" people who can afford as many electric toys as they want
people who can’t make a payment on a 2004 F-150"
Truer words etc., etc.....
I'm sure this is how we got to the fake patina situation that seriously grinds my grids .
I remember being loudly berated for showing up in old beaters I'd just begun to resurrect, now the stupid kids all clamor to buy my battered and rusty old VW I'm embarrassed to drive but I can't afford a $35,000.00 incorrectly restored one.....
As you stated : it's all about the _driving_ for me, I'll never feel young again but I certainly remember 1972 clearly when I'm driving it and wondering why all the others are parked in enclosed, temperature controlled garages .
They miss the entire point of being a gear / petrol head : IT'S THE DRIVING STUPID .
You've very effectively summed up my feelings about this sort of thing. I've often wondered if it's my 'join me on the picket line brother Baruth' working class back ground, my inverse snobbery of always being outside the tent pissing in, or just sheer inability to relate to people who have never struggled to make the rent.
Years ago when I was a student at the Royal College of Art (seriously, I was already living the dream and never did I expect someone like me could go there. My talent got me in and luckily a scholarship paid most of the fees. I moved back in with my mother while I attended) we had two projects that let me peek behind the velvet rope. One involved the RAC Club in Piccadilly (jacket and tie, no ladies) and the other was Salon Prive at Blenheim Palace. I drank their champagne and ate their lobster, and I'm sure I popped a few monocles looking as I did like a fucking goth rock star.
Who is also taking his Mondial QV to Radwood UK tomorrow. At least I'll be there in something with some credibility, rather than something that has suddenly become worthy of consideration just because of when it was made.
There’s a Radwood UK? The name lost all meaning the second it expanded beyond the circle of hell some call the Bay Area. This should make even less sense to people on the other side of the Atlantic (keeping in mind the marketing folks back in the day even had to change the title of “Encino Man” to “California Man” because nobody knew what the fuck an Encino was outside the states)
Yes, there's only one every so often (I think this the first one for a year or two). It's run by you know who and it's at Bicester Heritage (like every other fucking event these days).
For years, I asserted that the logo was outright stolen from the film Rad and that Kevin McCauley, the manlet who stole it, should be publicly keelhauled. Nobody involved with Sadwood has ever "gotten Rad". Brownell in particular is the alpha example of someone who was too big of a loser to even hang out with the losers who skated and rode.
Naturally, with their Hagerty acquisition I am now prevented from talking that kind of shit, so consider my opinion changed.
As someone who's completely ignorant of Radwood, but I'm interested in what you have dish out for Bradley. I'm surprised him and you would have crossed paths in the real world.
He has publicly said that if he ever sees me in real life "he'll leave the room in handcuffs." I assume that's some reference to an imagined criminal penalty for inept writing, because I'm 20 years older than he is and I could beat his ass into a coma while reciting "Dover Beach" and making a hotel reservation on speakerphone.
Aug 19, 2022·edited Aug 19, 2022Liked by Jack Baruth
All this stuff seems so joyless. But most any hobby gets that way, I suppose, at the extreme ends of it.
The point about multiple tiers and exclusivity I think is a perfect example of the "not quite as rich as I want" class. Because really the ultimate form is to be the person driving the Bugatti with the $10mm restoration up the lawn, and everyone else is a relative piker. So they can't quite get to that level, but they can make sure that their level is fully acknowledged and there are people to look down upon.
It simply gobsmacks me that seemingly intelligent people can act so dumbly, but then I look around the tech world and see _the exact same thing_ everywhere, at every level. It's like an idiocy fractal.
(I know nobody here really likes capeshit aside from Ronnie Schreiber, but...)
I used to work at a comic book store. We had picky customers come in every week, but one guy stood out from them all. He went through the stacks of books that came in wearing clean, cotton gloves. He would instantly seal them in bags with backing boards. He never let me or the owner of the shop touch them when it was time to ring him up, he'd hold them up for us in his gloved hands and slip them into his bag on his own. I never knew if he actually read them, and if he did, could he enjoy them? Or was he so wracked with anxiety over whether or not one of his gloved hands would damage one of those precious books to do so? You're totally right in your first point, it extrapolates perfectly to even the stupidest of hobbies.
John Updike satirizes that in a "Bech" story; the writer Henry Bech thinks he has a devout fan but in reality the fellow never reads the books and leaves them in long, plastic-jacketed lines with Mailer, Roth, and others.
I'm not really a comic book nerd. I'm a child of the '60s when it seemed that every kid read comics. My mom sent me copies of Aquaman and the Flash when I went to summer camp. The Comics Code apparently was a success in making formerly disreputable comics acceptable to American parents. I support independent creators today because of the culture war. To be honest, I've never had much patience with adults who discuss the minutia of the various superhero "universes", but then I feel the same way about adults and Harry Potter, and maybe even adults and Tolkein. I've long wanted to get a bumper sticker that says "Suq Qe' yIn" ("get a life" in Klingon).
Bonus points if you can pronounce the Klingon with glory! Q'apla!
You seemed pretty knowledgeable about the comicsgate guys, and that now makes sense. The only new comics I've bought in the last 10 years have been from them, but I haven't done the whole "who would win in a fight" thing since I was a teenager.
I hate Fan Boys. They're the reason normal people can't openly enjoy sci fi, comics, anime or a hundred other things. They live vicariously through their favorite media, everything about it is deadly serious business to them and they don't know when to turn it off and relax.
I have thrown out almost all comic book related stuff that's not comic books (which I keep at home safely out of view from the public) so I do NOT get associated with them. I'm embarrassed by them, and I was even in my dorkiest teen years. To be fair, almost every hobby has their subset of superfanboys who take it all way too seriously...
My exposure to the "higher" end of the auto industry is TV. 30 years ago those shows were on TNN and squarely aimed at the hobbyist. They featured real down-home personalities who not only talked-the-talk but walked-the-walk in that they had real skills and the ability to teach regular people. Today, the shows I see are for the most part either half-hour long ads or hour-long reality based shows where master craftsmen build six figure cars that I will never be able to afford. Sometimes these are interrupted by days worth of live auction coverage where people pay exorbitant sums of money for things my buddies and I used to find and buy broken down and unloved in back alleys or side yards. Maybe that's just the nature of things...
