It’s your Custom Car

How do you want your

So, Custom Car is under new ownership. More or less everyone who reads these words will have known that already, but to give you the full gen it’s now the property of Assignment Media. We’re a very small family company which also publishes a couple of 4x4 titles, and we’re only the third owners in Custom Car’s history. And we certainly know that what we’ve got on our hands is an icon among motoring magazines.

Custom Car has had many incarnations. Many of you have been along for almost the whole ride and will know that to start with, it was trying to be like everyday car magazines but with a sense of fun. It used to include road tests on new cars and vans as well as stuff about tuning and the odd article on way-out subjects like kit cars and, would you believe, off-roading. Hot rods and drag racing were far from being its main subject until much later.

It went through a phase of being loaded with Volkswagens, flirted with bodykitted Escorts and so on, had a spell where it was trying to be as madcap as possible at all costs then finally settled into what it is now.

And that’s what these words are about. What it is now, and where it goes from here.

I explained in last month’s issue that I don’t see myself as editor in the traditional sense, because I’m not worthy of a role that’s been filled by so many experts down

What matters in a car?

I’ve met a good few of you guys since we took over, and I keep asking this question. The answers I’ve had tend to suggest that a hot rod is 50% car, 50% art. And, I’ll tell you, I love that. In the world I’ve inhabited for many years, an off-roader tends to be 50% car, 50% baked-on mud. Paintwork tends to have gone on with a brush, or a roller; rather than appreciating good presentation, a worrying amount of people sneer at it.

I love cars, and I love art (I used to collect paintings, back in the days before I started collecting children instead). So the hot rod scene has turned out to be a natural fi t for me. The creativity here is an absolute vibe.

Anyway, less about me. Obviously, some cars will tend more in one direction or the other. But even the gnarliest race motor or rat rod will still have a strong element of presentation to it and the most lavish of street machines still wants to avoid the dreaded all-show-and-no-go label. Now, I’ve been editing enthusiast motoring magazines for more than a quarter of a century, and one thing nobody has ever said to me is ‘I want to see more trailer queens.’ So when we were sent an article recently about a spectacular artwork with four wheels, a big old V8 and chrome in all the right places, but no seats or steering wheel, my reaction was that it’s cool but it doesn’t have a place in Custom Car. Was I right or wrong?

So, which matters more: the way it’s built or the way it’s presented? It’s always going to be a balancing act – where should the balance fall?

Rich Adams’ F150 (left) and Carl Powles’ Deuce (above) will both be appearing in future issues. Two very different vehicles in every way – except that each is a perfect example of the car as art

How do you want your

the years. I want to let the scene represent itself in Custom Car, and with such a strong team of contributors, all of whom are dyedin-the-wool hot rod enthusiasts, it’s in very safe hands. But obviously, there are certain parts of the editor’s job that someone needs to do, and that someone is me.

One of those is to establish what the magazine’s readers want from it. So what I’m going to do here is throw out a series of questions on subjects that seem to crop up a lot. To be absolutely clear, this is not me telling you what we’re going to do: it’s a whole bunch of subjects that have come up while I’ve been out and about meeting readers over the last couple of months, and I’m asking for your views about them. We can keen the magazine exactly as it is, we can tinker with it or we can change it completely. It’s entirely up to you good people. No babies will be going out with the bathwater, but my mind is competely open.

If you want to make your opinions known on some or all of what follows, or anything else, my email address is at the end of this article. Please don’t hesitate to drop me a line; whatever your feelings on the magazine, I really want to know about them.

Thank you for being a Custom Car reader; I’m here to help this grand old magazine have exactly the future we all want for it!

Alan Kidd Group Editor

Street or strip?

This is at the heart of it. To some people, the mag should be all about street rods; others place much more emphasis on drag racing.

Do traditional race reports interest you? The results were online within seconds and we’re telling you the same stories weeks or months later, so do you read them in full or do you just look at the pictures? Or do you skip them and wish there had been another vehicle feature there instead?

Or, if you’re from the racing side of the street-strip divide, is there stuff we’re not currently doing that you wish we were? When we run a race report, you were probably there and you might even spot a picture of your own car in it, but do you yearn for more?

Custom Car used to cover all sorts of motorsport, including rallying and circuit racing. Do you want us to go back there? And what about good ol’ boys doing rednick motorsport around the world, stuff like the Sarina Mud Drags or Pig’n’Ford racing at Tillamook?

Or, an equally valid question, are you happy with the way we do it right now? After all, our current format of race reports was created by people who live and breathe drag racing. We won’t change things just for the sake of it!

Custom Car and drag racing go together like bacon sandwiches and HP Sauce. But does our traditional form of event coverage do enough for you? And are there other forms of motorsport you’d like to see in our pages? After all, some people think bacon sandwiches go with tomato ketchup. Weirdos.

