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less than 18 months the yellow masthead, known internally as ‘the flying arsehole’ (it was supposed to be a tyre), had been replaced by something altogether more traditional.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.