As I have aged, I have begun to suspect that I wasn't supposed to be here this long. I think that I and the vast majority of the rest of the working class were always intended to be worked into the ground on farms or blasted to bits on some distant battlefield. We were supposed to be ephemeral and the rich were always supposed to inherit the best of our stuff. Maybe that's why people today never really grow up - if they're just going to take all our best stuff anyhow, why not just live out our lives in a prepubescent fantasy land where we all have superpowers? But then I wonder which is better, a rich never-ending fantasy life or dying in some ditch?
Thomas, I feel that way as well. At fifty, I think I've done everything that a man could reasonably want to do. I'm just sticking around for my son, really. What did HST say when he cut the cord?
Cut the cord and start finding the real enthusiasts on YouTube, because those shows you talk about from 30 years ago didn’t die - they just went somewhere else. There are plenty of noble wrenchsmiths on YT and until Google decides that promoting vehicular mobility in video form has a carbon cost associated with it, it’s the best thing we have.
I remember those shows. Power Block, I think it was called, on Saturday afternoon.
Before you get all nostalgic about 'em, remember that they were set in fully-equpped garages with checkerboard floors clean enough to eat off of, hosted by clean guys in clean clothes who used The Right Tool For The Job every time, who used torque wrenches on every bolt, who never swore or cursed out the car's engineers or hurt themselves or threw tools across the shop in anger.
I used to watch Norm Abrams on The New Yankee Workshop on PBS use $50,000 worth of power tools to make a $200 table and it gave me an idea for a DIY show where the host shows us how to repair or make things when you have the completely wrong tools. It would basically be a show about how to rig things and use makeshift solutions and sketchy methods but still have the thing work in the end. Somehow I don’t think the lawyers would ever allow such a thing to air.
There’s a Chinese girl on YT that repairs/rebuilds all kinds of motors in a little shack in the Chinese countryside. She has a couple of pairs of pliers, some wrenches, a sand blaster and a little wire welder. It might be the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen.
I just watched one where she hauled a rusted old hulk of a single cylinder engine down a mountain in a plastic tub on her back, restored it, then hauled it back up the mountain to the man who owned it.
It’s so unbelievable that I suspect it might be staged. But I hope not.
She goes by Genius Girl or Linguoer. Worth a few minutes of your time.
The last "this old house" he and Villa worked on I believe is called the Weiland house. The budge went through the roof by hundreds of thousands. I remember there was a roof that esn water off to another roof. The 2nd roof had a leak. Villa asks, Norm what do you think happened? Well they did it wrong. The thing had been like that for 50 years. That house was such a cluster that the WSJ did a front page story on it. Villa let the show soon after. Villa was the real deal about what show should be. Norm and everyone else throws 10000 bucks at a 20 buck fix.
I remember Bob Vila’s return to television with his “Home Again” program.
IIRC, one of the houses he worked on in that series was a modest split level in Plymouth, MA - quite a departure from the expensive homes and sky-high reno budgets he dealt with on public television.
Unfortunately, the most memorable part of the Plymouth project on “Home Again” was Vila’s carpenter (Ryley) losing several fingers
There's a guy who does the latter on YouTube, but with ATVs and dirt bikes. He buys clapped out bikes off of Marketplace and gets them running with basically a HF test light, an adjustable wrench, and WD40. Watching the guy work makes my blood boil, but I appreciate his work ethic.
The Power Block was a thing in the late 90s early 2000s. By then it was already being slickly produced and although they still showed actual work was very much in the process of morphing into 30 minute ads.
I recall the early 90s being a little different. TNN was very much the hillbilly channel and the shows were a little closer to reality. Shows like the Shadetree Mechanic were really educational until the producers discovered that they could also be cash cows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rEWr48IZfU
This article completely summarizes why I quit reading car mags about 10 years ago... I long ago realized the divide between the 'drivers' and the 'owners' and my entry in the air-cooled world by happenstance and a low price only solidified it. I just can't relate to those who barely drive their cars, wax poetic about their detail regimens, pay for photoshoots and eagerly anticipate the next appreciation justified sale. Also, having lived in LA for half a decade, I came to realize that a lot of those guys (like the outlaw) have no problem hiring no hablan ingles to do all of their paint and body and then act like they're driving a Jackson Pollock-and demand Pollock like prices on the sale.
@Jack, don't know when I'll get to Ohio, but I'd love to take you up on the offer at some point. If you're ever in the Bay Area and want to abuse a decent aircooled 911, lmk.
I always roll my eyes over these celebrity/influencer ex owned cars. Look at the ex Bolian RUF on BAT right now. Ex owner claimed it always ran lean and got flagged and removed despite a lot of people “upvoting” and asking for his input. No clue why this is allowed to occur on the premier auction site but it does and it hurts to whole market.
Know what finally drove me away from car magazines like Hot Rod, Car Craft and Super Street? Something I call The Great Myth of the Car Magazine.
The Great Myth of the Car Magazine is that a normal guy can build a magazine cover car on the money he makes working at McDonald’s or some other shit job.
What the articles almost never allude to are the 80-hour work weeks at two full-time jobs, the exclusive devotion of every dollar not spent on food, rent and gasoline to the vehicle or the fact that to pull off such results requires one to know every machine shop owner, paint booth operator and mechanic in town.
Look, if you spend literally every discretionary dollar you earn on your car and spend months at a time living on ramen noodles, you’re not a “Real Car Guy,” you’re a one-dimensional idiot with no perspective.
Besides, I don't care what machine shop you used or where you had the car painted. I want to know what you do for a living that lets you afford an $80,000 car.