Other events

In keeping with a lot of other magazines, Custom Car has traditionally run show reports which tend to be a brief intro followed by several pages of pictures of the cars that were there. Obviously people have always tended to respond well, or this kind of stuff would have been ditched, but we all know that as with race reports, this is another case of the mag giving you something you’ve already had online. In this case, chances are those pictures had already appeared on Facebook while the show was still on.

Once again, then, do you want us to stick with this kind of material? Or do you fl ick through it in a few seconds where a vehicle feature or an interview with someone who’s been building hot rods since The Doors were still together would keep you engaged for half an hour? Or are show reports a great opportunity to spot cars you know out and about and see your mates’ motors in print?

There’s a lot of debate on what kind of cars we should be featuring. Obviously, the broad defi nition is modifi ed old vehicles, but then there’s that distinction again – rods or racers? Should we concentrate on street machines or should we be looking at outand-out drag cars too?

And does there need to be a cut-off date? Somewhere in the 1970s, a few people have said, but then others have pointed out that cars from the mid-90s are more than a quarter of a century old too now.

I’m not talking about Euroboxes here, just to reassure you. And in the same vein, I don’t for a minute think that people want us to turn Custom Car into some sort of homage to what Max Power used to be. Modern stance casualties are not our bag, and nor are tuned-to-the-max four-pots that rev twice round the clock. Chips are things you dip in curry sauce, thank you.

Custom characters

Custom Car readers are a fascinating lot. Whether you do street rods or racers, mild kustoms or wild one-offs, it’s a scene full of people who’ve been doing it for decades. Most of you who I’ve met so far have built and/or owned more cars than we’ve all had hot dinners; you’ve got a box full of photographs telling the story of a life lived from rod to rod and you can talk all night about legendary characters of the scene and the stuff you’ve all got up to together.

Having done off-road magazines for so many years, I’ve met no end of people who have had some unbelievable experiences.

Yet the very fi rst Custom Car reader I visited for a photoshoot had stuff to talk about that left me pretty much speechless. No small amount of it was completely unpublishable, but that’s a different story…

I’m not talking about the ‘celebs’ of the rodding and racing scenes. I’m talking about everyday guys and girls who love the cars, the meets, the cruises and have been doing it since time immemorial. The cars are why the scene exists, after all – but it’s the people who build and own them that make the scene what it is.

It strikes me that letting you lovely people tell your stories in the pages of this lovely magazine could be a pretty cool thing. Do you, dear readers, want a bit of that? After all, an awful lot of those stories might end up being about you…

Still, take a look at this Chevy SS10 that’s going to be appearing in a future issue. Yeah, it’s more modern than what you’ve been used to seeing in Custom Car. But when we feature it, will you read about it or turn up your nose in disgust?

Overall, the term ‘custom car’ covers an enormous spectrum of vehicles. From old to new, from mildly modded to scratch-built, slammed, lifted, ugly, fugly, drop-dead gorgeous… hell, some people think we should knock back Deuces if they’re not made of steel. Others think there’s no such thing as a bad custom, because any custom is better than no custom at all. What would you include and what would you leave out?

The shock of the new…

We mentioned that back in the 70s, and indeed for a long time after that, Custom Car used to carry road tests on new vehicles. We don’t have any intention of turning it into something like Evo or Top Gear, and rodding will always be at its core, but having visited a bunch of readers’ homes over the summer to photograph their cars I’ve learned that almost all of you have something modern as a daily drive – and more often than not it’s something a bit tasty.

In particular, I’ve been surprised by the number of you who go about in German stuff. One of CC’s aims back in the day was to give its readers road tests that were more fun than the corduroy-clad, pipe-smoking, clipboard-sniffi ng facts and fi gures you used to get from the big motoring mags. A road test of mine was once voted the funniest of all time (he said modestly), and before my contract with Top Gear was ended I used to get people grumbling that my jokes were too naughty, so if you want that kind of entertainment just say the word and brace yourself…

Aside from road tests, take a look at this thing, the Hennessey Mammoth 6x6. It’s wild, it’s American, it’s blown and it’s putting out more than 1000bhp. What if that appeared in a news story in Custom Car; would it be interesting or out of place?

To represent new cars, our fi rst instinct was to reach for a pic of a Mustang. But from what we’ve seen, CC readers are more likely to have a quick Merc as their daily. The Hennessey Mammoth might look out of place here, but it actually ticks a lot of boxes

There used to be loads of Cal-look Beetles and other air-cooled Dubs in Custom Car. They got so popular that the publisher at the time launched Volksworld magazine as a spin-off title, and the rest is history.

Same question as before. if you were to open up a future issue of Custom Car and fi nd this here Beetle in it, how would you react? It certainly ticks a lot of the boxes (it’s old, it’s lowered, it’s a piece of fourwheeled art) but it’s not a hot rod. And, crucially, even though it’s an old Volkswagen (we’re not talking about boy-racer Golfs here), it’s still a Volkswagen. Does the badge matter?

