Wednesday ORT: NASCAR Settled, Choose Your Royce, Supermoto Lawsuit, Watch Business

All subscribers welcome

easily the worst picture ever taken of this particular watch model, sometimes i think bark does it on purpose

It wouldn’t be a Wednesday in 2026 if I didn’t pitch my book a bit. I will be shipping hardcovers to everyone this Saturday. If you aren’t on the list, I will have another set on Feb 10 or thereabouts. $30 out the door. What a fantastic Valentine’s Day gift this would be for the cat lady in your life! Also, the Meow and Dent sale continues: $20 for a signed early version softcover with a few stickers, in a unique mailer. Either deal can be had by emailing hardcover@cattalesbook.com.

Also, some Housekeeping. I have two great guest reviews; one of a Euro Jeep and one of a Seiko Bell-Matic. They’ll go out tomorrow night and Friday night, to paid subscribers.

Last but not least, I’m proud to know all of you. Our Thunderdome thread on Greenland was positively gentlemanly. I don’t think any discussion forum of this size has come close to managing that. God knows the other popular Substacks can’t do it.

The first people to bet against Michael Jordan and lose

what in god’s name is the woman on the right contemplating

It now looks like most of the details from the lawsuit filed by 23XI and Front Row against NASCAR are out. The most important part, as far as I can tell, is that teams will now have more durable “charters” that are more closely akin to sports franchises. This will go a long way to making the teams valuable in and of themselves, the way that, say, the LA Clippers are valuable, or the way that Williams Racing is valuable.

However, I don’t see that this elevates NASCAR teams to anything like the exalted status that F1 teams enjoy via the Concorde Agreement. Nor is NASCAR even remotely close to being as valuable as F1. It’s apparent (to me at least, given the information I’ve seen) that NASCAR has relentlessly attempted to chisel its own partners out of money while also running the quality of the sporting product directly into the ground at Talladega-esque speeds. This is unlikely to change.

As a matter of fact, when I think of NASCAR I immediately think of that old “BSD Is Dying” copypasta. Consider the situation:

• It’s a spec series using silhouettes that vaguely look like all the cars no college educated person has bought in at least twenty years. Right now it’s the Camaro (dead) against the Mustang (degraded and EV-ed) against the Camry (not a 2-door car in real life). Seen from a distance, the races look like what would happen if someone managed to turn off all the remote kill boxes at a rural JD Byrider: dudes who wear Oakley sunglasses driving used cars in a loosely defined group with zero concern for their fellow man.

• The races are an odd combination of dead boring and completely unpredictable. As with the typical regular-season NBA game, nothing that happens in the first 85% of the average NASCAR event means anything at all. After that, it’s partly random chance and partly whoever has the nicest coast-down tunnel back home.

• The teams are so desperate for cash they can’t even consider the idea of having a distinguishable livery. Here’s a typical NASCAR:

  

  Could you begin to guess which team it is? Hint: look above the rear window for the tiny line of text. Do the other Hendrick cars look anything like this? No. Will this Hendrick car look the same next year? Not if “ALL-PRO” changes their mind.

• The drivers are also indistinguishable from each other and there are far, far too many of them. They come in just five variants: Old Creeper, Young Ex-Kart Guy Without Beard, Young Ex-Kart Guy With Beard, Woman Who Does Terribly, Black Dude Who Is Immune From Criticism. I’m not saying NASCAR needs to field a Benetton lineup, but this sort of bland uniformity is poison to fans.

• About 50% of the country considers NASCAR a punchline. About two-thirds of the remaining “total addressable market” is living hand to mouth. Which is why the sponsors are painfully low-class. McLaren-Mercedes has Google and a half dozen other unicorn billion-dollar companies on their car; Front Row Motorsports has “Speedy Cash” and “TitleMax”. I don’t even know exactly what those companies do, but I guarantee you they exist to exploit the working poor somehow, because their visual language screams it.

The odd thing is that none of this is necessarily fatal to NASCAR. I can name another major sports series that has lost its appeal to everyone but the desperately broke and the pathetically bored: the NBA. Yet they’re doing fine. Maybe because everyone is betting on the games now. It could also be because the NBA isn’t run by a family of greasy grifters who despise everyone who has ever consumed their product.

My suggestion: Let Michael Jordan run NASCAR. He could not do any worse than the France family is doing. And let someone else own IMSA before that is completely run into the ground. Like, maybe, Liberty Media.

Which way, Western man?

Google thinks I’m shopping for a Rolls-Royce. Which I most definitely am not. But I know someone who is in the market. So we have three ways to spend $80,000. Which would you pick?

• The 1986 Corniche is a very solid example of a car that was once famous for being dirt-cheap used. The prestige of these vehicles is returning, but no one will believe that you spent eighty grand on yours, nor will they want to believe what this car can cost to keep running.

• The 2001 Corniche has tremendous curb appeal and street presence; it’s a fancier Bentley Azure that benefits from the divergent prestige of R-R and Bentley in the post-breakup era. I think it has real “old money” merit to it. Also, it drives like it was engineered a full five decades after the 1986 Corniche, in part because it was.

• The 2013 Ghost, unlike the other two, has more depreciation to do. A lot more. The floor value of a first-gen Ghost will eventually be the same as the floor value of an old 760iL. I bet this car needs $25,000 of something. Ah, but here’s the thing: there is something truly special about these Ghosts. They have big power. They feel like 94% of a Phantom for 40% of the price. You will search in vain for engineering shortcuts or sloppy workmanship or even indifferent material quality. To drive a V12 turbo Ghost is to understand why people want to be rich.

