Wednesday Open Thread: Thrill Of The Shill Edition

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please god send the hurricane there

A note to the reader, September 1 2023: This article lists “Everyday Driver” as one of the outlets seeking to cash in via Hagerty. One of the Everyday people reached out to note that they had never had much of an arrangement with Hagerty, and that it ended at the conclusion of 2022. Insofar as I think the person who contacted me probably has more credibility than the executive who described the arrangement to me, I’d like the reader to consider them “off the list” — jb

A few people have asked me to expand on my story from Instagram yesterday, so: Two years ago I was working for the insurance company at the Amelia Island Concours.

(If you’re reading this in 2030 or afterwards, for some reason, I’ll explain the above: Before the RM ModaMiami Concours came into existence and promptly caused everybody to forget about anything else, there was a concours called “The Amelia” that happened outside Jacksonville. It was founded by one of the ModaMiami people, who sold it for serious money to an insurance company. Now you know.)

(I’m just kidding, I’m sure people will keep going to The Amelia instead of ModaMiami. However, I will go to ModaMiami, as will most of the volunteers and locals I know.)

My employer had kind of an odd caste system for who got to stay where during the Concours, and normally I was at the end of that hotel centipede in the Residence Inn, but in 2022 a friend of mine pulled all the strings she could fit into her little hands and got me a room at the Ritz with all the vice presidents and senior vice presidents and other people who contributed nothing to the enterprise. I was standing in line with my father, who was also in town, when I realized that the person next to me was having trouble paying for his hotel room.

This person was Justin Bell. Another friend of mine referred to Bell via IG message yesterday as “a linen-clad, walking definition of failson,” which doesn’t seem far from the truth. His father, Derek Bell, short-roped him into pro racing and even served as his teammate, but Justin was more or less always the lowest performer in the car on any given day and his career had little to no traction beyond what his name could get him.

However, insofar as he was tall, handsome, and shared a last name with an actual racing driver, Bell quickly made headway in the media world. He had, and has, a real gift for forcing himself into situations where he gets paid to simply exist. Openly and unashamedly for sale to the highest bidder, Bell would do anything short of actual labor to earn a buck. No surprise, then, that he eventually found his way into the financial arms of my employer.

I should note that working at my old job was a lot like being in this scene:

only instead of insect alien you had… the grifters. There was a perception for a long time that the company would pay any price demanded for pretty much anything that was vaguely car-related. That we were idiots with blank checks. A respected media person once described my employer to me as “white trash burning the proceeds of a big scratch-off win” which I thought was both cruel and unfair.

Rarely did a two-week period go by when I didn’t hear about somebody hitting us up for big bucks with the most lackadaisical of pitches. For a long time I considered it my mission to keep the firm from making millionaires out of generic nonentities like Donut Media, Supercar Blondie, Everyday Driver, Driving While Awesome!, and a hundred other people I can’t remember because they had even less talent than all the above-named no-talent ass clowns. My bosses wanted to buy trash like Flatsixes/PorschePurist, which started with an asking price of $250,000 plus fees but, after I torpedoed the deal, supposedly sold to Fat Brad Brownell for nothing. Which was still more than it was worth, just like getting an old 944 for free is actually a negative outcome.

There were many ways into a payout that did not involve me, however, and as a consequence I saw an astounding number of deals cut elsewhere in the company that made no sense from my perspective. Justin Bell was one of those. He somehow bedazzled my bosses into giving him a show called “Drives Unexpected”, which was absolutely shambolic in execution and as far as I know had statistically zero viewership.

We also paid for Bell to travel the country in first-class, five-star fashion, covering his whole tab along the way. Which is why he was ahead of me in the Ritz-Carlton line, preparing for a fully-comped hotel stay at Amelia that I would conservatively estimate at $12,000. Plus he was receiving an appearance fee to be there, which I can’t disclose but which is more than I earn in a couple months of writing. He was definitely living the high life.

However, there was one little problem. His stay was pre-paid… but they needed a credit card on file for incidentals. With a minimum of $600 credit. Now, I can readily understand why someone who charges five figures a week to stand around and breathe might not have a full six hundred dollars in any bank account anywhere. We’re all human, and who doesn’t love drugs, am I right? But to not have $600 in credit? I have enough open line on my credit cards right now to buy an F8 Tributo, although I would sink beneath the waves when the first minimum payment came due.

Ever the company man, I stepped forward and offered to put his incidentals on my card, although I envisioned another awkward lunch with our corporate accountant as a consequence. But he’d already requested that the charge be lowered to $300, because he had determined that he did, in fact, have $300 of credit available to him. After some consultation, this wish was granted, and he strode off towards his suite.

(If you call one of those midnight ads on UHF channels for a credit card, they’ll start you with $400.)

