Wednesday ORT: Detroit, Euphoria, Fender (Again), Cuckmudgeon, Backrooms, This Williams Business

All readers welcome

God, I’ve seen what you’ve done for others, and I don’t want it.

What a week it’s been! Let’s cover the highlights and have some fun. But first, a brief commercial message: I’m back in The Free Press talking about why the Ferrari Luce is so awful. Don’t expect the level of discussion we get here; TFP is a relentlessly non-automotive audience. And some of them are excited about the Luce, presumably because it’s a way to have the Ferrari badge without the attendant Ferrari experience; it is the giant Louis Vuitton logo T-shirt of automobiles. It is important to remember that we increasingly occupy a world where display of the brand is more important than any particular virtue of said brand. That’s why Patek Philippe dress watches from the Fifties and Sixties sell for the melt value of their gold; there’s simply no way for someone to see you’re wearing a Patek. Another way to look at it: the street value of an early-purchase Swatch x Audemars plastic watch is greater than that of pretty much any gold dress watch from the past. The sole exception is probably a Cartier Tank… because everyone knows what a Cartier Tank looks like.

Anyway, we apparently live in a world where a few folks would really like their electric blob to have a Ferrari badge. Thank God I can get paid to speak truthfully about this piece of shit rather than being forced to fluff it for a payday. Which reminds me:

The bold alpha males speaking out in favor of the Luce

By any measure one could reasonably conjure, the new Luce is not a good product. It looks worse than a Tesla Model S and will probably trail said Tesla through the quarter-mile while also providing less interior space. The last time someone whiffed so comprehensively against a fourteen-year-old product that has just been idled for major revision was probably… the 1994 Smith and Wesson “Sigma”, which was demonstrably worse in all categories than an early-Eighties Glock 17. When it came out, some wag on the USENET (alright, it was me) opined that “Sigma” stood for “Sure It’s Glock… My Ass.”

You can argue that autowriters don’t have as much responsibility to the wealthy public as they do to the normal public. It’s a genuine dereliction of duty to promote a bad $25,000 car; promoting a bad $250,000 car is much less harmful and acting as advocate for a $2.5M car is entirely value-neutral. No one will ever lose his job, his home, and his kids because he is late for work due to his Bugatti, regardless of what you might see on “Billions”.

So I don’t think Jason Cammisa and John Pigboy Heffalump¹ are hurting the public much by coming out in favor of the ugly-ass Luce. But it is also true that I would not be doing a material disservice to humanity by changing this Substack to “Avoidable Contact Forever, brought to you by Dude Wipes(tm) and Realdoll(tm).” Nevertheless, I shall not be doing that, and for one simple reason: nobody's offered me any money to do that. God in His infinite wisdom has chosen to protect me from the kind of temptations that have recently led friend of ACF Matt Farah to endorse a $79 Chinese watch strap (that looks suspiciously similar to a $21 Watchdives product) and a $1,299 Chinese² watch (that looks suspiciously similar to a $99 Watchdives product).

Autowriters who will say and/or write anything in order to get on the next five-star press trip are morally inferior to those young women who get paid for visiting Dubai and serving as human toilets for various sheikhs and such. The latter are only degrading themselves; the former are also harming the business and their readers.

I suppose its possible that both of these fellows are expressing their honestly acquired opinions instead of nakedly toadying towards the prospect of free hospitality at the LVGP. Somehow that would be even worse, like finding out that those Dubai girls are just really into the rough stuff.

Charming in its own way

IndyCar is pretty neat in my experience if you just think of it as MX-5 Cup played at 2x speed. Anything can happen and you don’t need to overthink the strategy et al. In road course trim the cars are oddly handsome, too.

The Detroit street circuit is really, really tight; I was there a few years ago for the GT4 race and it was immediately apparent that not a single turn on the course is genuinely two cars wide. In order to shine here, drivers need a real traction sense and also a real idea of tire state. It doesn’t hurt to know what your brakes can do. If anything, most of the drivers underestimated their stopping ability; plenty of the overtakes were clearly the product of different opinions in that regard. Maybe three times there was a genuine instance of overbraking. Far more often we saw the over-enthusiastic application of exit throttle, aka the “Mark Reuss”.

It’s been said that IRL was the better organization but CART had the better vehicles. In any event, the (forcible) reunification was a good thing. Here’s an idea for another good thing: Unify IRL with F2. They’re the same car, more or less. Then encourage F1 drivers to dabble back in F2 the way Cup drivers run in O’Reilly. Wouldn’t you like to see Max run the Detroit GP? Sure you would.

