"Car Week": Dystopia, Necrophilia, Or Just Plain Cringe?

Using the past to cripple the present, profitably

let’s pretend to be rich, on manufacturer plates

For me, it was the least wonderful time of the year, three years in a row. There were many things I loved about being a full-time autowriter, but I did not enjoy the cringey rich-guy cosplay stuff that seemed irrevocably interwoven into my normal authorial life like strands of rusting razor wire in a cherished nighttime wool blanket. Nor was I a particularly good fit for the events and the hob-nobbin’, so after some pleading and sullen behavior on my part I was exempted from everything but “Amelia” and “Pebble”.

Amelia was alright because I had some friends down in Florida and because my father actually made it down for my last one, earlier this year, but Pebble was always an uninterrupted nightmare. I realize this sounds like the worst kind of humblebrag — oh, there’s nothing I hated more than being paid to attend the world’s premier assemblage of classic car activities! — so hear me out. The twisted magic of “Car Week” is that it takes everything we love about the automobile and inverts it.

Start with this: Why were you obsessed with cars as a young person? How much of it had to do with mobility and freedom? Didn’t you long for the day when you could just drive anywhere you wanted, without asking Mom and Dad? Most of us did. At “Monterey Car Week”, however, the automobile is no longer an instrument of mobility and freedom. It is parked on a lawn, stuck in a hotel valet circle, frozen in amber. The cars stop moving. They become objects to possess, not tools to liberate or exhilarate.

do not touch

What else is great about cars? Oh yes — they are inherently democratic. America has long been the only nation in the world where almost anybody can buy and use a car. On the public highway, a $500 beater gets to the next destination about as quickly as a $500,000 exotic, takes you to all of the same places.

Car Week inverts that as well. Everything is ticketed, and there are multiple levels of tickets, and some things are invitation only, and others are exclusive. My friends who are involved with credentials and ticketing for the various events describe a bare-knuckle brawl with people who are desperate to be publicly elevated above their fellow “enthusiasts” by any means necessary. Do you have tickets to the Quail? Will you watch Best of Show from the grass like a pleb, or will you watch the closed-caption broadcast from a luxury apartment just a hundred yards away from the thing itself ? There are ropes everywhere that are meant to be crossed, but by the right people and no one else.

It’s no fun to be rich without witnesses, of course, so they let the proles wander the lawn and they make all the help wear masks, all the better to complete the transition of our society into the Hunger Games. All the wacky pants and all the wacky hats; where’s the difference? The automotive media is hugely complicit in the whole thing, of course. The influence-writers get free cars to drive around, free meals, “exclusive access”. There’s just one condition: they have to broadcast Car Week out to the rest of the world in a naked attempt to generate FOMO among people who are too poor, too disinterested, or too busy on Woodward Avenue to care.

Last year there was a “concept car lawn” where the manufacturers were showing all their new rich-guy hardware. I had an appointment to interview some Lamborghini people, and they told me just to walk up to the rope. At that point, it was opened and I was let in. A thousand people watched me rub my dirty hick paws all over a Countach, a Gemballa, a whatever. I won’t lie; it was as embarrassingly intoxicating to my narcissism as being on stage to play music at a big party. Better, in fact, because I didn’t have to do anything. I just had to stand there and flaunt my privilege. When I crossed the rope back into the crowd, it parted for me like I was Somebody.

The next person to cross the line was a female lifestyle blogger who said “Cow-n-tack” and audibly farted when she tripped over a microphone cord. So much for that upscale fantasy. But you get the idea.

"Everyone wants to walk through a door marked ‘private.’ Therefore, have a good reason to be affluent."

Let’s see. What else do I love about cars? Oh yes: you can race them. “Car Week” includes an embarrassment, in all senses the word can possess, of fake historic races in which you can see Group C prototypes running at Spec Miata pace. Naturally, there is an elaborate hierarchy of ticketing, access, paddock visits, luxury boxes, champagne toasts, and all of the other shit that never ever happened back when the cars actually meant something and were racing for real. For a tenth of the cost you could see a modern IMSA race at Laguna Seca, but the “race fans” at the Historics aren’t really fans of racing. They’re just fans of money and clout. They want to be seen, and they want to be seen while they are enjoying a level of prestige slightly higher than those around them.