‘The very fi rst Custom Car reader I visited for a photoshoot had stuff to talk about that left me pretty much speechless. No small amount of it was completely unpublishable, but that’s a different story…’

In the workshop

This is yet another area in which the scourge of internet has largely put paid to what magazines used to do. It’s been a long time since anyone got their spanners out and did a job following the step-by-step instructions in a magazine. The odds of the job you need to do being published just when you need to do it are slim at best, after all, and when you can fi re up YouTube and search for a tutorial video instead you can see why here’s-howit’s-done stories have largely been replaced in magazines by here’s-how-we-gotsomeone-to-do-it-to-ours-in-return-for-anarticle stuff.

So do you approach magazines looking for anything technical at all these days, or is it more about just checking out other people’s cars and reading the stories behind them? Assuming that magazines’ days as a kind of Haynes-manual-lite are indeed in the past, would a monthly section of workshop updates from around the scene fl oat your boat instead?

Worldwide motors

Something I’ve been made very well aware of is that the UK scene is really strong. I know because I’ve met some of you and marvelled at your cars. It’s harder to gauge where Britain stands on a global scale, but people whose opinions I trust all say we’re right up there. And ultimately, it’s the UK scene that Custom Car is here to represent.

That’s why in recent times (with the exception of during lockdown, when the editorial team couldn’t go out to get features), you’ve not seen many overseas builds in these pages. Are you happy with that? We certainly don’t need to go abroad just to fi nd enough cars to write about, but do you want to see more stuff from America, Europe, Down Under…? And if so, are we talking the absolute top motors or the down-home stuff that won’t ever win a badge but might be easier to relate to?

Thorny. When the fi rst issue following our takeover of the magazine was published, we heard you loud and clear on social media. We’ve gone down by a weight on our paper and plenty of you commented on the fact.

I’m not angling for sympathy here, but managing costs is critical to every magazine’s survival. We only have so much to spend and the less we do on paper, the more we’ve got for those expert writers I was talking about.

The thing is, paper prices have gone up about half a dozen times in the last year or so, and each time it’s by something like 10-15%. Eventually, something has to give. We absolutely get the point so many of you have made (not just pathological moaners, either; we’ve had people saying ‘I love the magazine but please improve the paper’) and it’s something we hope to be able to remedy, but there’s only so much we can do without upping the price you pay. The same goes for the number of pages in the mag.

It’s a balancing act. Talking of which, we put the new issue on the scales in ye olde editorial kitchen and it was only 27g lighter than the previous one. In old money, that’s about a dozen average Maltesers.

Still, I’ll take it as read that you’d like CC to be on thicker paper. But would you still want that if it meant paying a bit more for it? We could go all the way to the top of the scale and turn it into a highly premium publication on lush art paper, but that would probably mean doubling the price. Talk to me, folks: the customer is always right…

Our tone

As I mentioned at the top, back when Nixon was President and Heath was the new boy in Number 10, Custom Car was launched as a hippyish alternative car mag that was going be more fun than the usual fare. It sort of created the territory that Top Gear came along and nicked a couple of decades later.

Its humour got pretty wild at times, and from what I’m told so did what went on in the editorial offi ce. Well, it was in Croydon and you need to get your kicks whatever way you can down there. There’s also the small matter of Custom Car having spent many of its formative years as the soft porn mag you could get away with buying as a kid because it’s about cars, really, honest Mum.

I can tell you categorically that we won’t be going back to the era of girls putting it all on show. But some of you have told me that you miss the days when Custom Car was a bit naughty. What sort of tone do you want from us? Dry and authoritative, chilled out, playing it full-on for laughs?

And fi nally…

It can be quite hard to describe what you’re looking for in a magazine without saying ‘why don’t you make it like this other magazine I read,’ or words to that effect. If that helps you get your views across, go for it. The fi rst rule of plagiarism is that there is no plagiarism, just research (if you know your Tom Lehrer, you’ll know where we plagiarised that joke from), and the staff at our local WHSmiths are well used to us showing up with a wheelbarrow.

Most importantly, I also want to know what you don’t want us to change. As I said above, the magazine we’ve taken on has been crafted by people to whom street rods and drag racing are a way of life. We’re not here to change things for the sake of it, but there are some very polarised opinions out there so I really need to hear from as many of you as possible to give me a true picture of what you do and don’t want to see.

And with that, then, over to you. I want to hear your answers to any or all of these questions – or indeed anything else about the magazine that I’ve not thought to ask above. Drop me a line at alan.kidd@assignment-media.co.uk. I look forward to hearing your views, and thank you – what you tell me really WILL help shape the future of this fi ne old publication!