..

 

There are a lot of very nice car's around, but they also need a good story to make an interesting feature. imho. I do like reading about the old rally and race drivers.

 

Have you seen a copy of Fast Ford recently?

I've been working on car mags for 14 years, and this unfounded criticism was levelled at them even then. At the end of the day modifying your car well isn't cheap, so ALL modified cars have had money spent on them, some more than others. The best cars have had more money spent on them, so it's only logical that there will be some big budget cars in the mix.

 

I couldn't agree more with the above. The guys do a very good job, but consider the source material, classic fords, it is unfortunately a dyeing out scene where you can buy scoobies and evos and countless other cars for the same money as a cossie.

You can only feature 300-400bhp cossies so much.

 

But the problem with that is actually getting cars that havent already been featured to turn up

And most of the pub / internet talkers with the 400+bhp cars running on greens and a t34 wont turn up either because then we will realy see they have more like 300 bhp

Plus it costs the mags a lot of money to do them

 

The titles of these two mags are Fast Ford & Performance Ford & yet the performance of the cars are rarely covered, an owner quotes 6 billion horses (on a T4 ) & the average punter believes it. I would like to see the Bullshit figures proved or the figures not quoted. If mines in a mag it proves the quoted figures.
It seems most want Low Power Ford or Totally average Ford, maybe they should change the Titles to get bigger circulation .

 

Not particularly. It doesn't hurt sales, but it doesn't increase them really.

 

totally agree with you mate sorry for using bad language in my post but i really did not like that nick and before him was another twatt Ben Birch as far as i know he was fiddling and had to leave Performance ford mag

 

I think it covers all bases very well and because its so varied you don't really get the "tuners" cars as such. Even when a car is professionally built its still not silly money. The BMW that was built by the guys in Edinburgh is a good example, very well done and maybe an aspirational car for some but not entirely out of reach for many people.

I love the low budget stuff but i think a retro cars can carry off just a clean look, new rims and a drop. If you just had an S1 dropped on nice rims and ultra clean it wouldn't quite cut it as a feature for Fast Ford.

 

Nice idea, but simple logistics dictate that it's not always practical. Nor are dyno graphs any guarentee. You have the luxury of time and an engine dyno, but you are very much the exception, not the rule.

It's fair to guesstimate the mods based on the spec, but overestimating does no one any favours, and we're careful to be as realistic as possible.

 

I have brought performance ford and fastford for many years and met Dave and Nick when they came over to Jersey and I feel for the guys trying their best every month to bring us some of the best cars out there so i feel abit patient with these guys as they traveling about to sort features, so we have a mag to read each month

 

Dan it must be so hard for you mate to find that very different car we have not seen before and for your powers to be to understand as its a business your running at the end of the day to get the max amount of copies sold . so really what is the way forward especially when ford have for some reason got left behind with their latest models by other manufacturers producing better performance cars !!!!!

I have decided to go back to the 80`s Fords mk3 escorts etc so watch this space mate
regards Marc

 

The main problem I find is that on both mags, the features are very shallow, and give little tech info or what does what on the car, and tend to end up as a long shopping list. That said the tech articles by Stu in FF are great, and the monthly projects are quite interesting...

Must be hard to find new things to write about though...

 

What a load of uninformed crap. Nick is very knowledgeable when it comes to tuning and cars in general (he was a mechanic for years before he joined PF... and a good one to from I've seen)
He is quiet with people he doesnt know very well, which can come across the wrong way, but he's a good guy. He helped me out many times.
As for the AG comment, Nick had many dealings with Andrew (track days, photo shoots) so they normally get to chatting.

 

Not everyone who reads the mags has a big power cossie!
I think they all need a cross section of "big power" / "aspirational" cars and the more attainable stuff to appeal to the widest market.
The titles aren't FASTEST FORD or BIGGEST BHP FORD! What should it be a 600bhp+ cossie dick show in every month??????

The power a car produces isn't the only piece i read on a car feature. For me someone dropping a Racing puma lump into a fiesta is just as interesting as someone building a massive spec yb as its the route they take and the story that makes the read worth it.

 

paul at nyrs sumed it up 30 odd post ago with this

You also forget that with the world wide webb most new cars are all over it during the build and this takes the fun out of buying the mags as most cars are so well known before the feature is written

 

No, finding content month in, month out that pleases the reader, the advertiser and the publisher definitely isn't easy. But it's my job, and it's a job I love so don't feel sorry for me

 

You are choosing one example of my plausable questions,

I am interested in knowing how they got in to the tuning buisness, what the experience is, were they see the direction of the scene going, new things they see coming i.e different types of turbos etc etc there are many more questions that could be asked

All just my opinion of cause's

Mike