I long ago learned that envy or FOMO sells a magazine better than anything else. It's why the Larry Webster reboot of Road&Track had "WHAT FAST MEANS NOW" on the cover, and why every men's magazine has captions that are often indistinguishable from threats or homosexual come-ons. Those project-car articles are deliberately misleading and obscure, because they want you to read all the way to the end. There's always some source of money behind the scenes that isn't mentioned, with the rare exception of the old white blue-collar guy who puts three hours a night in on a car for ten years.
I was going to argue using an example of a CJ/Wrangler/Scout hybrid my buddy and I (mostly my buddy) built in our early 20s that made the cover of a Jeep specialty mag as an example. Then I remembered he has never had to hold a full time job.
Off topic, was that rob siegel guy from Hagerty with the collection of driver grade BMWs legit? He wasn’t a great writer but I dug his style and his car “accumulation” (collection)
He seems like the real deal to me. I still read most of his stuff and I can relate: a non-wealthy engineer with not-really spectacular cars that likes to write.
That's why I like Freddy Hernandez's builds. He's pretty transparent about the costs and the builds take as long as they need to take. Actually, my favorite builders are the guys at Bad Obsession Motorsports, who have taken six years to not quite complete Project Binky, a stock looking classic Mini with a turbo AWD drivetrain out of a Toyota Celica. https://www.youtube.com/c/BadObsessionMotorsport
The cheap mild 350 vortec powered hot rod build is interesting once, and what I built. After that I want to see and dream about splayed valve 632s with 3 stages of nitrous no prep drag racing at midnight in the hood for 20k and everyone is strapped
The lizard people reducing or eliminating the mobility of lower income Americans through their EV money grab is the absolute worst thing about EVs. There will be no 10 or 20 year old EVs available for these Americans to drive due to obsolete technology and prohibitive battery replacement cost.
Everything you need to know about our masters is encapsulated in California essentially mandating electric cars while simultaneously suffering brownouts. Sleeper remains the only film about the future that seems remotely plausible.
Aug 19, 2022·edited Aug 19, 2022Liked by Jack Baruth
I have attended two Rennspeed events at Laguna-Seca because I live in the Bay Area, I own a 993, and I felt I should see some of the history for myself. The first time was fun, but it felt like walking through a museum, not being among enthusiasts. I was disappointed the second time I went because it was all the same cars, all the same people, all the same everything down to the vendors, underscoring the idea that it is a museum.
The real fun was in the parking lot. Substack comments do not allow the posting of photos, so I will instead describe my favorite car from the two events.
I found it parked on the gravel near the pond just over the footbridge at Laguna-Seca: a 356-C that looked like it had been pulled out of a lake. The paint was at one time white, but had long since faded and tarnished to something more like the color of snow at the edge of a busy road. It had great swaths of rusty bare metal on each rear quarter, a hood and nose mottled by what looked like greasy fingerprints, and a roof spayed primer gray. The chrome trim was all there, but heavily pitted and pockmarked with rust. Every window frame was ringed with oxidation. The interior was in roughly the same shape, with mis-matched panels, threadbare carpet, a lopsided glovebox door, and no radio.
Taped to the roof was an enormous heart cut out of a brown paper bag with DREAMS DO COME TRUE!!! written in Sharpie with flowers drawn all around it. The woman (I have to assume it was a woman) who owns that car clearly dreamed of one day owning a 356, and that was the only one she could afford. She loves it in a way the guy with the 930 TAG Turbo, or the 718 with provenance, or any of the other six- or seven-figure garage queens never will and she drives it with a joy those people will never feel.
I saw that car four years ago, and it is the only one from the two Rennsports I've attended that I recall with any clarity. I don't think I'll ever forget it. I hope the owner is out there somewhere driving it at something approaching redline with the windows open, the sun shining, a big smile on her face.
I try to stick to cars shows that have burnout contests and/or start at midnight. Keeps the wrong kind of people away. Though I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the silver-haired captain of industry in his then-new SL600, blonde seatcover beside him, who rolled into the lot at 1:30 AM and wanted to run anyone for a grand. A twin-turbo LS Firebird (not super common back then) outran him; he left graciously.
"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?"
Excitement, noise, the prospect of freedom to go where I pleased provided I was back home at a reasonable hour.
"How much of it had to do with mobility and freedom?"
How very on the nose!
I find the themes of inversion common these days: taking what car hobbyists loved and changing it to upside down world; take our cultured politeness and turn it into a weapon against us; taking our dumb video games and turning them into cutscene simulators.
I know they're coming for my newfound motorcycling from the top with government mandated electrification. Destroying the soul of motorcycling (yes, it is amusing to wind a motor above 12k) just as they are coming for the cars. It's supposedly in the name of the planet, but they never seem interested in actually solving problems and they definitely don't seem to be a fan of humanity in it's filthy masses.
I love the noise of a car, whether it's the burble from the unequal-length headers on a Subaru boxer or a big, rumbling V-8 or the buttery-smoothness of a straight six, it's one of the very best things about cars. And now with electrifying EVERYTHING (Chrysler/Dodge recently announced their electrification) my interest wanes. Telsa makes fast cars, but they just don't do it for me. I don't know, maybe it's stupid to have such romantic feelings about cams and exhaust notes and supercharger whines, but that was all part of the mystique.
And to touch on the freedom, I read somewhere that you can buy a longer range for your Tesla. So you can travel farther. But you gotta PAY, and the way I read it is that it is only a software thing, not extra batteries, so you have to pay for a line of computer code that lets you go farther on a single charge. Maybe I'm wrong and it is extra batteries for the upcharge, but the point still remains, you don't have to pay extra to get a bigger tank for gas in your car, and if you run out you can always fill it back up in 5 or 10 minutes.
One of the best things about a gas or diesel powered car is that you can refuel it without having to preplan in most places in this country in about 3 to 6 minutes and be back on your way. My daily driver will go about 500 miles on a full tank and it usually takes less than 4 minutes to refill. I have 6 cars at home and 3 drivers at home, am I supposed to put in 2 or 3 electric chargers and spend thousands of dollars? No thanks, I’ll stick to the internal combustion engine for now thanks.
