In this paper, we study the extreme values of the Rankin–Selberg L-functions associated with holomorphic cusp forms in the vertical direction. Assuming the generalised Riemann hypothesis (GRH), we prove that

$$ \begin{align*} \underset{T^{\delta}\leq t\leq T}{\max}\bigg\lvert L\bigg(\frac12+it,f\times f\bigg)\bigg\rvert \geq\exp\bigg(C\sqrt{\frac{\log T\log\log\log T}{\log\log T}}\bigg) \end{align*} $$

with $C\leq \mathscr {X}\sqrt {1-\delta }$ , where $\mathscr {X}:=({2}/{\pi })\int _{0}^{\pi /3}\sin ^2\xi \,d\xi $ and $0\leq \delta <1$ .

In this note, by introducing a new variant of the resonator function, we give an explicit version of the lower bound for $\log |L(\sigma ,\chi )|$ in the strip $1/2<\sigma <1$ , which improves the result of Aistleitner et al. [‘On large values of $L(\sigma ,\chi )$ ’, Q. J. Math. 70 (2019), 831–848].