Wednesday O/R/T: F1 Outlook, Mr. McMorrow, Stellantis Pricing, Tudor Review

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“did you ever hear the tragedy of darth plagueis the wise?”

Contest(s) update

We have a winner for the Vanguard Scout speakers; I’ve contacted him and am waiting to hear back. In about two weeks I’ll draw a name from all the people who renewed their annual subscriptions and all the people who have been monthly-subscribed since this time last year, and one of those people will get his choice of the Guild Bob Marley guitar or a TactileTurn pen or a pair of Casio “terrorist” watches in silver or gold. Watch this space.

14 down, 10 to go

It’s been years since F1 has had a back half of the season with this much potential for excitement and change. The Constructors’ Championship will likely go somewhere else besides Red Bull, just by virtue of every other team in contention being able to field two competent drivers. What about the drivers’ trophy? That’s a little more certainly in the hands of M. Verstappen, but nothing is yet guaranteed. Just for fun, here’s my Top Ten prediction. I’ll dig it up at the end of the season so we can laugh at it.

1. M. Verstappen

2. L. Hamilton, as much as it pains me

3. O. Piastri

4. L. Norris

5. G. Russell

6. C. Leclerc

7. C. Sainz

8. S. Perez

9. F. Alonso

10. YUKI TSUNODA — in the famous words of Miike Snow, “I believe it, even if it is not true”

“You married into it”

Once upon a time, there was a site called Jalopnik. In the beginning it was just three crazy guys writing what they wanted to. And then Ray Wert arrived. So much of his origin story reminds me of how people describe Jimmy Iovine in the pre-Interscope days: the will to power, his “delulu is the solulu” approach to not really knowing his job, the continual narcissistic injuries, and so on. Like Iovine, however, Wert was willing to simply head-butt his way to success — and that is how Jalopnik became a household word.

I always struggled a bit in my interactions with Ray Wert. The goals I’ve had in life are usually specific — “win X race”, “buy X item”, and so on. Ray, by contrast, simply wanted to be somebody, and he wasn’t picky about how this might happen. After years of excoriating General Motors, he went to work for them, and nobody was surprised. He’s been floating around the business trying to land a meaningful executive position for a long time now…

…but the “Sliding Doors” moment for him, the minute where his whole life changed, was when he became Prince Consort for Mallory McMorrow. Depending on which movie you’ve chosen to watch on the American screen, Miss McMorrow is either a tireless crusader for women’s freedom from gun violence or a deranged shrew with the soul of a Sendero Luminoso death-squad leader. On neither screen, however, is she Mallory Wert.

At the DNC, McMorrow got a spotlight speech where she warned that, under a Trump Administration, the DOJ and FBI might be “weaponized” to do crazy shit like turn elapsed misdemeanors into felonies and raid the homes of ex-Presidents and, I don’t know, all the other stuff they’re doing to Trump now for the purpose of saving democracy. She said a lot about “Project 2025”, the public policy document that Trump has publicly renounced. She yelled a lot.

I personally thought she came off like Ian McDiarmid in his worst moments as “Senator Palpatine”, but it might just be because they have remarkably similar faces and I’m sensitive to stuff like that. Some of you may have found real joy and motivation in her clarion call. Either way, there’s something sad about the fact that Ray Wert will never have the power he wanted for himself, but rather will be adjacent to that power, just another Nice Submissive Husband Of The Democratic Party, perennially forced to roleplay what they’re calling “tonic masculinity” now. Like Doug Emhoff, who by the expressions he wears in public probably hasn’t had a happy moment in his life since he bricked in his nanny back in 2008 or thereabouts.

After a life of needing to be important, what’s it like being important because of your wife? Wait, maybe we can use the Laufey quote, but REVERSO:

it hurts to be nothing / it’s worse to be something with you

In which Darth Vader visits the Death Star

how do you earn 40 million a year and not fix that chomper up front

Speaking of Imperial leaders, doesn’t this emergency visit by Carlos Tavares to Stellantis in the United States just reek of “dispense with the pleasantries”? Wasn’t it just six months ago that champagne corks were popping for the financial performance of the former FCA in the United States? And now…

Tavares blamed himself for not being quick enough to act while problems at the group's North American operations were piling up and, when presenting first-half results, said he would spend part of his summer holidays there to fix them.