The meanest-sounding V8 car I've ever encountered is still that black SVT Terminator with the full Magnaflow setup I saw in Pittsburgh 15 years ago. That car radiated intimidation like a GNX.
In John Coletti's book on the history of the Terminator, he describes how the development of the car's engine was more or less "Run the prototype engine till something breaks, then replace THAT part with something from the Summit Racing catalog when we build the next prototype engine and try again."
Saturday night I was westbound on 696 and I noticed a black car coming up quickly in the left lane, likely headed home from the Dream Cruise. It was too dark out to tell if it was a Grand National or a GNX but it had to be one or the other. Dark and menacing.
I've written about the GN and GNX so I'm pretty familiar with the differences. It was just too dark to see them, plus the car was in the far lane and it was pulling away from me.
The twist of the knife is that EV buyers tend to minimize their driving. Everyone I know with a Tesla works from their home office. Everyone delivering their sandwiches is doing so with a rental escooter or econobox.
Loaner and rental watches are the nadir of men's culture. Not surprisingly, they are almost exclusively the province of dudes who can't get laid in a whorehouse.
I can understand a loaner for the purpose of a review. I wouldn't mind reviewing the new Accutron Spaceview 2020 as I had my father's Accutron Deep Sea 666 Feet restored and it's one of my favorite watches. On the other hand, if Bulova said they'd loan me a Spaceview and send me to Monterey to show it off, I'd probably decline. To be honest, I'd feel funny even wearing a watch borrowed from a friend. I admire your bronze Tudor but what would I say if you loaned it to me and someone admired it? "Thanks, it's my friend Jack's"?
I understand why jewelers like Harry Winston loan expensive pieces to actresses to wear to award shows and premiers, but I'm not sure the actresses really benefit from captions describing the jewelry as loaners.
As for rental watches? That's a bit like spending $800/day to rent a supercar in Vegas. The juice is probably not worth the squeeze.
I guess I’m going to be the only one here to say that these events serve a useful purpose: preserving our automotive history.
Don’t get me wrong. I know full well that many if not most collectors collect for the thrill of owning, not driving. And the thrill of owning something that other people don’t own - usually their so-called peers. A dick measuring competition by any other name.
(I once saw a mind-bending collection for The Robb Report that no one else had ever seen. All I felt was sad.)
But these cars cost a fortune to restore and maintain, and the average person can’t afford to do it. Whatever reason the rich may have for doing it, they are doing us all a favor. IMHO
Great car shows are like open air museums to me. Humans make museums so we can see great human achievements. Okay, so I like museums.
As for collectors, I've only personally known a couple of people with large collections of significant cars and they're both mensches as far as I can tell. Ken Lingenfelter, whose collection is used, gratis, for about 200 charitable fundraising events a year and who has always been gracious to me (though he owns Lingenfelter Performance, founded by his late cousin, he owns a few Callaway Corvettes, but no Henneseys). Ken's collection is thoughtful. While he's a primarily a GM and Ferrari guy, his Porsches, Fords, and Mopars are practically the distilled essence fo those brands. Also, he has some oddball cars like a Caballero, neoclassic.
The other person is Wayne Lensing, who made big bucks selling racing chassis and equipment. He's a history buff and has a wide ranging collection of historical artifacts, including a number of cool cars, that he turned into a public museum so his small town in southern Illinois would have some kind of tourist attraction. It's a money losing proposition because the place is about 50 miles past BFE. The guy is salt of the earth.
deciding and then going to and running in the first historics in '74 with my favoritebyamillionmiles girlfriend is a treasured memory. $10 for a pass to that 1-day event. i ran the first 5, 9 outta the first 10, and most of 'em till i lost my leg in '11. the early days were wonderful; steve and debbie earle were responsible for so much of it. the quail has changed tremendously by the last time we had a car there--'19. had 3 cars at pebble; never for judging. but heck if people wanna do these kinds of things--it's their $$. highline cars are just a jewel show these days
The only thing more boring than a supercar is an electric supercar. I never cared about the original Countach, let alone the reproduction, and the last Ferrari I gave a damn about was the 308 GTS - which likely had more to do with Christie Brinkley flying down the highway blasting the Pointer Sisters than the car itself.
Thinking about the sort of odious, worthless-yet-wealthy people that actually buy this crap is a bucket of cold water for whatever remains of your childhood bedroom poster fantasies.
It was one thing when these concours events were for the insufferably rich to get together and show off amongst themselves - and maybe some barely-sufferable David E. Davis-type would write an article I wouldn't read in the back of an auto rag, pre internet. Now that's it's become part of the neverending influencer circle-jerk that masquerades as western culture, it's much harder to ignore. All the fakeness and pretense just further erodes my ability to care about any car at all anymore.
Aug 20, 2022·edited Aug 20, 2022Liked by Jack Baruth
I saw a Hyundai Ioniq 5 on my way to work today and I realized why electric cars repel my: They all have this overly-clean, Uncanny Valley design aesthetic to them, like those humanoid robots with the rubber skin.
" people who can afford as many electric toys as they want
people who can’t make a payment on a 2004 F-150"
Truer words etc., etc.....
I'm sure this is how we got to the fake patina situation that seriously grinds my grids .
I remember being loudly berated for showing up in old beaters I'd just begun to resurrect, now the stupid kids all clamor to buy my battered and rusty old VW I'm embarrassed to drive but I can't afford a $35,000.00 incorrectly restored one.....
As you stated : it's all about the _driving_ for me, I'll never feel young again but I certainly remember 1972 clearly when I'm driving it and wondering why all the others are parked in enclosed, temperature controlled garages .
They miss the entire point of being a gear / petrol head : IT'S THE DRIVING STUPID .
-Nate
Driving's not the WHOLE point. The building's fun, too.
Yes, this is so for a select few of us .
Most real enthusiasts just want to ride / drive.....
Me, I love resurrecting some piece of junk then searching out the bits and bobs to make it better for _me_ and no one else .
