What goes around comes around. As regular readers will know, some 20 years ago four optimists launched Octane. Hailing from motoring magazine backgrounds, publisher Geoff Love, managing editor David Lillywhite, advertising sales director Sanjay Seetanah and myself (plain old editor) decided to create a classic and performance car magazine – a publication that reflected the changing times in the classic car world.
It had moved along fast from simply being a hobby for hairy blokes who liked getting their fingers dirty – hell, we still do! – to vintage, classic, historic racing and rally cars being much more aspirational, collectable and part of the mainstream social fabric, as reflected by such events as the ever-popular Goodwood Festival of Speed and the swish Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. The car game had changed, and we managed to ‘effectively tap into the zeitgeist of the historic car world: the people, the events, the action, the excitement’, as I optimistically wrote in the first Editor’s Note.
Against the odds, Octane survived the usual 80% magazine failure rate and took off. So much so, we made our first mistake and sold it to Dennis Publishing, thinking the arrival of digital media would kill us off, PDQ. Didn’t happen. Octane continued strongly for two decades but recently came up for sale again. The good news is, it’s been bought by Hothouse Media, owned by Love and Lillywhite, so the old team is back in place and Octane is once again being published by enthusiasts for enthusiasts and not simply for the bean-counters’ bottom line. You will already have noticed the improvement in paper quality with this, issue 250, a fitting number to see Octanefired up and running at the redline once again.
The classic car world has evolved over the last 20 years too, and we should expect more of the same going forwards. When I arrived in London in the 1990s, living in bedsits from Islington to Fulham, the streets were lined with all sorts of old cars, many of them classics being used as daily drivers: shabby, often painted that awful chocolate brown that was the most popular colour of the 1970s. Younger car enthusiasts enjoyed Porsche 911s and Triumph TR6s on the cheap, along with ubiquitous Golf GTIs and Ford RSs. Cars became real fun again and classic c
