Thanksgiving ORT: Vincero Quattro, Road&Wack, Domestics As Luxury, J Crew Media

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well, let’s not forget the crap that is very much this caption, or “craption”, if you will

Housekeeping: I’d promised to tell the “Story Of Squids” in this one, but instead I’ll do it on Sunday so I can say more hateful stuff behind the cowardly cover of my (eminently reasonable) paywall.

What, like it’s hard?

The season to remember continued in Las Vegas with yet another non-processional, non-predetermined, non-boring event. Were you confused by the offhand dominance shown by Mercedes in every single timed session? So were they, apparently. What wasn’t confusing, and has come to be almost an expectation: George Russell toasting an inconsistent Sir Lewis in qualifying then falling a bit short on absolute Grand Prix per-lap pace. Or maybe George just didn’t need to go any faster, having put on a clinic from the green light to the checkered flag. The announcers were quite excited about Lewis running him down but it doesn’t appear that Russell was ever genuinely at risk. Clean air and fresher tires will do that.

The action at the front was interesting enough that it was almost a surprise when everyone crossed the line and Max Verstappen had done exactly enough to secure his fourth world championship in a row. I hope I’m not ruffling too many feathers when I say that the Max quartet, on the whole, is significantly more impressive than Sebastian Vettel’s statistically similar run a decade ago. Vettel was consistently his own worst enemy in the Red Bulls — that is, when he wasn’t getting beaten by his journeyman-at-best teammate.

By contrast, MV is a racer’s racer. He gives nothing away, rarely makes a mistake, always pushes as hard as he can. Who among today’s drivers — or, let’s face it, yesterday’s drivers — could beat him in the same car? He chews through any and all teammates in much the same way that Sir Lewis could only really handle the compliant Bottas. His reputation will only gain luster with time; this will be doubly true should he choose to step away from the sport around his 30th birthday.

Other notes from the race:

• #JusticeForYuki: He’s consistently given the worst strategy in Formula One and his team seems indifferent at best to his success, but Yuki has time and again demonstrated his ability to get the job done. No, I don’t think he is a legendary driver of the first rank — but you can make an argument for him being in the front half of the current roster.

• Charles Agoniste: In a world where his departing co-driver didn’t keep playing hardball with him on a global stage, it would be Charrrrl in second place, not Lando. Piastri has gifted Lando enough points to make the existing difference, as well. Is this fair to Charles? It hardly matters now. He will have Sir Lewis to deal with next year. Hot take: I don’t think he’s at all worried.

• Alpine sub-plot derailed: Imagine a team that picks up two-thirds of the podium slots in one race then, in the very next event, hands their top qualifier a broken car and fails to send more than one person into the pitlane for the other guy. How loud do you think Flavio Briatore is yelling behind the scenes right now? Prediction: Alpine with customer engines and Flavio calling all the shots will be a consistent threat for 3rd place in the constructors’ championship.

• It’s time for Sergio Perez to go home. Either the car is too much for him or he’s in too difficult of a mental position to execute as he should. Put Yuki in the car. Or put Liam in the car, if internal politics keep Yuki out of it. Or Colapinto. Or a random fan out of the stands.

• Is it just me, or is the Williams awfully difficult to drive? Speaking of Colapinto. The Williams cars keep ending up in the wall or behind it. Is James Vowles being aggressive with an eye towards greater success next year, or is he just pushing people into mistakes?

• Here comes “Cadillac F1”. General Motors looks very close to having the 11th F1 team. This must come as a great relief to whomever would have finished last in any future seasons were this not the case. I can’t adequately express just how badly GM is going to get smoked by little factories in the UK and Switzerland. Don’t be fooled by their success in Corvettes: that’s almost always an outcome pre-ordained in generously-written rulebooks. GM-F1 will be the worst team since Minardi, but they won’t have any of Faenza’s charm.

It retroactively diminishes the work of decent people

i can’t believe you’re selling this magazine to the public bonkers, because it sucks

Your humble author will permanently cherish the six years he spent writing for Road&Track. While our leadership wasn’t always outstanding — do you want someone who takes orders from his wife, or someone who takes charity from his sister? — we had a murderer’s row of editors who each brought unique talents to the job. Gifted, earnest writers like John Krewson and Kyle Kinard. Insightful and unique personalities like Alex Nunez, Sam Smith, and Matt Tierney. People who really cared about their work, like Bob Sorokanich and Zach Bowman. Great guest contributors like Chris Chilton and Colin Comer. I’d be remiss if I didn’t praise Travis Okulski for his combination of talents behind the wheel and keyboard.

