Wednesday Open Thread: W-Seriously? C/D Sees The Iceberg, Jonny Goes Begging, State Of The Stack

All subscribers welcome

So much to discuss today, and I want to make this a short article because I’ve waxed a little loquacious lately… Let’s get to it.

The Great One on deck

There’s only one Robert Farago — and this week he’s talking about the dating frustrations of an “OFWG”, for paid subscribers only.

State Of The Stack, briefly

We are very close to having 3,000 total subscribers here at Avoidable Contact Forever, and not that far from having 800 paid subscribers. In the weeks to come I’ll be contacting Trackday Club members to arrange their opportunities, so now is the time to join if you’ve been on the fence. This spring I will be working on a small book as an additional benefit to paid subscribers. After 18 months of doing this, it remains one of the purest joys I’ve ever known. Thank you for reading and commenting. Have you noticed that we often get more comments, and of a higher quality, than you can find at any other automotive blog on the planet? Substack might just be the future of automotive journalism — and it will have to be, because…

Color rags floppin’, Part One

Car and Driver announced this week that they would be, ahem, enhancing subscriber value by cutting down to six issues a year. Strictly speaking, this is true, as this reduces potential exposure to Elana Scherr, but anyone silly enough to have paid for twelve issues a year will perhaps feel cheated if they only get six. Left unsaid so far: the core profitable aspects of C/D have been reduced to “selling travel packages” and “online shilling for Bring-A-Trailer”, neither enterprise being affected by this change.

My “I alone can fix it” response on C/D’s Instagram page has been well-received, but it’s not like anybody would have the guts to actually let me run the magazine, so it’s an empty threat. Truth be told, the stage was set for Car and Driver’s collapse when Eddie Alterman took charge lo these many years ago. Mr. Alterman is far from a stupid man and he did me the courtesy of not completely blocking my presence in Road&Track for six lovely years, but he is far from the sort of freedom-and-whisky man’s man that an editorial effort like C/D requires. You can say what you like about Davis and Yates and the like, but they weren’t nebbishes. They had personal magnetism and a bit of memorable presence. Mr. Alterman appears to be perpetually in danger of being stuffed in a locker by a thirteen-year-old boy. You want a fellow like that running the business side, not driving the cars.

Let’s not even discuss the tenure of Sharon Silke Carty, Car and Driver’s very own Lt. Marimow. Was she brought in to kill the magazine, or was that just a side effect of being a terminally boring person who can’t drive and doesn’t want to learn how? Of course, she’s now gone and the actual bi-monthly disaster has to happen with Tony Quiroga at the head of the publicly-displayed masthead. Mr. Quiroga is a gentle, thoroughly decent, and genuinely likable human being. He deserves better. So do the readers. Well, as another character from The Wire says: “You want it to be one way… but it’s the other way.”

Color rags floppin’, Part Two

Maybe Jonny should ask Doug DeMuro. And does anybody really think that Motor Trend has ever failed in their core mission of saying nice enough things about vehicles? This makes me laugh because we have a commenter here at ACF who likes to lampoon me for testing rentals and loaners and reader-owned vehicles. He often contrasts this with the magnificent press-loaner access enjoyed by Mr. Lieberman, one of the industry’s prettiest mouths.

I doubt anyone reading this owns a Cybertruck — but if you do, I’ll fly out and drive it at my own expense just to beat MT to the World Exclusive First Test Of Cars Already In Showrooms.

W-hen it’s over

Several of you have emailed me about the W Series auction. Two of you wanted to know if you should buy one of these lovely F3 cars — and you shouldn’t. The engines have no support in the USA and nobody knows how to tune the chassis. Get this Stohr F1000 instead. You’ll have the satisfaction of coming to the MidOhio SVRA race and putting me on the trailer with time to spare.

The rest of you were just dirtbag sexists who wanted to celebrate W’s inEVitable collapse. (Wait. Do we always capitalize EV in that word?) You have my sympathies. I’m personally sick and tired of seeing this endless and relentless push to “put women in motorsports”, whether it’s W Series or F1 Academy or short-roping Ken Block’s wife and daughter into a Baja win by giving them a brand-new gun and full WRC-level support to take to a knife-fight full of DNFs and casuals.

