"Someone at Cornbury House should get hold of the Ferrari Owners Club , or HSCC magazine. Both PROPER club publications written for the members.”
Ted, I think that you’ve hit the nail on the head there. While not everyone in the Club will be a lifelong car club member like you and me, I suspect that there are many -crucially, including board members- who have little or no experience of car clubs and so are unfamiliar with how they work best. This is perhaps also the reason that the Club has latterly become more of a business than a club.
"What is really telling is the fact that despite facing considerable criticism, neither the editor nor the publishers feel the need to defend the magazine on the forum. If I didn't know better, I'd say that it demonstrates utter contempt for the club membership and in particular, the contributors to Porsche Post.
"Regarding the crass 'unloved' moniker, I don't feel the need to defend my purchase of my Carrera 3.2 but what I will say is that I bought it because it offered the perfect combination of performance, usability and looks, is powered by an air-cooled engine and sits on a traditional 911 chassis - not because it was cheap!”
Chris, I think it unlikely that anyone from PP (or the Board) will have seen any of what has been written here because they are simply not looking, bearing out my comments on this Forum in the other thread which you mention. I don’t think that there is any doubt that members can be held in contempt these days and there seem to have been a number of people in positions of authority over the past few years who think that they are somehow above the rest of us.
I can give you but one instance of this treatment from personal experience. For some time I took over the Vintage View feature in PP, but one month the column just stopped appearing. No-one had the courtesy to inform me that I was being dropped or to tell me to stop submitting material though! Still, by this time it had anyway become impossible to get any articles or photographs included so it was really no surprise.
The ‘unloved’ comment is another example -my own model has similarly suffered in PP- of the lack of understanding of how car clubs work, as mentioned above. It is an unwritten rule of clubs that while you may praise (or even over-praise!) your own model, the one thing that you should avoid is rubbishing the cars owned by fellow members. Common sense would dictate that this sort of behaviour is likely to alienate some of those paying for the privilege of membership, so why would anyone do it? Cheap and confrontational journalism is more prevalent than ever these days, but it does not sit well in this environment. I suppose that someone who hates convertibles will be given a new 911 cabriolet to test any day now ... oh yes; they did that recently, didn’t they!