If someone gave me eighty grand tomorrow, and I was not permitted to spend that money on an LC500, I’m going with… the 2001 Corniche. In the long run, it will be worth the most. And in the short run, it’s the most special of the three.

I’ll see you in court, fancy motoamerica person

the last thing the plaintiff saw, presumably

Almost two years ago, Rivian engineer Greg Dachner was riding his supermoto bike at Adams Kart Track in Riverside, CA when he was struck by MotoAmerica heartthrob Rocco Landers. Dachner was nontrivially injured as a result, although he was neither paralyzed nor even injured to the extent that, say, your humble author has been at least five times in his life.

Dachner has an attorney wife and an attorney father-in-law. So he is suing. Despite having signed the waiver, and despite about 130 years of precedent in motorsports that the rider/driver always eats his own costs and injuries. Read a summary here:

I can easily see this leading to the end of amateur motorsports in the United States. If we accept external notions of liability and responsibility in racing, you would be a fool to ever suit up. What happens when that moron in the $350,000 GT4 car spins in front of your Miata? His attorney will be better than yours.

I have nothing negative to say about Greg Dachner, in part because he clearly doesn’t mind suing people, but: I couldn’t look my fellow competitors, my future competitors, my son, or any other grown man in the eye if I filed this lawsuit. I’ve met Rocco, because I was driving the MotoAmerica safety that went to help him out after a crash at Mid-Ohio. Like most young men in the sport, he is absolutely willing to take any and all risks.

So, were I a hobbyist supermoto rider like Lachner, and I had already seen Landers dump the bike twice that day, as Lachner alleges, I might say to myself, “Do I want to be in this guy’s way, or do I want to let him crash without me?” Because Lachner isn’t gonna ride away from Landers.

I don’t understand the mindset of someone who is willing to destroy the entire motorsports hobby because he broke his leg in two places. Boo hoo. I’ve broken my legs, my hips, my feet, my neck, my arm, my wrists, my hands, my feet… I wouldn’t do anything to harm the sports that have given meaning to my life. I don’t respect that. Not one bit.

I could not have guessed the #2 place for all the tea in Cartier’s best market

This image is floating around the Internet right now; it supposedly represents Morgan Stanley’s market estimates. There’s no end of surprises in it, really. I’ll give you a few of my favorite insights, but I’d like to hear yours as well:

• Isn’t it funny that Rolex is the biggest producer of any brand with an average price over a thousand dollars? Yet they also have more unmet demand than any other brand. Easy to see why: they do everything right, from making mechanically admirable watches to keeping their brand messaging simple. But…

• In 50 years, a Tudor Black Bay will be something like one-twentieth as common as a Submariner or GMT. Every BMX collector knows what a “Blue Max” is: a Mongoose produced for Armed Forces PX locations. They were a little cheaper new. But they are not cheaper now. Also, most Tudors will be beat to shit, because people wear them. Want a preview of this? Go to Chrono24 and see how many Tudors are listed, compared to how many Rolexes. It’s 20-to-1 for Rolex.

• The “Holy Trinity” of Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin are pretty close in total market turnover… well, Vacheron is a little behind them. Based strictly on the average retail, I would say Audemars is the easy winner… but I am personally on a Vacheron wait list, as opposed to an Audemars wait list, because I’d rather be seen wearing an Overseas than a Royal Oak, and I think it’s a better watch. Of course, it’s also one-third as expensive as a desirable-spec Royal Oak or Patek Nautilus.

• Did you think Cartier would be second place? I mean, Brother Bark just got himself a new Santos Medium, and he’s always got this sort of knack for knowing what people want, but I never imagined they sell 680,000 watches a year. I assume that 600,000 of them are quartz Tanks for women that go directly into jewelry boxes and are not seen again until the divorce.

• German watches, represented here by their Swiss owners for Lange and Glashutte, are rare and special. 12,400 high-end Germans a year. That’s it. I think I’ll have a Lange someday, but I couldn’t tell you how I’ll manage it.

• Who is buying Chopard? I used to work at a bagel company that had fallen in with Chopard and I was horrified by most of their product. Most of the lineup looks to me like Fossils. How is their average ticket 15,825 CHF, which is higher than that of Rolex?

• Next time you hear someone try to minimize the “K-shaped economy”, remember that Richard Mille is selling 5,700 watches a year at an average sales price of $341,792.

• I would be impressed by any fellow I met who was wearing a Zenith. I think most of us still associate that name with televisions (if you’re old) or nothing (if you’re young). I came pretty close to buying a new El Primero maybe ten years ago. Bought a fancy guitar instead. That was probably a mistake.

• If you want the biggest bang for your buck off this list, go buy a Parmigiani Fleurier. They retain zero value and they are chock-full of fascinating horology. When I accompanied DG to pick up her latest Omega (I think she was personally responsible for the brand being #3 instead of #4 in the overall list) the fellow who owns her dealer had me try on a stunning rose gold PF Tonda World Time. It weighed about half a pound, had a micro-rotor manufacture movement, a full solid gold deployant clasp that alone is probably worth five grand, and an original retail of $58,000 or thereabouts. Mine for $19k — if I had $19k, and if I possibly imagined I could make it through a day of wearing a solid gold watch bigger than a Casio MR-G without ka-chow!-ing it against a doorframe, making it a $9k watch.

• Grand Seiko isn’t on this list, obviously. The best information I have places them at 40,000 watches per year at an average retail of $7,500. They would be about 25th on this list. Seiko, the parent corporation, is bigger than Swatch, with a much higher price per unit.

Alright, enough silly watch talk, except to note that I’ll have a feature shortly on the very fanciest and most interesting Japanese watch you can buy for $300…

Over to you, ACF!