Don't look back in anger: The wild world of car mags in the 1990s

A young James May watches the Autocar team do battle on a Scalextric track The 1990s was a golden era for consumer publishing – and for car magazines in particular Anyone who enjoyed the recent BBC documentary on the birth of the groundbreaking lads’ mag Loaded may be surprised to hear that the 1990s was also the scene of a bloody battle for the soul of the car magazine. True, it involved less debauchery, but there was plenty of subterfuge, egotism and tantrums – not to mention the incineration of millions of pounds as the three big specialist publishers fought to dominate one of the most lucrative magazine sectors. In January 1993, I parked my ‘hospital’ blue Escort 1.3 Base in a side street as far from the Autocar & Motor office as possible (deliberately hidden because I didn’t want my new colleagues to judge me) and stepped into the rather large shoes of one James May. He had been fired when the national press picked up on a – shock, horror! – rude word the Autocar production team had embedded in the Christmas double issue, for which James carried the can. He also carried a tape recorder into the meeting in which he was dismissed, immediately returning to his colleagues in the Autocar office to relive the tragi-comic moment. This act of defiance provided a hint at not only his future self on Top Gear but also the spirit of the car magazine sector at the time. This specialist media supertanker, which set sail with Autocar’s launch in 1895, was about to go to war with itself across the pages of Top Gear, Autocar, Max Power, Carweek, Auto Express, Car, Performance Car, Complete Car, What Car? and, finally, Evo. Three of them never made it back to base. To understand how we got to this point, it is worth rewinding to the 1970s and the profound effect that Car magazine was having on the profitable – and complacent – weeklies of Autocar and Motor. With the likes of our very own Steve Cropley and Mel Nichols (later to become Autocar’s editorial director) at the helm, Car had regularly ‘stuck it up’ the weeklies with its ingenuity and scoops. By the early 1980s, long-standing rivals Autocar and Motor were somehow being published by the same company, IPC, whose nickname ‘the Ministry of Magazines’ told you all you needed to know about their commitment to internal competition. Haymarket, which was already publishing What Car?, then acquired Autocar for £250,000 in 1984, and in 1988 it bought and closed Motor. Less than two years later, Auto Express was launched. No surprise, then, that both the BBC and Car publisher Emap decided to pounce with new magazines of their own, resulting in a splurge of launches in 1993. And then things got interesting. First, the BBC’s publishing partner, Redwood, which had just failed to buy Car, produced a dummy issue of a new magazine, Top Gear, with three competitive advantages: first, a great design, inspired by the women’s title Elle and conceived by Paul Harpin, who later became creative director of Haymarket; second, free advertising at the end of Top Gear TV episodes, which was manifestly unfair to everyone else; and third, the hard work of two people who were moonlighting from rival magazines in an act of subterfuge that, for some, still rankles today. Top Gear hit the shelves in October 1993 under editor Kevin Blick and with a cover that featured every new car on sale in the UK on the banking of the old Brooklands circuit in Surrey. The magazine cost £2.40 and had a ‘cover flap’ with a metal-effect finish that featured Quentin Willson at the top and Jeremy Clarkson at the bottom. The prize giveaway was an Escort Cosworth. Meanwhile, Emap was working on two launches: the multimillion-pound Carweek, led by the decorated editor of Car, Gavin Green, and ‘Project Petrol’, the brainchild of Grahame Steed and which was launched as Max Power. As we now know, the star of the show was not Carweek, which, despite a host of quality writers and the chance to win an Aston Martin DB7 in its £1 launch issue in August 1993, only survived 18 months. Instead, it was Max Power, which frankly did not make any sense to us car journalists when it appeared in April 1993, that went on to outsell everyone before closing in 2011. The new competition had a transformative effect on Autocar, which got bigger and glossier in 1994 and full of great ideas as it embraced the big-ticket car launches of the 1990s. Truth be told, it was a great time to be a car journalist. As you will read elsewhere in this issue, the 1990s first brought us the Mazda MX-5, Jaguar XJ220, McLaren F1 and Honda NSX, then the Elise, MGF, XJ8 and S-Type, plus ever more brilliant 911s, M3s and M5s, the Ferrari 360 and F50, the Freelander, Discovery, new Range Rover, Audi TT, Cayenne, X5, Beetle and new Mini. Even the Rover 75 sent sales northwards. What could possibly go wrong? The answer can be traced to something that became common in media circles at the time, namely ‘lifestyle’. There had been hints of it in car magazines for years, not least through Performance Car columnist Clarkson, who had pioneered a blokey tone that was more akin to the emerging lad culture of Loaded, FHM et al. Max Power went several steps further, needling the establishment with its underground modded car cruises and something largely absent from car mags of the time: humour. How dare they. As the magazines evolved, so did the focus of some advertisers, shifting from the bread and butter of ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ to more brand-oriented concepts, where cars were associated with things that were inherently cooler, such as, you guessed it, lads’ mags. It was around this time that Autocar, hot on the heels of its 100th birthday, relaunched with a striking yellow masthead penned at great cost by Pentagram, a renowned design consultancy. Inside, the photos became less descriptive and more atmospheric, while the features section evolved into something more weird. Autocar readers, accustomed to their weekly dose of car news and sport, were not convinced. The sales went backwards, and in less than 18 months the yellow masthead, known internally as ‘the flying arsehole’ (it was supposed to be a tyre), had been replaced by something altogether more traditional. The circulation recovered. Autocar was not the only car magazine to suffer from this identity crisis. Emap, revelling in the soaring circulation of Max Power, decided to close Performance Car in 1998 because of a perceived lack of demand for traditional performance motoring content. The senior journalists on Performance Car, Richard Meaden and John Barker, thought otherwise, and, with the backing of farmer Harry Metcalfe and publisher Allan Pattison, they launched Evo in 1998 on a shoestring budget. Evo made the definitive case for the traditional car magazine in the mould of Car and Autocar, complete with high-quality writing and ‘photos you could frame’. It worked brilliantly. The car media’s lifestyle experiment was not quite over, however. In a final twist, an independent magazine called Petrolhead was launched by Tony Middlehurst in 1998, complete with a fashion editor and the likes of Suzi Perry on the cover. It didn’t hang around for long, but it has had a lasting impact on the automotive media landscape, because it stopped the founder of PistonHeads, Dave Edmonston, from calling his groundbreaking website Petrolheads. And, believe it or not, Middlehurst still writes for PistonHeads to this day.

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