What struck me in particular during the episode was just how shameless Bell was about it. Like — if I didn’t have $600 of credit available I would be unwilling to show my face in public, but he was smiling and acting like he’d just bailed out the Ritz-Carlton corporation with a billion-dollar loan from petty cash. In the week to come, I frequently saw him hob-nobbing and blessing the hoi polloi with his presence, always exuding the self-assured grandeur of Kenneth Branagh playing Henry The Fifth.

For those of you who ask me why I haven’t tried to return to automotive media since last year: there’s your answer. Because it works for people like him, and does not work for people like me. My mind has always contained an iron band that connects “effort” and “return”. My subscribers here are kind enough to pay for my work, so I do it unstintingly and with a full heart. If it doesn’t meet their needs, I’m not angry when they unsubscribe. It just encourages me to work harder. My whole adult life I’ve expected to work hard and long hours to make real money. Realistically, this makes me an idiot.

And now Bell, whose IG handle is justinbelltv as if being on television was a worthwhile goal for a grown man, has tied himself in with Faraday Future. I really thought FFEI had burned every single person in America somehow prior to this point. Their car has been vaporware for nearly a decade, their stock is now a penny stock, and they have effectively no traction with anyone for any reason. Yet Justin Bell is a “Co-Creator Officer”, whatever that means.

Oh wait, it means he will once again be leaning on his dad.

“This amounts to elder abuse,” one wag messaged me this morning about the dual-Bell involvement. You can say what you want about Hunter Biden but at least he brought in the ten-figure sums for The Big Guy. Justin is dragging his father through the mud for… what, exactly? How much could they possibly be paying him? It would take about ninety thousand shares of FFIE stock, which apparently is in the process of a reverse split, to even cover a tab at the Ritz.

Has it ever occurred to Justin Bell to maybe, I don’t know, get a real job? Does it occur to any of these grifters that their lives might be more dignified, and even more fulfilling, if they just learned a trade or managed a McDonald’s? There’s been a lot written lately about how some UPS long-haul drivers will be making six figures in the years to come. Which makes sense, because they provide an obvious value. If you gave me the choice between dinner with Bell or Ed Bolian or Mr. JWWW or “Supercar Blondie” or “The Porsche Girl” or… a UPS long-haul driver, I’d pick the latter. Because I respect what he does.

Not that being a grifter isn’t without its own effort. It must be absolutely exhausting at some level to fly first class to the Ritz with less than $600 of credit in your pocket. Even the least imaginative mind would have to be troubled at the prospect of the next check not clearing or the next influencer deal not coming through. And all the while you have this massive pressure to display the same high-net-worth lifestyle as the people to whom you toady. You need to have the same vacations, the same meals, the same watches.

Here’s the thing about the concours scene: to some degree, almost everybody is playing that game. Pebble Beach and its far lesser siblings amount to literally nothing besides displays of wealth, be they earned or unearned, exaggerated or undisclosed. Everybody poses in these clothes they wouldn’t wear anywhere else:

Does this idiot think he looks like a rich person? Is this what he thinks rich people look like? The whole vibe is deeply and disturbingly reminiscent of what you might get out of a one-act play based on Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen”, performed at the end of the season by the less successful attendees of an adult fat camp.

Oh well. Thankfully its Wednesday and the automotive media is just now getting around to realizing that a “Nazi car” has once again won the show. In the words of yet another correspondent:

Like clockwork, the online wringing of hands over this year’s winning 1937 Krautwagen has begun. Once these people step back out of business class, the Bolshevism returns with zest.

For a whole week, the media, the hangers-on, the industry people, the Justin Bells — they were all effortlessly rich, all part of a world that loved and cherished them, all part of a massive circle of dudes blowing each other just like at the climax of the infamous Detroit Auto Show parties reportedly held by a certain former C/D and MT editor.

(About that: A twenty-something gay auto-photographer friend of mine once got a coveted invitation to that party, thinking it would boost his career, but when it was actually time to get down to business he chickened out and ran away. “There was so much saggy flesh on the floor, it looked like those sandworms from Dune you’re always talking about.”)

Now it’s time for the comedown. Everybody flies back to homes and apartments they don’t like and don’t really want, is reunited with the family or spouse they utterly despise. Now every meal is on your own tab. Now you’re digging into that $300 of credit for gas and groceries, not champagne on the balcony. This is where it truly hurts to be high-net-worth-adjacent.

It’s easy to arch an eyebrow about the Justin Bells and Supercar Blondies and all the other people who clearly want to be something they are not: rich when they’re broke, glamorous when they’re plain, compelling when they are of zero interest. I’m not going to bother doing that. We’re all entitled to try being someone. No shame in it. Or not much, anyway. If you make it, great. If not, well… I hear Faraday Future is hiring.