Former Essex girl and petrolhead Julia Waters, who now runs a hypnotherapy business, says she attended a few Max Power shows and has fond memories of driving up and down the Southend seafront on a Friday night.
“All the cars were loaded with the biggest subwoofers [speakers] and looked like they had driven through the front window of Halfords. The police were usually there but generally, unless things got too out of hand, they let us get on with it,” she recalls.
“Surprisingly, I don’t remember there being many accidents. Only one remains in my memory, a guy who had revved up a Vauxhall Nova to a ridiculous level of horsepower, which proved too much for the engine to handle. It resulted in it bursting into blue flames.”
Waters says things gathered momentum in the early 2000s as The Fast and The Furious movies took off and popularised the “street racing” scene.
“It sounds like a cliché, but the street racing family really was that,” she says “It didn’t matter where you came from, or even what you drove to a point. If you came with an appreciation for cars, you were welcomed with enthusiasm.”
In my native Warwickshire and the surrounding areas, the modern take on the classic Volkswagen Beetle, usually driven by a bloke with long hair or a mullet haircut, was also popular, along with the Renault Clio (we all wanted to be Nicole from the incredibly popular series of Clio adverts), Peugeot 205 and Austin/Rover Metro, which were acceptable enough to be driven by both teenagers and their parents.
Then there was the Volkswagen Golf GTI brigade, aka the Sloane Rangers, in their pink shirts and baseball caps who, at Exeter, where I went to university, often had surfboards strapped to the roof or a green sticker in the back window saying, “Exeter, probably the best university in the world” (a nod to the popular Carlsberg beer advert at the time). Their cars were usually black or bottle green – and previously belonged to their mum.