The question was asked what happened in 2007 2008, the mag desided be more like redline and evo mag. be a proper tuning and car mag. all the girls went and it reinvented its self. however this new consept did not work ans sails plumeted. so they went back to the old format ish. the customers lost fath in the mag and never came back.... i loved it as a teanager and was a large factor in why i got my first rs turbo.
rip max power.

 

Might be a load plastic fantastic fibreglass shite in those mags.. but its one stage some if not most us went through in the early days.. badboy bonnets, crappy light upgrades, filler, rattle cans, spoilers, bodykits, banging sound systems ( the only one i havent grown out of lol )

 

ISSUE 3 one of my Favourites , used to see alot of this mk2... have some video's of it aswell



Sad the magazine went the way it did really , used to work with a guy that picked cars up from owner of the 1st ever featured Car The Purple Throbbing Monster Dimma Turbo 205.That was a sight to watch up finchley high street torque steering all over the road

R.I.P Max Power

 

I remember buying it back in the day when I first passed my test around 2001. Deffinatly fed my passion for cars and has given me the outlook on cars I have today.

I wonder how its disappearence will affect the modified car scene...

Found some from that era over xmas. Some of the cars in it at the time I loved but looking back now look stupid.

Oh well, it seems all of us buying it for old times sake will make it the best selling issue!

 

actually a bit sad at reading that.although nowadays i hate the thought of max power chaved up cars i loved it when i was 17-18 years old.loved going to the local news agent and grabbing a bottle of irn-bru and max power and heading of home to read it

 

used to buy it years ago, even then my mates slaged me off because they bought fastcar insteed, well i buy fast ford now and they have failed in life and started buying pvw

anyone remember the illegal street drift thing they did? iirc a guy with a sahp cossie hit a spectator and the mag printed the full story?

 

Just bought it there for old times sake only, i stoped reading it many moons ago, after reading it throught the last pages where of lassies with there tits out then adverts for sex lines, says it all really.

On the first page it says "Thank you farewell... For now"?

 

I bought it about 3/4 times and that was enough for me.

Im a retro car man myself, cant be doing with all the spoilers and speakers that create more power than the engine.

Give me a nice Capri 3.0S (or equivalent) and im happy.

 

I bought it for old times sake, and there's a mk4 fiesta in there!!! Ok its a bodykitted show car which ain't my thing, but when was the last time a mk4 fiesta got any covarage in a mag?

 

Couldn't find a copy for love nor money today, pretty pissed off as I would like a trip down memory lane. If sales spike like this perhaps they'll bring it back

 

it's been out for a few days mate, but to be fair i did pick up the only copy i could find in tesco the day it came out, so word has probably spread it was going to be the last one

 

I did buy it years ago, but eventually I got fed up of all t*ts and b*ms in it, nothing wrong with ladies, but there are other mags for that and lack of technical stuff. As with most stuff, you grow up and move on.
Fast Car was great when it first came out, but copied Max Power, so I too fell out of live with that.
Thanks for the headsup about last issue, probably pop out and get a copy for ol'times sake.

 

Secretly we all have a soft spot for the cars that made it in the issues from may 1993 to 1998 odd, i used to read them when i was 5-8 at my cousins house when he had his rs turbo and xr2!

 

Was a chap called Simon Penson - He previously worked on a fishing magazine. By all accounts he was good at being an Editor, but knew fuck all about the scene and is credited with killing the magazine. Truth it, it was already well broken when he took the helm, he just punched the nails in the coffin by changing it every issue until the point where no one actually knew what the magazine was any more. With each issue they'd loose readers, panic, and change it. Which would then loose even more readers... and so the cycle continued until it was utterly broken.

It didn't help that Bauer seemed to forget that you need staff who actually know the market.

Not a chance. They may try some 'specials', but Max Power as a monthly magazine is gone forever.

At its peak it sold 280K magazines, and was the biggest selling car mag in the UK. In recent years the sales were slaughtered (helped along massively by Zoo/Nuts, and then finished off by the term 'Chav' becoming synonymous with modified cars, and overused by the media).

Thought the last issue was massively disappointing TBH. The cover concept was good, but the flames looked really bad and fake.

The mag was also packed with feature cars they'd months years ago and were just using up - I mean 3x Rover 200s in the very final issue FFS!!!!

I thought they could have filled the mag with heritage, and all the great things people remember, rather than just having a bunch of stuff that CAUSED the decline in the first place (i.e the kind of cars that killed the scene and no one gives a shit about like that little pick-up thing). The good stuff made Max so amazing and culture changing was just a section at the back.

Ironically the magazine demonstrates why they killed themselves. Compare the features, the humor and the 'spirit' of the old stuff, with the wooden, fake wannabee-cool features in the front end.

 

IMO when it was at its strongest point was in the late 90s to early 2000's when dan, millsy, and those other trolls were running the mag

 

Think i might get this for old times sake i remember the early ones with cool cars in them not like the saxo years some young chav sticking a big bore on his 1.2 and a pair of his mums black tights over the rear lights to give them the smoke look lol.

 

Back in the day I bought it every month with out fail and read it from cover to cover.
I got the 1st issue and carried on for about 3 years.
Back then some of the features were very funny, and a good light hearted read with good cars that were not over top, but well built for their time.... one that springs to mind is the standard looking green Nova GSI with C20LET conversion!