Last but not least, of course, they had me, about whom the less said the better but I’ll say something anyway: I’ve won a lot more races and done a lot more gonzo shit than Hemingway, Hunter S., and Setright combined, whether you like it or not, plus I’m the only person in the business who consistently sets better times than the factory engineers in their own cars, plus I take my duty to the reader as seriously as Salinger regarded his own privacy. You know, if I weren’t a deformed ugly obese cripple with the voice of an injured duck I’d really be something, but God wanted to save the good stuff for John Mayer.

Anyway. We did first-rate work and loved almost every minute of it. Which is why I’m a little upset, almost physically so, at what passes for Road&Track nowadays. In particular, this Performance Golf Cart Of The Year that they just put out. Let’s start with the idea of the article, which sucks: Hey, let’s take seven crummy compliance cars and give two of them awards for greatness! Everything that follows is seemingly deliberately subpar: the choice of “New York Safety Track” which is basically the autocross course at Pitt Race, the meandering and unclear criteria for victory… and the people they’ve hired!

What a list of nonentities. I could say something unpleasant about everyone but our dear friend Matt Farah but it would in each case boil down to “couldn’t place top half of a regional autocross or a directional-university creative-writing class”.

When you assemble this Voltron of mediocrity and give it the limp half-sword of effectively zero budget, you get… a Porsche advertisement. Is anyone surprised? I know Hearst just fired a lot of people last week, and I’m sure that most of them should have been fired a long time before they were, but trust me: after suffering through the PEVOTY or whatever they call it, I’m dead certain there’s more room in the abattoir.

“Imagine pretending you hold any automotive cultural authority as you type pro-CCP content from a former J Crew.”

That’s what one of my less merciful readers said to me about whatever’s happening over at Motor Trend. They went from this building:

to this one:

because they’re not selling anything that anyone wants to buy. Yes, the advertisers love MT and always will, but you need some vague pretense of reader/viewer engagement to keep the grift going, and I don’t think they have much of that left.

Come to think of it, maybe their ultra-focus on YouTube and cable TV wasn’t as brilliant of an idea as it perhaps seemed at first glance. Automotive video as a whole is losing steam in 2024. Even Doug DeMuro, long thought to have an absolutely bulletproof formula for getting idiot-clicks, is in the process of rebranding his channel to what one commenter derisively called “Temu Top Gear”. Not only is it harder to get clicks, it’s much harder to get paid for them. YouTube is a monopoly, it’s a company town, and the revenue reports increasingly reflect that harsh reality. Don’t like it? Build your own platform, right?

I have a few friends who really enjoyed Roadkill, and I’m sorry for them. I’m almost as sorry for the Roadkill host who admitted that he had no idea who even owned the rights to the idea. Learn from Prince, why dontcha? If you don’t own your creative content, you own nothing!

Why does GM charge more than Honda?

One of my favorite readers sent me this CNN article about the diverse and vibrant array of icebergs at which “Stellantis” is currently pointing — and I was struck dumb(er than usual) by the above graphic. Intellectually, I knew that pickup trucks lift domestic transaction prices above the imports, but it’s one thing to kinda be aware of that and quite another to see it demonstrated in a bar chart that even a philosophy major can understand.

You can’t tell me that this is a sustainable state of affairs, especially in an economy that has been stagflating for a while now. And while the approximate prestige gap seems true to life within each category, with Ford leading the domestics and Toyota leading the imports, I cannot believe that General Motors has anything like the kind of brand equity, even here in the USA, that Toyota enjoys. Go tell your rando neighbor you bought a new Toyota. Then say, “No, wait, it’s a Buick,” and you’ll be able to watch them revise their opinion of you downward in real time.

The domestics are charging too much money for their product, in at least three different ways:

0. They are biasing their product mix to vehicles that the average American can’t afford even on an 84 month note;

1. They are bumping sticker prices with drunken abandon, like anyone actually has more money in 2024 than they did in 2020; (edited from my original typo — jb)

2. They are too dependent on vehicles that can be shocked out of demand by mild economic setbacks or increased energy costs.

This is not just a Stellantis problem. And it makes Honda, in particular, look very good. They sell products that are generally top-rated for less money than the domestic competition. This was a winning formula when it was Accord vs. Cavalier, and it’s a winning formula when it’s Pilot vs. Explorer. The longer such a situation persists, the less likely we will be to have any significant domestic auto industry whatsoever.

That’s all, folks — but tomorrow we will have the Made In USA Buying Guide, on Friday we will have a Cat Tales, and on Saturday we will break out the long-awaited Part Two of Thank The Franks by our very own John Marks. As always, thank you for reading!