-Nate
You've very effectively summed up my feelings about this sort of thing. I've often wondered if it's my 'join me on the picket line brother Baruth' working class back ground, my inverse snobbery of always being outside the tent pissing in, or just sheer inability to relate to people who have never struggled to make the rent.
Years ago when I was a student at the Royal College of Art (seriously, I was already living the dream and never did I expect someone like me could go there. My talent got me in and luckily a scholarship paid most of the fees. I moved back in with my mother while I attended) we had two projects that let me peek behind the velvet rope. One involved the RAC Club in Piccadilly (jacket and tie, no ladies) and the other was Salon Prive at Blenheim Palace. I drank their champagne and ate their lobster, and I'm sure I popped a few monocles looking as I did like a fucking goth rock star.
Who is also taking his Mondial QV to Radwood UK tomorrow. At least I'll be there in something with some credibility, rather than something that has suddenly become worthy of consideration just because of when it was made.
Sir, on this Substack we call it "Sadwood". They're lucky to have you.
There’s a Radwood UK? The name lost all meaning the second it expanded beyond the circle of hell some call the Bay Area. This should make even less sense to people on the other side of the Atlantic (keeping in mind the marketing folks back in the day even had to change the title of “Encino Man” to “California Man” because nobody knew what the fuck an Encino was outside the states)
Yes, there's only one every so often (I think this the first one for a year or two). It's run by you know who and it's at Bicester Heritage (like every other fucking event these days).
Well at least they changed the logo so it didn’t read as “WoodRad” anymore
For years, I asserted that the logo was outright stolen from the film Rad and that Kevin McCauley, the manlet who stole it, should be publicly keelhauled. Nobody involved with Sadwood has ever "gotten Rad". Brownell in particular is the alpha example of someone who was too big of a loser to even hang out with the losers who skated and rode.
Naturally, with their Hagerty acquisition I am now prevented from talking that kind of shit, so consider my opinion changed.
As someone who's completely ignorant of Radwood, but I'm interested in what you have dish out for Bradley. I'm surprised him and you would have crossed paths in the real world.
He has publicly said that if he ever sees me in real life "he'll leave the room in handcuffs." I assume that's some reference to an imagined criminal penalty for inept writing, because I'm 20 years older than he is and I could beat his ass into a coma while reciting "Dover Beach" and making a hotel reservation on speakerphone.
4
All this stuff seems so joyless. But most any hobby gets that way, I suppose, at the extreme ends of it.
The point about multiple tiers and exclusivity I think is a perfect example of the "not quite as rich as I want" class. Because really the ultimate form is to be the person driving the Bugatti with the $10mm restoration up the lawn, and everyone else is a relative piker. So they can't quite get to that level, but they can make sure that their level is fully acknowledged and there are people to look down upon.
It simply gobsmacks me that seemingly intelligent people can act so dumbly, but then I look around the tech world and see _the exact same thing_ everywhere, at every level. It's like an idiocy fractal.
(I know nobody here really likes capeshit aside from Ronnie Schreiber, but...)
I used to work at a comic book store. We had picky customers come in every week, but one guy stood out from them all. He went through the stacks of books that came in wearing clean, cotton gloves. He would instantly seal them in bags with backing boards. He never let me or the owner of the shop touch them when it was time to ring him up, he'd hold them up for us in his gloved hands and slip them into his bag on his own. I never knew if he actually read them, and if he did, could he enjoy them? Or was he so wracked with anxiety over whether or not one of his gloved hands would damage one of those precious books to do so? You're totally right in your first point, it extrapolates perfectly to even the stupidest of hobbies.
John Updike satirizes that in a "Bech" story; the writer Henry Bech thinks he has a devout fan but in reality the fellow never reads the books and leaves them in long, plastic-jacketed lines with Mailer, Roth, and others.
I'm not really a comic book nerd. I'm a child of the '60s when it seemed that every kid read comics. My mom sent me copies of Aquaman and the Flash when I went to summer camp. The Comics Code apparently was a success in making formerly disreputable comics acceptable to American parents. I support independent creators today because of the culture war. To be honest, I've never had much patience with adults who discuss the minutia of the various superhero "universes", but then I feel the same way about adults and Harry Potter, and maybe even adults and Tolkein. I've long wanted to get a bumper sticker that says "Suq Qe' yIn" ("get a life" in Klingon).
Bonus points if you can pronounce the Klingon with glory! Q'apla!
You seemed pretty knowledgeable about the comicsgate guys, and that now makes sense. The only new comics I've bought in the last 10 years have been from them, but I haven't done the whole "who would win in a fight" thing since I was a teenager.
I hate Fan Boys. They're the reason normal people can't openly enjoy sci fi, comics, anime or a hundred other things. They live vicariously through their favorite media, everything about it is deadly serious business to them and they don't know when to turn it off and relax.
I have thrown out almost all comic book related stuff that's not comic books (which I keep at home safely out of view from the public) so I do NOT get associated with them. I'm embarrassed by them, and I was even in my dorkiest teen years. To be fair, almost every hobby has their subset of superfanboys who take it all way too seriously...
For the record, I both read AND understood CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, so I'm not exactly above suspicion myself.
I love capeshit. It is the only thing I can get the family to sit down and watch together, so I love it.
> idiocy fractal
Stealing this. Thank you.
My exposure to the "higher" end of the auto industry is TV. 30 years ago those shows were on TNN and squarely aimed at the hobbyist. They featured real down-home personalities who not only talked-the-talk but walked-the-walk in that they had real skills and the ability to teach regular people. Today, the shows I see are for the most part either half-hour long ads or hour-long reality based shows where master craftsmen build six figure cars that I will never be able to afford. Sometimes these are interrupted by days worth of live auction coverage where people pay exorbitant sums of money for things my buddies and I used to find and buy broken down and unloved in back alleys or side yards. Maybe that's just the nature of things...
