Quote:
Originally Posted by John Turner
In what way exactly has the quality suffered in the last 5 years? This has been a recurring comment throughout the life of the mag since the late Gregor Grant died.
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I actually think it has improved in the last five years - but it did have a helluva lot of lost ground to recover. I read it every week from about 1972 until the early noughties and whilst I had changed , it had changed even more. It had become an F1 fanzine, much of the copy was lazy speculation and the standard of writing was often painfully bad . It was never going to rival Shakespeare , but the cliche ridden text , which increasingly tried to ape American prose, was hard to read without sighing .
But I had started buying the odd copy again and I was pleased to see some more diversity in subject matter creeping in , and an awareness that motorsport history didn't start the week before last , and that F1 was not the only show in town . Obviously I missed the national coverage it used to have , and I found it frustrating to read opinion pieces by guys who had only been watching the sport for a few years , and how it showed ...
Marcus Pye's national column was excellent but that has been missing for some time, as has meaningful coverage of stuff like the speed hillclimb scene. But that just reflects the audience doesn't it ? Look at the 200 plus posts devoted to a shady sponsor in the F1 forum (who bloody cares ?) and contrast that with the desultory 23 marking Dan Gurney's death ...
Times change ,and so do we .