Living in Peterborough and Oundle (where one of the writers lived) I regularly saw the project cars on the road.
RS Kicker pulled up next to me filling up my MK3 XR3i, before it had been in the mag for the first time and I was blown away by it!
Seeing the yellow Project Thunder driving down the narrow Oundle highstreet making lots of noise springs to mind too.

Over time I stopped buying it because it just seemed to get worse and worse, which was a great shame.
Ive not bought it for about 10 years, but saw this last issue and thought it would be good to read, but sadly I was very disapointed with it.
Why does the last ever issue need pages full of new products? I was really looking forward to seeing some of the early/best features reproduced in full and so on, but it seems a really good opportunity has been missed.

Sad to say, but all this last issue has done is confirmed why I stopped buying it

 

+1 ...

 

Ill go see if I can find myself one to tommorow, the last time I bought one was about 2004.

 

i wont be buying it for old times sake, havent brought it for years an dont want to spoil the memory of wot it once was......porno/car mag lol.

 

If you go back far enough it didnt have the soft porno element, THAT is when it was at its best

 

max power always has been shit!well in my opinion anyway lol

 

Depends what you wanted from it, if you were after a technical/serious/indepth read then it was never going to be any good!
A bit like people moaning that Top Gear has too much fucking about

 

i found it good as toilet paper although it was not very absorbent and tended to slip up the ars crack rather then grip and wipe lol

 

So it actually wasnt very good as toilet paper then!

 

tushay my man tushay

 

Rich, do you want me to mail you the copy I bought? It certainly wasnt what I was expecting.. Either Ive got much older than I thought or it's really gone downhill in the last 10/12 years

 

Its actually quite shit, because for the past 7+ years we havent really thought about maxpower, only pf and ff.

But alot of us grew up reading redline, revs, fastcar, maxpower, and from the 90's up until early 2000's.

I can remember in my old house in my bed room and cellar hanging shit loads of posters up and collecting the stickers pmsl when i was about 12 and my cousin who was 14(2002)

turned wank ever since they started featuring civics and saxos though

 

does that mean that any self respecting motoring journo would leave max power off their CV/portfolio if they did any work for them?

simple, ford never made a decent fiesta mk4. It was all shopping trollies and thats it. its completely overlooked by the mk5 zetec-s which at least has some performance to shout about.

the best mk4 you could get was a 1.4 si

 

the mk4 was a pointless car and you never see them, for good reasons

 

I'll be grabbing this to have a glance at just for old times sake, got a cupboard full of old max powers and revs but not really purchased one for a long time.

Stick to my Classic ford and retro mags these days.

Ginge

 

lol!

 

think dan's hit the nail on the head with this one, they should have shown us feature cars from it's heyday, bonkers things like the pinto powered reliant robin, features that originated the words "peter-bog-horror" the first use of the word "fuck" in a publication i can recall other than a porno mag, etc, etc

they could have also rounded up some of the ex staffers to write about how max influenced their career's, vbh and the like

how the max philosophy went on to become revs (which i think turned out to be a better mag and more max power than max power )

there were glimpses of it's greatness in the last issue, but thre was far too much booabage on display, anyone who's got the mag handy will also be able to put up pics of some of the bints who bared their chests at various meets, including the infamous pink or brown answers and most were just there to get their tits in the mag

 

Bought it a couple of times but couldn't get my head round all the plastic. I meant the cars not the girls

Am shocked it fizzled to this though

 

reading this thread has bought back some funny memories. i was 17 back in 2000 which i suppose was the 'height' of the max power culture. I have some great memories of the cruises etc, seeing some of the 'maxpower girls' in the flesh was good fun when your in your late teens. Although one thing that does stand out in my mind once was meeting a guy at guildford cruise one night called danny ( cant remember surname ) but he used to run a bmw 'tuning' firm called dantech. Well this guy, ( who used to drive a turbo's 3 series ) was the biggest tool i've ever met in my life........... ever!!! really can't explain just how much of a cunt this guy was. anyone remember him?? i'm sure he can't be in business now

 

i went throught the poster from the first one i bought as a teen! counted up 154 issues i have bought since my first issue i never missed one! they have ruined my life lol

 

I have it - I am gonne read it tonight.


Do you know what - fuck it - I am happy to say Max Power got me into cars...

I remember where I was and what the first mag was - on the poster 3rd row - 6th mag. Corsa.

I remember buying it - WH Smiths in Sutton Coldfield - and being mesmorised by it.

I think there was a 4x4 Escort Van in that issue too - and a 3door.

Loved it...

 

Picked up a copy yesterday, will have a flick through.

Dan - do you think there is mileage in some sort of special issues?

Rick.

 

used to love Max Power back in the day! USed to look at the cruise review from each areas etc. Cars was cool until early 2000 when it started going down hill! i went to Max Power live when it first started, went to second show and thought it was rubbish. Then never went again.

 

Got a copy tonight and had a flick through and tbh bit disappointed. I think if it was to be a special commemorative issue, it should be just that not a few pages at the end of a regular mag.

Still fucking loved it back in the day and genuinely wish I'd not thrown out all the copies I had pretty much every copy from Feb 96 (green astra) to around 2002.