As I have aged, I have begun to suspect that I wasn't supposed to be here this long. I think that I and the vast majority of the rest of the working class were always intended to be worked into the ground on farms or blasted to bits on some distant battlefield. We were supposed to be ephemeral and the rich were always supposed to inherit the best of our stuff. Maybe that's why people today never really grow up - if they're just going to take all our best stuff anyhow, why not just live out our lives in a prepubescent fantasy land where we all have superpowers? But then I wonder which is better, a rich never-ending fantasy life or dying in some ditch?
Thomas, I feel that way as well. At fifty, I think I've done everything that a man could reasonably want to do. I'm just sticking around for my son, really. What did HST say when he cut the cord?
Gurgle Gurgle?
Cut the cord and start finding the real enthusiasts on YouTube, because those shows you talk about from 30 years ago didn’t die - they just went somewhere else. There are plenty of noble wrenchsmiths on YT and until Google decides that promoting vehicular mobility in video form has a carbon cost associated with it, it’s the best thing we have.
I remember those shows. Power Block, I think it was called, on Saturday afternoon.
Before you get all nostalgic about 'em, remember that they were set in fully-equpped garages with checkerboard floors clean enough to eat off of, hosted by clean guys in clean clothes who used The Right Tool For The Job every time, who used torque wrenches on every bolt, who never swore or cursed out the car's engineers or hurt themselves or threw tools across the shop in anger.
Ever seen all those things together in real life?
I used to watch Norm Abrams on The New Yankee Workshop on PBS use $50,000 worth of power tools to make a $200 table and it gave me an idea for a DIY show where the host shows us how to repair or make things when you have the completely wrong tools. It would basically be a show about how to rig things and use makeshift solutions and sketchy methods but still have the thing work in the end. Somehow I don’t think the lawyers would ever allow such a thing to air.
There’s a Chinese girl on YT that repairs/rebuilds all kinds of motors in a little shack in the Chinese countryside. She has a couple of pairs of pliers, some wrenches, a sand blaster and a little wire welder. It might be the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen.
I just watched one where she hauled a rusted old hulk of a single cylinder engine down a mountain in a plastic tub on her back, restored it, then hauled it back up the mountain to the man who owned it.
It’s so unbelievable that I suspect it might be staged. But I hope not.
She goes by Genius Girl or Linguoer. Worth a few minutes of your time.
The last "this old house" he and Villa worked on I believe is called the Weiland house. The budge went through the roof by hundreds of thousands. I remember there was a roof that esn water off to another roof. The 2nd roof had a leak. Villa asks, Norm what do you think happened? Well they did it wrong. The thing had been like that for 50 years. That house was such a cluster that the WSJ did a front page story on it. Villa let the show soon after. Villa was the real deal about what show should be. Norm and everyone else throws 10000 bucks at a 20 buck fix.
I remember Bob Vila’s return to television with his “Home Again” program.
IIRC, one of the houses he worked on in that series was a modest split level in Plymouth, MA - quite a departure from the expensive homes and sky-high reno budgets he dealt with on public television.
Unfortunately, the most memorable part of the Plymouth project on “Home Again” was Vila’s carpenter (Ryley) losing several fingers
Riley lost fingers? Didn't know that. I enjoyed that show better than TOH. It was realistic as opposed to fantasy
Sorry, Ryley,, misspelled. Looks like he still is in the business
There's a guy who does the latter on YouTube, but with ATVs and dirt bikes. He buys clapped out bikes off of Marketplace and gets them running with basically a HF test light, an adjustable wrench, and WD40. Watching the guy work makes my blood boil, but I appreciate his work ethic.
I don't think you're talking about Mustie, but he and Taryl Dactyl do some good rebuild videos with normal tools and practical workarounds.
I've never heard of either, but will check them out. This guy's channel is "2vintage".
The Power Block was a thing in the late 90s early 2000s. By then it was already being slickly produced and although they still showed actual work was very much in the process of morphing into 30 minute ads.
I recall the early 90s being a little different. TNN was very much the hillbilly channel and the shows were a little closer to reality. Shows like the Shadetree Mechanic were really educational until the producers discovered that they could also be cash cows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rEWr48IZfU
This article completely summarizes why I quit reading car mags about 10 years ago... I long ago realized the divide between the 'drivers' and the 'owners' and my entry in the air-cooled world by happenstance and a low price only solidified it. I just can't relate to those who barely drive their cars, wax poetic about their detail regimens, pay for photoshoots and eagerly anticipate the next appreciation justified sale. Also, having lived in LA for half a decade, I came to realize that a lot of those guys (like the outlaw) have no problem hiring no hablan ingles to do all of their paint and body and then act like they're driving a Jackson Pollock-and demand Pollock like prices on the sale.
@Jack, don't know when I'll get to Ohio, but I'd love to take you up on the offer at some point. If you're ever in the Bay Area and want to abuse a decent aircooled 911, lmk.
I always roll my eyes over these celebrity/influencer ex owned cars. Look at the ex Bolian RUF on BAT right now. Ex owner claimed it always ran lean and got flagged and removed despite a lot of people “upvoting” and asking for his input. No clue why this is allowed to occur on the premier auction site but it does and it hurts to whole market.
I hear you.
I put 40k mi on a '78 911SC I picked up cheap (and ended up dumping about 10 grand into) over the course of 5 years. It was my only car!
Know what finally drove me away from car magazines like Hot Rod, Car Craft and Super Street? Something I call The Great Myth of the Car Magazine.
The Great Myth of the Car Magazine is that a normal guy can build a magazine cover car on the money he makes working at McDonald’s or some other shit job.
What the articles almost never allude to are the 80-hour work weeks at two full-time jobs, the exclusive devotion of every dollar not spent on food, rent and gasoline to the vehicle or the fact that to pull off such results requires one to know every machine shop owner, paint booth operator and mechanic in town.
Look, if you spend literally every discretionary dollar you earn on your car and spend months at a time living on ramen noodles, you’re not a “Real Car Guy,” you’re a one-dimensional idiot with no perspective.
Besides, I don't care what machine shop you used or where you had the car painted. I want to know what you do for a living that lets you afford an $80,000 car.
