Max Power was peak ’90s reading – and now it needs to be brought back
The 1990s wasn’t just a golden decade for sports cars and supercars: it also ushered in the era of the modified car.
Young drivers, buoyed by a strong economy, access to innumerable cheap motors and an explosion in the fibreglass and in-car entertainment markets, flocked to put their own spin on almost everything they could get their hands on.
Peugeot 205s, Citroën Saxos and Vauxhall Novas were by far the hottest properties, but even Rover’s utterly dreary 25 hatchback could be redeemed in the eyes of the generation’s cash-flush creatives.
It was only natural, then, that publishers would seek to capture the attention and indeed the wallets of this booming market. Tens of modded-car magazines popped up seemingly overnight, but none did it quite like Max Power, the first and best of the bunch.
In its tone, presentation and, crucially, access, Max Power absolutely nailed it. From the very beginning, plastered on each cover was a car modified to the absolute hilt with a witty cover line, from ‘Manic street creatures’ above a Mk2 Ford Escort to ‘Pugger me!’ next to a wide-bodied Peugeot 306, and the light-hearted tone of the copy within was a total break from the stately voice projected by traditional titles.
That was its unique selling point: a tongue-in-cheek attitude, almost self-satirising, with a wink in acknowledgement of the whole culture’s silliness, that nobody else could quite replicate.
Let’s not forget the cars, either. Tuning powerhouses such as Dimma, Carisma and Rieger appeared to wage war on one another, locked into an arms race to build the most outlandish car possible. A V8-swapped Renault Laguna? Sure thing. A Vauxhall Astra swollen to nearly six feet wide? Why not?
Meanwhile, keen readers engaged in their own war of style, bidding for kudos in car parks up and down the country on a weekly basis. Forget picking up a nice pair of trainers or a designer outfit: if your car wasn’t wearing TSW Venom alloys, you were nobody.
It all formed one great, proud celebration of the car but one that was seemingly corrupted by commercial interests as time wore on.
The rampant sexualisation of women that took hold in Max Power and its contemporaries as their publishers sought to capture a slice of the booming lads’ mag market sits especially uneasily today.
I reckon it was this element – and bigwigs’ reluctance to let go of it and risk losing audience share – that was ultimately one of the biggest contributors to Max Power’s death in 2011. Society simply moved on, and interest in ‘Maxed’ cars slowly waned as the magazine’s focus on them was diluted.
But as madly modded cars come back into their element and the original set of Max Power machines age into classic status, I’d love to see something of its ilk return, focused strictly on some of the amazing work being done by people just like you and me.
The culture that’s now booming once again deserves an organ to celebrate its efforts, with a more modern tone that places a focus on the insane amount of work that’s needed to transform a humble shopping supermini into a show-stopping tech-fest of a machine, wearing double its body weight in plastic addenda and equipped with a sound system that wouldn’t be out of place on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