"We were arrogant," he said earlier this year at Stellantis' investor day in Michigan. "I'm talking about myself, nobody else."

I feel for the guy, even though he’s only my sixth-favorite Tavares. (The five best, obviously, are collectively responsible for “Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel”). All the research I can do suggests that Stellantis hasn’t raised prices any more than about eight to nine percent on their core products, like the Ram trucks, since MY2021. Let’s face it: prices in the real world for everything else are up a lot more than nine percent since the election of November 2020/COVID-19/whatever else you blame for this money-printing tsunami catastrophe.

I think the real pricing issues being discussed have to do with the Stellantis family EVs, which are overpriced. But here’s the problem: every EV, even the Fisker going for $14,000, is overpriced. That’s why the Feds have to pay you $7500 of some other taxpayer’s money just so you’ll consider one. To make things worse, there’s no possible price at which the EVs could even break even. Example: Harley-Davidson lost $177,273 on every LiveWire it sold last year. I don’t know if selling more of them would have improved that number, or worsened it.

So while the clueless normie media talks about “pricing issues” for Stellantis, let’s call this thang exactly what it is: making too many EVs that don’t sell, and discontinuing the cars that do sell. This isn’t a problem you can fix with an Alec Baldwin “Always Be Closing” motivational speech. It’s a deep-seated problem with the product. One I doubt that Carlos Tavares is brave enough to fix, or even discuss in public. Oh well. If an EV-focused version of Dodge falls in the woods, can anyone hear it over the 392s at the Woodward Dream Cruise?

Briefly Considered: Tudor Black Bay Ceramic

black watches, like black cars, show the dust

About a dozen readers have suggested in the past few months that I talk a little more about watches on the site, so here goes: As many of you know, the past several years have been a little thin for me financially, and I’ve wanted to keep racing my fussy Radicals no matter what it costs, so it’s been a long time since I’ve bought anything like a “luxury item”. In fact, I can easily remember the last time I did so: November of 2017, when I went to London and bought a Tudor Black Bay Bronze. How time flies!

A couple of years ago, while pawing through Brother Bark’s majestic collection of Swiss watches, I saw that he had the new Tudor Black Bay Ceramic. This watch is currently best-known for being the official driver jewelry of the “VCARB” F1 team, but it’s also fairly notorious in the watch-nerd world for three reasons:

0. It is the first watch not made by Omega to be certified by the Swiss government agency METAS as a “Master Chronometer”, meaning that it’s somewhat more accurate than the “Chronometer” designation earned by pretty much all Rolex watches. (Rolex is the more famous parent brand of Tudor; if you’re a car guy who doesn’t understand watches, Rolex is Lexus while Tudor is Toyota, so this would be like the “champagne glasses” ad being made with the Avalon instead of the LS400.)

1. It has a black ceramic case with a sapphire-glass back showing a completely undecorated movement. Just black ceramic and plain metal.

2. The aforementioned undecorated movement is called “in-house” by Tudor, suggesting that it’s made by Tudor. In fact, it’s made by Kenissi, a joint venture owned 80% by Rolex and 20% by Chanel that supplies movements to other watchmakers as well. Kenissi is connected to Tudor Primary Assembly via an underground passageway; whether this makes it “actually Tudor” is the subject of a thousand super-dorky online arguments collectively known as “tunnel discussions”.

I was totally envious of Brother Bark’s ceramic Tudor, of course, but I just pushed that feeling deep down inside with the rest of my childhood trauma, and didn’t think about it again. Until recently, when I accompanied Danger Girl on a couple of watch-purchasing expeditions. I won’t say what’s on her Wolf double winder now, it’s not my place to say, but let’s just say that topics like “Geneva waves” and “aventurine” and “complication” have been much-discussed here in the township as of late. It got me thinking that maybe I should buy another watch. This was a thought I should have discouraged, but did not. After some truly autistic stacking of discounts and offers, I was able to get a new Black Bay Ceramic for way below MSRP.