I’ve talked about this before, but the explosion in vintage racing is the worst thing that has ever happened to automotive competition, period. It sucks the air out of real, modern racing and diverts it back to an idealized past where it is always 1969, the cars are always Gulf Blue, and the Boomers are always 23 years old, but now they’re rich beyond their wildest Woodstock imaginings. Every years, tens of millions of dollars are diverted from real racing to fake racing. Manufacturers regularly drop out of IMSA, citing cost concerns, yet they never fail to find the coin necessary to haul out the historic iron for parade laps at Laguna Seca. You can spend ten million dollars to run a full two-car DPi effort for a year… or you can spend some major percentage of that sponsoring the Historics, flying a few trailers’ worth of cars from Europe, sending twenty journalists first-class to the event, booking hotel rooms at a thousand bucks a night, paying for champagne toasts and comped tickets.

Once upon a time you could at least see some interesting new cars being debuted at Monterey Car Week, but now it’s an endless parade of electric trash that is explicitly designed to sit in some lizard person’s garage and… appreciate. This year’s concept and new-car releases are almost medically depressing. Are you interested in “electric sports coupes”? They’re all over the place. What about electric crossovers? Got those too. Electric sedans? Naturally. None of this junk will ever turn a wheel in anger anywhere outside San Jose and Martha’s Vineyard, but that doesn’t matter, because we’ve just about finished bifurcating our economy into:

• people who can afford as many electric toys as they want

• people who can’t make a payment on a 2004 F-150

and nobody wants to do business with the latter group unless they can make it pay in rapacious check-cashing/Dollar General fashion.

Oh, and there are the cheap-car shows, which are painfully ironic and serve mostly to make the rich-guy stuff look even more important. Only an idiot would think that these “crapcan” events are a rebuke to the one-percenter cosplay; to the contrary, they are a bought-and-paid-for validation of the one-percenter cosplay. They say, in effect: “We who are about to work day jobs salute you, and no worries, Ma’am; we could never take our cars and our car show as seriously as we take yours.”

the corporation has many ways for you to participate, but participate you must

Like I said, I hated being there with a passion. The whole thing always felt a bit too Last Days Of Rome for me, from the masked servants to the endless tirade of self-congratulation among the so-called inner circles, each more inner than the others, or at least they hoped so. If the Woodward Dream Cruise is America’s past, being essentially a participatory parade where a dude with an ‘84 Monte Carlo SS can get as much (or more) public love as an influencer with a manufacturer-provided supercar, then Car Week is America’s future. One of the lizard people who “advise” the World Economic Forum just got done saying something like:

Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of these these big ideas and big words about machine learning and genetic engineering and blockchain and globalization, and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future, and I think that — again, this is a hypothesis — if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people, in many places around the world, part of what might be going there is people realize — and they’re correct in thinking that — that, ‘The future doesn’t need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and in global connectivity and whatnot, and they don’t need me. Maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way like universal basic income,’ but it’s much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited.

Emphasis is mine.

The world of Car Week is a sharp rebuke to the idea of poor people, or even regular working-class people, existing at all — except as an audience. It is a self-contained capsule of distorted wealth, endless affirmation-for-hire, fetishization of objects that once served an authentic purpose of transport or competition but now are only useful as tokens in an endless game of one-upmanship played by people who are so disconnected from the realities of normal American existence as to almost be another species entirely.

Whatever miseries and humiliations my present life may contain, at least I no longer have to be a part of that. Instead, I’m going to spend this weekend living very much in the present, working out a four-motorcycle swap with a friend and a couple of other interested parties where the total value of all involved vehicles won’t even reach ten grand. I have this stupid idea that maybe my Substack readers can swing by my farm and try a few of them out in the years to come, if they happen to be in the neighborhood.

There are, ahem, a few challenges to work out in the process. Still, I’m looking forward to it. We don’t have the ocean-controlled climate of the Monterey Peninsula here in rural Ohio, but it’s late summer, the sun is shining, and there’s a cool breeze to be found behind the handlebars of a hundred-horsepower motorcycle. For me, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.