There’s something deeply sad about all of it. Not to mention unnecessary. Women have been competing and winning in club and pro racing longer than I’ve been alive. My wife is a multiple divisional/regional champion and people don’t even know she’s a woman because of her name; it’s common for SCCA people and spectators to tell me “Your brother ran a great race today.” While I’m sure that it was difficult or impossible for a woman to race NASCAR in 1960, nowadays the deck is stacked in the other direction. Can you imagine what Danica Patrick’s pro career would have looked like if she’d been a man? Fruit flies live longer.

Karting both here and in Europe is packed to bursting with the well-funded daughters of men who didn’t have any sons and therefore desperately want their princesses to be winning drivers. Most of them quit the very minute Daddy can’t make them suit up and race any more. It’s eerie, actually: look at major kart event entry lists and you can see them vanishing as they turn 18 or go to college.

Surely none of this comes from a deep desire to see sexual equality/equity/whatever — you don’t see billion-dollar efforts to get more women into Alaskan crab fishing or waste management. Is it about fun danger, maybe? Downhill mountain biking is probably more dangerous than racing cars, but no effort is taken to get women involved, largely because you can’t keep them away from it. The lifts are filled with females competing at every level. I celebrate the best amateur women downhillers and always make sure to be exceptionally polite when I pass them. (Often they’re frightened by the horrible creaking noises, both from the overloaded and miserable Session 9.9 I’m piloting and from my cyborg knees. To say nothing of the heavy breathing. Who knew it was so much work to ride down a hill.)

Why is it so critical that women go racing? It has to be a matter of economics. Consider, if you will, the thinking that led to this advertisement:

I suspect that this ad is for young “city girls” what Scarface was to would-be drug dealers; just as Tony Montana says “In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women,” they see this lonely late-twenties NPC get a job and a Trax and a dog, all of which leads up to her romance with some tall brother. It’s exceptionally well done, especially the part where it’s her impulsive idea to kiss the guy.

Ah, but here’s the problem: the Trax is twenty-five grand. How can you sell Miss Boss Babe on more profitable equipment down the road, when the Trax is clearly sufficient for urban life? Some idiot in marketing must think that female racers will do it. If Johnny Rutherford could sell Sciroccos to men at a higher sticker price than Rabbits, then surely some female racer can sell BMW M-electric-whatEVer to women, right?

I think those marketers are doomed to be disappointed. Taylor Swift sells a lot of guitars, in terms of what young women buy, but John Mayer’s PRS line absolutely murders her “Baby Taylor” in terms of unit sales and profit. On the other hand, look at Kylie Jenner. It could go either way. Regardless, the girl-racer spice is going to flow at high volume for a very long time.

Just in case I have a billionaire reading ACF today, I have a suggestion for what to do with all the W Series stuff. There’s a demographic out there that desperately wants to race and is absolutely forbidden from doing so, namely: boys (and girls) from low-income households. It’s simply unaffordable to run an F3-style season for less than half a ticket a year. (That’s $500,000, by the way.) Someone should buy all thirty of these cars and hold a race series for kids whose parents are below the poverty line. Black, brown, white, doesn’t matter. Chances are you’ll find a couple of genuine prospects in the process. Remember, Lewis Hamilton’s family wasn’t poor. They were poor compared to Nico Rosberg’s family. Anthony Hamilton could put his boy through the junior kart series on his own tab — in 2024 you’d spend $25-50k a year in post-tax income to race like Lewis did at the age of eight. Imagine how many kids could be the next Lewis, or better, if they had access to any racing at all.

Ah, but poor kids don’t buy new cars, and probably never will. Neither will their families. F1 Academy it is, then, with all the charming young women from good families and nice neighborhoods. The good news: when Academy falls apart, the cars will be even cheaper, because they’re F4s instead of the F3 spec used in W Series, and we do have a nice F4 series in the USA, so you’ll want to be on the lookout for them in the auction listings of 2027 or whenever. Alas, your humble author will still be unable to benefit. I don’t fit in the cars. It’s why I wasn’t racing F2000 in my thirties; even when I had a flat stomach, my shoulders were too wide. I’ll accept any sympathy you’d like to give. It’s tough being an “OFWG”. Just ask Robert Farago!