Five-sentence movie review: “Backrooms”

0. You don’t need to know anything about the “lore” or the YouTube stuff or the Steam games to enjoy the movie; quite the contrary.

1. Chiwetel Ejiofor, whom I despise thanks to a profoundly naive idea on my part that he is anything like his character in “Children of Men”, delivers an acting masterclass, and is the second most impressive Black actor to be discussed this week.

2. The visual design of the film is astounding, drawing from Nineties-furniture misery, the Omega Mart in Last Vegas, and THX 1138 in near-equal measure.

3. Don’t expect anything good to happen, and you won’t be surprised.

4. Renate Reinsve is a nearly perfect female and would be one thousand times as famous as she is if some of you short kings out there could find it in your hearts to love a woman who claims to be five foot ten and is obviously lying, this broad is closer to six feet than Vin Diesel is.

From euphoric to majestic, painfully

“yeah, just copped it on bring a trailer for thirty-four grand”

It takes a lot to be a better actor than Chiwetel Ejiofor, but Colman Domingo handles it effortlessly in the final episodes of “Euphoria”. If you’ve seen the flamboyantly gay, emotionally wrecked drama-queen character in “The Four Seasons”, you would be excused for not recognizing that Domingo is both that guy and “Ali”, the Muslim, First Infantry soldier, and recovering addict to whom Rue Bennett turns in “Euphoria”.

Plot twist: Domingo is actually gay in real life, by the by.

He’s not the only surprise to be had. Not since Dylan went electric has a creative person changed direction as effortlessly, and convincingly, as Sam Levinson has in this show’s third season. Seasons One and Two, which premiered in 2019 and 2022, respectively, were deliberately dream-like, artsy, and massively unrealistic meditations about youth drug use. Few shows have offered as many unforgettable set pieces in just sixteen episodes, whether it was a nude Sydney Sweeney being choked or Labirinth singing gospel in the famous Knox Presybyterian Church or my personal favorite, a brutal sequence where Zendaya has to channel her inner T-1000, parkour expert, and junkie all at once:

“Euphoria” has been repeatedly criticized for glamorizing addiction — but in Season Three, Levison crushes those vibes with a ten-pound sledge. He then does the most shocking thing of all, in a show already renowned and notorious for shock value: he evangelizes for both the Old and New Testaments and their power to heal even the most degraded among us. It is an astoundingly Christian message, especially coming from the Jewish director son of a Jewish director father.

In the season, sin is deadly, blasphemy is punished, and faith is rewarded. You might even say that “Ali” puts on the full armor of God… and sheds that Muslim name in the process. The pivotal character in the last genuinely violent scene is named Bishop; he carries something between Muslim prayer beads and a rosary. I suppose we all should have seen this particular end coming.

It’s been interesting, watching the media gripe about Levinson’s message while also reluctantly admitting the deftness of the execution. What fascinates me most about it was that Euphoria didn’t necessarily need to end. Yeah, you were gonna lose Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi ASAP because they have bigger fish to fry, but let’s face it: Zendaya isn’t going anywhere, the public has had a chance to vote on her movie-star potential and they have universally chosen Sydney Sweeney instead.

“Euphoria” could have run ten seasons. Twenty. It could have been “Grey’s Anatomy”; both series lost Eric Dane and kept on ticking. Rather than milk the cow endlessly, Levison decided to do something that Zendaya’s despised “Chani” in the Dune films would understand:

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

Respect.

It was the Silver Sky all along

“you’ll never know… the unlikely beauty in letting you go”

Paul Reed Smith, the company not the man, has confirmed recipt of a “cease-and-desist” letter from Fender over its Silver Sky model. The reason can be seen in Reverb’s Top Sellers list for 2025:

1. Fender American Professional II Stratocaster (USA)

2. PRS SE Silver Sky (Indonesia)

4. Fender Player Stratocaster (Mexico)

7. PRS USA Silver Sky (USA)

This represents an improved state of affairs for Fender, who took a worse beating from PRS for much of the past seven years. Fender also has a tougher business proposition than PRS does, because they own their Mexican facilities and have to keep them humming by any means necessary. By contrast, PRS outsources the “SE” guitars to Cort overseas. PRS is also able to get more money per “Strat” than Fender does. The cheapest USA Silver Sky costs $2,749, while the cheapest USA Strat is $1,259 and the volume model is $1,499. To put that in perspective, I paid $999 for an American Standard Strat in 2008 and I paid $999 for an American Deluxe during a music-store shutdown in 2013. The wildest thing is that I sold the American Standard for six hundred bucks in 2018, because a friend needed a decent gigging guitar. Oof.

