Pioneers almost 60 years ago
11/25/2020
The day before yesterday, on November 23, 2020, zwischengas.com celebrated its 10th anniversary. We got started in 2010 and were also a bit of pioneers - after all, the approach pursued by zwischengas.com had never been implemented to this extent before. A magazine archive that now contains over 580,000 pages covering practically the entire history of the automobile and hundreds of thousands of photos from then and now, plus a sound archive, an auction database, a media library and much more. To this day, zwischengas.com remains unrivaled.
But of course, other people have done pioneering work before us. For example, Max Pichler and Heinz Schaardt (pictured above), who published a racing magazine from Switzerland from 1963 onwards that was largely unparalleled, at least in the German-speaking world.
Powerslide" was founded by Rico Steinemann, Arthur Blank and Max Pichler, Heinz (Horst) Schaardt soon joined them to organize the distribution and also to help with the photos and reports. None of the pioneers had much idea of how to make a magazine. They learned by doing. Pichler took gripping photos, Steinemann wrote exciting texts and Blank made sure that the result looked presentable.
The result was one of the most famous magazines of the time and it was published in this form on a monthly basis until the early 1970s. It then became the weekly "Motorsport Aktuell", which still exists today and is published by Motor Presse.
A photo from that time, which Heinz Schaardt sent us on the occasion of our 10th anniversary, illustrates wonderfully that media work and racing were closer together back then than they are today. The caption reads:
Photo 1964 Hillclimb Schauinsland D: from top left Heinz Horst Schaardt, Rico Steinemann, "Seppi" Siffert and Marianne Steinemann.
Powerslide can be read page by page in the Zwischengas magazine archive , from the first issue in 1963 to the last issue in 1975 (before the name change).