Which is still more than I can afford, so I’ll be selling some stuff here in the next few weeks, please buy all of it.

or maybe i should have spent the money on a new steering wheel

The Black Bay Ceramic isn’t for everyone. It has no “rizz”, as the kids say. From a distance, it looks like nothing at all. Up close, it’s definitely not a Submariner or Speedmaster. Let’s not even get into the corporate psychosis that made Rolex/Tudor decide that they should put a solid caseback on all the lovely, fully-decorated Rolex movements then slap a sapphire window on something that has no more tarting-up than a $139 Seiko 5 watch.

Scratch that; the Seiko is fancier.

The Black Bay Ceramic comes with a really stupid leather/rubber strap on a Tudor “Deployant” clasp that is designed with just one purpose in mind: to remind you that you can’t afford a Rolex. No worries; I ordered something nicer from my friends at Aaron Bespoke in Montreal, who made the crocodile-with-lime-green-stitching pimp-strap I wear on my Black Bay Bronze, and it should be here soon.

Other knocks on the Tudor: the bezel is stupid, it’s black-on-black, who can read it? And it only clicks once per minute’s worth of rotation, instead of the two clicks per minute you get with Rolex. Dear reader, I can understand why some of you insist on the Submariner, just based on that feature alone. It’s hard to go back to one click per minute after you’ve had two. Like getting into a V-6 Charger rental after a night in a Hellcat Widebody.

That’s what sucks about the Ceramic. Let’s talk about what rocks:

• It weighs very little, and since it’s a Rolex at heart it is all but bulletproof, so it’s fine for the wrist-racking activity of Radical racing. I divide my watches into the categories of Race-Usable (G-Shocks made from titanium or plastic, Moonswatches, Seiko 5) and Not-Race-Usable (full metal G-shocks, Omega De Ville Hour Vision, Vortic hand-wind, fancy stuff like that) so to have a “nice” watch in the former category is a joy.

• The poverty-spec white-on-black color scheme is highly readable at 155mph in an open race car, or at a lower speed on a motorcycle. I have a lot of watches that look much nicer but aren’t instantly legible to me under difficult conditions, especially since I refuse to wear bifocals.

• It really does keep perfect time; over the course of ten hours driving the MotoAmerica medical car it remained on the same second as the official course timer.

• I expect that it won’t be difficult to service, since the MT5062 movement is being made in mass quantities by Kenissi and therefore will be well-documented, with strong parts availability. This matters more than you’d think for a watch that you want to leave for your children, and it’s been on my mind a lot regarding the Speedmaster Broad Arrow that I have been holding onto for my son, since it has the bastard Piguet/Omega 3303 Co-Axial movement that sold in modest quantities at best.

• It’s not a Rolex GMT-Master II, which is The Default Watch Of Successful 52-Year-Old Men. Having achieved about zero success in my life (other than being Regional Driver of the Year, ahem) and also not really feeling “aligned” with my fellow middle-aged, middle-class dudes in a lot of ways, it seems appropriate to wear a Tudor instead of a Rolex. If I won the Runoffs or got a novel published, maybe I’d buy a GMT-Master. More likely I’d go straight to a Sky-Dweller in platinum, just to drive the point home. For now, the Tudor is a fair statement of what I’ve done in life: tried my best, with some measurable but unspectacular results.

Every time I wear the Ceramic, I like it more. It really strikes a nice balance between “hobbyist watch” and “usable device”. I’ll be racing with it for the rest of the year, although I might sub in my Polar Lights or Lava Moonswatches once or twice, just for fun. It further cements my belief that Tudor, in 2024, is what Rolex was in 1974: the mechanically nicest Swiss watch you can buy, and have serviced, everywhere. I recommend it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to start taking photographs of stuff for my garage sale. Anybody want to buy this Jazzmaster?