A Public Apology, A General Suggestion

In which the author lets a few people down, and is then himself let down

this is some kind of metaphor, i think

I’ll never let you / let me down again

A few friends and frenemies of my brothers formed a band called “X Rated Cowboys” twenty or so years ago, and promptly released an album called Saddest Day Of The Year, which you can actually hear on Spotify if you’re so inclined. As with most local-music efforts by talented people (one of whom would go on to be the guitar tech and occasional touring player for Sheryl Crow) it’s sometimes ridiculous and sometimes brilliant. The unifying theme of the thing is depression and betrayal. The track “Stupid” goes something like

I’m too stupid to be unhappy

Too helpless to be sad

Too far gone to be missing

Something I never had

I believed in your word

Now I’m choking on every one of of them

But I’ll never let you let me down again

It will come as no surprise to you that I felt let down by multiple people in the past year, and that I occasionally feel stupid for having believed in any of them. But that doesn’t obscure the fact that I, in turn, let a lot of people down from 2019 to 2022.

Mario Korf is one of them.

He writes a delightful and informative blog called Occam’s Racer in which he obsesses over various aspects of aero and tuning, mostly for Miatas, and with the discussed results usually coming either from a computer program or the diminutive Pineview Run road course in New York.

I didn’t get three paragraphs into Mario’s work before I realized that he deserved a much bigger audience. So I contacted him and asked him to write for Hagerty. He was gracious enough to accept.

Here’s what I should have done: began publishing his work immediately.

Here’s what I actually did: I kept his work in my back pocket, so to speak, for the motorsports-centric website for which Hagerty had just approved funding. For purposes of fairness, and for purposes of compliance with my severance agreement, I’d like to skip discussing my opinion of the people involved and stick to the facts surrounding this site, which are: I did a prototype for it in two hours, was ready to take it live the following week, and then it took over a year and a half of input and feedback from various elements in the rest of the company before the first article finally went up, more or less in conjunction with my departure.

Because I am one of the most naive, trusting, easily swindled, and generally born-to-lose people in all of Christendom, I truly believed that we were always just about to get approval for the site, which I’d nicknamed “Imola”. And I wanted the site to launch with killer stuff. So I kept commissioning pieces for it… and waiting. I basically destroyed my friendship with Preston Lerner, one of the most thoughtful and effective writers in the business, because I hired him to do a couple of hugely involved and difficult pieces then just sat on them until Imola was ready.

Preston thought I was gaslighting him about that, or possibly trying to harm him in some way. Why else would you hire someone to write stuff, pay them, tell them it’s great, then just bury it in a vault? Because, you see, only the biggest dipshits in autowriting are in it for the money or the free shit. There’s far more of both available elsewhere if you have even a sliver of talent. Good autowriters are in the business to write and to have people read what they write. So he was really unhappy about it. But all I could tell him is what I was being told: any day now!

I did the same thing to Mario, but it was worse than that: I asked him to put his site on lockdown, so to speak, so that when his content appeared on Imola the search engines wouldn’t ding us for republishing content.

(Side bar: Oh my GOD the amount of bullshit I’ve heard in the past few years from self-appointed Experts Of Interwebz about SEARCH ENGINES and ALL THE WAYS THEY WORK. The only difference between people who think they know search engine optimizaton, or SEO, and the people who used to read animal entrails to tell your fortune, is this: the people in the latter job actually trained for years to be good at it.)

Mario waited. Patiently. For almost two years. And then, finally, after I left, Hagerty ran a single Occam’s Racer article. Then he was told that there wouldn’t be any more. I doubt the decision was made by the young man who runs the site; he’s a talented, thoughtful person himself.

You can read Mario’s single article here. It’s brilliant, and it contains more intelligent thought about how to go faster via aero mods than pretty much all of the rest of motoring journalism combined. But you have to be a pretty sharp cookie to read and understand it yourself. So the suits don’t want it, I guess.

If I had a million dollars (If I had a million dollars…) I would pay Mario full price for all the articles Hagerty didn’t take. Since I don’t, I’ll do the following: I’m going to attempt to get my Radical PR6 out East to one of his favorite tracks so he can try driving it (to see how real aero works, wink wink) and I’m going to ask those of you with an interest in amateur motorsports to share the Occam’s Racer site with your friends. I hope that will go some way towards undoing the harm that I’ve done to him.

Mario isn’t the only person I let down at my old job. After twenty years of being mostly self-employed and/or working for men of obvious integrity and character like John Amoss, Chris Zeidner, Bob Zetterberg, Ron Pogue, and others, I was in the naive habit of believing what I was promised and then making promises in turn — ones I intended to keep. So I made countless deals with people, only to have many of those deals fall apart when the rules of the game were changed on me, often in ways that I could not publicly discuss.

That’s not a way of blaming my failures on others, because after the first six months or so of my last career I should have known better and acted accordingly. Instead, I continued to ask people to work for or with me, only to wind up letting them down. One friend in particular made some significant changes in his life to come work with me, and was let go afterwards just because he bruised someone’s ego. Others have taken jobs or contracts at my request only to see the terms and conditions of those situations change dramatically.

So I want to publicly apologize to Mario, Preston, Ethan, Alex, Grace, Sam, Matt, and others who believed in me only to find themselves holding the bag when all was said and done. I’ve disappointed more people in the past three years than I have in the forty-eight prior. I won’t forget any of it. Thank you for believing in me to start with. I hope you can find it in your hearts to believe in me once more, some day a long time from now. I’ll never let me / let you down again.