Long-time Reader? Read this!

Posted on August 25th, 2007 in Driving Emotion,Opinion by Julian Edgar

All that I’ll say here has already been covered in AutoSpeed, but here it is again – this time with the facility to allow you to directly comment.

AutoSpeed is changing. The publication that we were 8 years ago, 5 years ago, even two years ago is not what we are today. Rather than being stuck in a time warp, we are responding to changes in society, changes in car technology and changes in the philosophy of staff members.

We started the latest raft of changes back in November last year – less chequebook hero feature cars, more background on car engineering, a hands-on project car (Frank the famous Falcon!) and more reader feedback.

Now we’ve dropped my Driving Emotion column in favour of this blog, a change that incidentally has boosted overall published content.

And reader contributions to the blog are just the beginning – expect to see in the near future the facility to comment on every single article. When the comments facility is up and running, we’ll drop the current Response reader feedback column. A weekly ‘letters to the editor’ forum is now outdated and with the facility to comment and give feedback on everything published, we see no need to retain it.

And the editorial content is further changing.

Where modified cars should be going…

Posted on August 24th, 2007 in Driving Emotion,Economy,Handling,Opinion,Power,Technologies,Turbocharging by Julian Edgar

The other day a reader wrote in, saying how he was disappointed with AutoSpeed. Amongst other things, he said that there were plenty more powerful modified cars around than those we are featuring – all we had to do was attend some dyno days and go to the drags.

That we are no longer particularly interested in featuring typical straight-line drag cars, and typical horsepower dyno hero cars, hadn’t occurred to him.

I told him in my reply that AutoSpeed was (and is) changing in editorial direction; if he liked the Australian magazine Street Machine (he’d said in a previous email he did) I thought it very unlikely that he would like AutoSpeed, both now and in the future. Therefore, it would seem best that he stop reading AutoSpeed, rather than just go on being frustrated with us.

[Incidentally, this idea that if you don’t like us, don’t read us, seems to offend people. But to me it makes perfect sense: what’s the alternative – I encourage those readers to persevere, even though I know they won’t like what is coming up? To me that seems completely hypocritical.]

Anyway, I was reflecting on the reader’s comments, especially in the implication that more power is good – and even more power is therefore better. As I’ve stated previously, I think that many modified cars in Australia are heading in completely the wrong direction – they’re huge, hugely heavy, and hugely powerful. But rather than put this so negatively, let’s look at the issue more proactively. What makes for a good modified car? (And so, one that we’d be delighted to feature?)

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