I don’t think Fender can win this lawsuit, and I think it does nothing but elevate PRS in the eyes of the average musician. Which, frankly, they don’t need. Everyone knows PRS makes a better guitar. What they generally don’t make is a cooler guitar. This lawsuit can’t make the Silver Sky any more cool, but it can hurt Fender, and likely will. The fact that the whole guitar market is a bit of a crab-in-the-bucket situation makes the lawsuit even more pathetic. How many guitars will anyone sell in ten years? Twenty?

Trouble in Vowles-a-dise

According to the Guardian and other sources, things are going badly at Williams F1:

Away from the track, the team and their parent company, Dorilton, are embroiled in a messy dispute with a former executive, Claudia Schwarz, who was dismissed in 2022. In court filings, she alleges she was fired after raising concerns about sexism towards her and racism, with claims drawing in Lewis Hamilton’s foundation and the artists Wyclef Jean and Shaggy.

The ultimate ownership of the Williams team is also questioned by the former executive, who makes a hotly contested claim that the team are controlled by Peter de Putron, a billionaire based in Jersey with close links to the Conservative party. They in turn accuse the executive of fiddling her expenses, charging inflated fees and defrauding the company in cahoots with a former CEO of Williams’s parent company.

In the lawsuit she alleged: “Ms Schwarz complained about the various business practices of the Williams Racing Team through its owner, Peter de Putron as it relates to marketing. This included complaints as to the manner in which contracts and business operations were being performed in the country of Bermuda, complaints regarding defendant Peter de Putron’s insistence that the Williams Racing Team not be marketed to African Americans and the LGBTQ Community [and] complaints about not allowing participation to donate/support Unicef alongside all the other F1 Teams for Ukraine war victims.”

Shortly after Austin, Dorilton’s CEO, Bjorn Bergabo, said in a video call with Schwarz’s hospitality and marketing team, according to her lawsuit, that “the investor ‘is furious’ and he made it clear ‘that this is not the quality of people he and board wants to see in the Paddock Club.’ He further said it was embarrassing that [Wyclef] Jean and Shaggy, [the two singers] dared to come to the table of himself, Mr Bergabo and Mr Savage, to say thank you to him for the invitation.”

Schwarz also alleges in her claim that she raised concerns about what she described as De Putron’s decision to prevent Williams from joining the Lewis Hamilton Commission, which assists minorities aiming to work or race in motorsports. In her lawsuit against Dorilton and De Putron, Schwarz alleges the billionaire told Fultz and Capito: “He would ‘rather sell the team’ before he would let the Williams Racing Team become a part of [the Hamilton Commission].”

For the record, “The Hamilton Commission” is an obvious bit of race-bating and grievance-grifting. It’s ridiculous that it exists at all, let alone has full financial participation from every single F1 team (including, nowadays, Williams.) It is also ridiculous that F1 teams are supporting Ukraine; sports organizations are not supposed to be sponsoring wars. Can you imagine the New York Knicks tossing a few bucks at the Wagner Group?

I hope they grind this woman face-first into the ground. It is patently obvious (to me, from what I have read) that she got caught banging at least one executive and she is now doing the ultimate I’m Gonna Go Tell The Teacher What You Did And You’ll Be In More Trouble Than I Am. And nothing, I mean nothing, screams “privileged multi millionaire white broad” than claiming to be some sort of advocate for Wyclef Jean. The mind boggles.

And what kind of value did she deliver when she was CMO, other than apparently getting frisky with someone? Zero, literally zero:

“We had 17 partners generating no money because most of the deals were value in kind,” says Kenyon, recalling when he joined the team. “So we cleared that out. We worked on the basis that if it’s not worth anything, it’s not worth anything.”

She is also alleged to have misappropriated nearly seven million dollars in expenses, which easily beats the time I took ten people to dinner at “Meat on Ocean” and expensed the price of a new Honda Navi on “Japanese A5” and “Ketel One”. On the other hand, she apparently raised concerns about her employer’s dealings in the Bahamas, something similar to a comment I raised at one of my jobs that probably did not help my longevity there.

I would also defend Ms. Schwartz by pointing out that Nicholas “GOATifi” was employed during her tenure there. If she had anything to do with that, then I take back most of what I’ve said above.

See you all later on in the week!

1. this is not a fair name for him, I coined it one day in California watching him galumphing across an Old West movie set trying to catch the attention of a female autowriter. None of us should be judged by his worst moments.

2. “assembled in Los Angeles” of pure Chinesium. I do, however, respect the hustle.