I long ago learned that envy or FOMO sells a magazine better than anything else. It's why the Larry Webster reboot of Road&Track had "WHAT FAST MEANS NOW" on the cover, and why every men's magazine has captions that are often indistinguishable from threats or homosexual come-ons. Those project-car articles are deliberately misleading and obscure, because they want you to read all the way to the end. There's always some source of money behind the scenes that isn't mentioned, with the rare exception of the old white blue-collar guy who puts three hours a night in on a car for ten years.
I was going to argue using an example of a CJ/Wrangler/Scout hybrid my buddy and I (mostly my buddy) built in our early 20s that made the cover of a Jeep specialty mag as an example. Then I remembered he has never had to hold a full time job.
Off topic, was that rob siegel guy from Hagerty with the collection of driver grade BMWs legit? He wasn’t a great writer but I dug his style and his car “accumulation” (collection)
More or less, yeah.
He seems like the real deal to me. I still read most of his stuff and I can relate: a non-wealthy engineer with not-really spectacular cars that likes to write.
That's why I like Freddy Hernandez's builds. He's pretty transparent about the costs and the builds take as long as they need to take. Actually, my favorite builders are the guys at Bad Obsession Motorsports, who have taken six years to not quite complete Project Binky, a stock looking classic Mini with a turbo AWD drivetrain out of a Toyota Celica. https://www.youtube.com/c/BadObsessionMotorsport
The cheap mild 350 vortec powered hot rod build is interesting once, and what I built. After that I want to see and dream about splayed valve 632s with 3 stages of nitrous no prep drag racing at midnight in the hood for 20k and everyone is strapped
Outstanding! Thank you.
The lizard people reducing or eliminating the mobility of lower income Americans through their EV money grab is the absolute worst thing about EVs. There will be no 10 or 20 year old EVs available for these Americans to drive due to obsolete technology and prohibitive battery replacement cost.
Mobility is freedom.
Exactly, and clearly we've all had too much of it for too long!
If the autombile had existed in John Locke's time, driving would today be considered a civil right, rather than a state-issued privilege.
Everything you need to know about our masters is encapsulated in California essentially mandating electric cars while simultaneously suffering brownouts. Sleeper remains the only film about the future that seems remotely plausible.
I have attended two Rennspeed events at Laguna-Seca because I live in the Bay Area, I own a 993, and I felt I should see some of the history for myself. The first time was fun, but it felt like walking through a museum, not being among enthusiasts. I was disappointed the second time I went because it was all the same cars, all the same people, all the same everything down to the vendors, underscoring the idea that it is a museum.
The real fun was in the parking lot. Substack comments do not allow the posting of photos, so I will instead describe my favorite car from the two events.
I found it parked on the gravel near the pond just over the footbridge at Laguna-Seca: a 356-C that looked like it had been pulled out of a lake. The paint was at one time white, but had long since faded and tarnished to something more like the color of snow at the edge of a busy road. It had great swaths of rusty bare metal on each rear quarter, a hood and nose mottled by what looked like greasy fingerprints, and a roof spayed primer gray. The chrome trim was all there, but heavily pitted and pockmarked with rust. Every window frame was ringed with oxidation. The interior was in roughly the same shape, with mis-matched panels, threadbare carpet, a lopsided glovebox door, and no radio.
Taped to the roof was an enormous heart cut out of a brown paper bag with DREAMS DO COME TRUE!!! written in Sharpie with flowers drawn all around it. The woman (I have to assume it was a woman) who owns that car clearly dreamed of one day owning a 356, and that was the only one she could afford. She loves it in a way the guy with the 930 TAG Turbo, or the 718 with provenance, or any of the other six- or seven-figure garage queens never will and she drives it with a joy those people will never feel.
I saw that car four years ago, and it is the only one from the two Rennsports I've attended that I recall with any clarity. I don't think I'll ever forget it. I hope the owner is out there somewhere driving it at something approaching redline with the windows open, the sun shining, a big smile on her face.
Never been to any of these events. I do know that "The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering" based on the title alone makes me grind my teeth
I try to stick to cars shows that have burnout contests and/or start at midnight. Keeps the wrong kind of people away. Though I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the silver-haired captain of industry in his then-new SL600, blonde seatcover beside him, who rolled into the lot at 1:30 AM and wanted to run anyone for a grand. A twin-turbo LS Firebird (not super common back then) outran him; he left graciously.
Aside from him, eat the rich.
"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?"
Excitement, noise, the prospect of freedom to go where I pleased provided I was back home at a reasonable hour.
"How much of it had to do with mobility and freedom?"
How very on the nose!
I find the themes of inversion common these days: taking what car hobbyists loved and changing it to upside down world; take our cultured politeness and turn it into a weapon against us; taking our dumb video games and turning them into cutscene simulators.
I know they're coming for my newfound motorcycling from the top with government mandated electrification. Destroying the soul of motorcycling (yes, it is amusing to wind a motor above 12k) just as they are coming for the cars. It's supposedly in the name of the planet, but they never seem interested in actually solving problems and they definitely don't seem to be a fan of humanity in it's filthy masses.
I love the noise of a car, whether it's the burble from the unequal-length headers on a Subaru boxer or a big, rumbling V-8 or the buttery-smoothness of a straight six, it's one of the very best things about cars. And now with electrifying EVERYTHING (Chrysler/Dodge recently announced their electrification) my interest wanes. Telsa makes fast cars, but they just don't do it for me. I don't know, maybe it's stupid to have such romantic feelings about cams and exhaust notes and supercharger whines, but that was all part of the mystique.
And to touch on the freedom, I read somewhere that you can buy a longer range for your Tesla. So you can travel farther. But you gotta PAY, and the way I read it is that it is only a software thing, not extra batteries, so you have to pay for a line of computer code that lets you go farther on a single charge. Maybe I'm wrong and it is extra batteries for the upcharge, but the point still remains, you don't have to pay extra to get a bigger tank for gas in your car, and if you run out you can always fill it back up in 5 or 10 minutes.
One of the best things about a gas or diesel powered car is that you can refuel it without having to preplan in most places in this country in about 3 to 6 minutes and be back on your way. My daily driver will go about 500 miles on a full tank and it usually takes less than 4 minutes to refill. I have 6 cars at home and 3 drivers at home, am I supposed to put in 2 or 3 electric chargers and spend thousands of dollars? No thanks, I’ll stick to the internal combustion engine for now thanks.
The meanest-sounding V8 car I've ever encountered is still that black SVT Terminator with the full Magnaflow setup I saw in Pittsburgh 15 years ago. That car radiated intimidation like a GNX.
I love Terminators. Somehow they got EVERYTHING RIGHT at the end.
In John Coletti's book on the history of the Terminator, he describes how the development of the car's engine was more or less "Run the prototype engine till something breaks, then replace THAT part with something from the Summit Racing catalog when we build the next prototype engine and try again."
Eventually they ran out of parts to break.
Saturday night I was westbound on 696 and I noticed a black car coming up quickly in the left lane, likely headed home from the Dream Cruise. It was too dark out to tell if it was a Grand National or a GNX but it had to be one or the other. Dark and menacing.
Did it have wheel well flares and fender portholes?
I've written about the GN and GNX so I'm pretty familiar with the differences. It was just too dark to see them, plus the car was in the far lane and it was pulling away from me.
Wasn't sure how familiar you were with them.
The twist of the knife is that EV buyers tend to minimize their driving. Everyone I know with a Tesla works from their home office. Everyone delivering their sandwiches is doing so with a rental escooter or econobox.
After reading this I opened Instagram to find an auto journalist’s photo of the loaner WATCH he’s wearing to Pebble. Quite a contrast.
Loaner and rental watches are the nadir of men's culture. Not surprisingly, they are almost exclusively the province of dudes who can't get laid in a whorehouse.
The are men who RENT watches?
That's pathetic.
Seems like the “cultured” equivalent of rental rims.
I can understand a loaner for the purpose of a review. I wouldn't mind reviewing the new Accutron Spaceview 2020 as I had my father's Accutron Deep Sea 666 Feet restored and it's one of my favorite watches. On the other hand, if Bulova said they'd loan me a Spaceview and send me to Monterey to show it off, I'd probably decline. To be honest, I'd feel funny even wearing a watch borrowed from a friend. I admire your bronze Tudor but what would I say if you loaned it to me and someone admired it? "Thanks, it's my friend Jack's"?
I understand why jewelers like Harry Winston loan expensive pieces to actresses to wear to award shows and premiers, but I'm not sure the actresses really benefit from captions describing the jewelry as loaners.
As for rental watches? That's a bit like spending $800/day to rent a supercar in Vegas. The juice is probably not worth the squeeze.
I guess I’m going to be the only one here to say that these events serve a useful purpose: preserving our automotive history.
Don’t get me wrong. I know full well that many if not most collectors collect for the thrill of owning, not driving. And the thrill of owning something that other people don’t own - usually their so-called peers. A dick measuring competition by any other name.
(I once saw a mind-bending collection for The Robb Report that no one else had ever seen. All I felt was sad.)
But these cars cost a fortune to restore and maintain, and the average person can’t afford to do it. Whatever reason the rich may have for doing it, they are doing us all a favor. IMHO
I'd rather they set the old cars on fire and finance some new race teams, but that's just me!
Should art museums sell their collections to fund art schools?
Didn't Doug Irwin originally say he wanted the guitars he made for Garcia so he could sell them and fund a luthier school?
Great car shows are like open air museums to me. Humans make museums so we can see great human achievements. Okay, so I like museums.
As for collectors, I've only personally known a couple of people with large collections of significant cars and they're both mensches as far as I can tell. Ken Lingenfelter, whose collection is used, gratis, for about 200 charitable fundraising events a year and who has always been gracious to me (though he owns Lingenfelter Performance, founded by his late cousin, he owns a few Callaway Corvettes, but no Henneseys). Ken's collection is thoughtful. While he's a primarily a GM and Ferrari guy, his Porsches, Fords, and Mopars are practically the distilled essence fo those brands. Also, he has some oddball cars like a Caballero, neoclassic.
The other person is Wayne Lensing, who made big bucks selling racing chassis and equipment. He's a history buff and has a wide ranging collection of historical artifacts, including a number of cool cars, that he turned into a public museum so his small town in southern Illinois would have some kind of tourist attraction. It's a money losing proposition because the place is about 50 miles past BFE. The guy is salt of the earth.
deciding and then going to and running in the first historics in '74 with my favoritebyamillionmiles girlfriend is a treasured memory. $10 for a pass to that 1-day event. i ran the first 5, 9 outta the first 10, and most of 'em till i lost my leg in '11. the early days were wonderful; steve and debbie earle were responsible for so much of it. the quail has changed tremendously by the last time we had a car there--'19. had 3 cars at pebble; never for judging. but heck if people wanna do these kinds of things--it's their $$. highline cars are just a jewel show these days
How a situation where all the equipment is physically in the vehicle, but you have to pay extra to enable it, ISN'T a scam is beyond me.
The only thing more boring than a supercar is an electric supercar. I never cared about the original Countach, let alone the reproduction, and the last Ferrari I gave a damn about was the 308 GTS - which likely had more to do with Christie Brinkley flying down the highway blasting the Pointer Sisters than the car itself.
Thinking about the sort of odious, worthless-yet-wealthy people that actually buy this crap is a bucket of cold water for whatever remains of your childhood bedroom poster fantasies.
It was one thing when these concours events were for the insufferably rich to get together and show off amongst themselves - and maybe some barely-sufferable David E. Davis-type would write an article I wouldn't read in the back of an auto rag, pre internet. Now that's it's become part of the neverending influencer circle-jerk that masquerades as western culture, it's much harder to ignore. All the fakeness and pretense just further erodes my ability to care about any car at all anymore.
I saw a Hyundai Ioniq 5 on my way to work today and I realized why electric cars repel my: They all have this overly-clean, Uncanny Valley design aesthetic to them, like those humanoid robots with the rubber skin.