Greenwich Concours 2011 - Big Gallery!

Sunday was the European car day at the Greenwich Concours D'Elegance. As always, it was great to get up close with some fantastic and rare machinery.  This year's event was a little short on real show-stoppers.  For example, there was only 1 Bugatti present, whereas in previous years there have been numerous significant ones like Peter Williamson's T57 Atlantic. I felt that some of the corrals were being filled out by lesser examples of the respective marques.  For example there were 2 XJS examples in the Jaguar area, and no truly rare Jags on display (like C-types or D-types). Overall, the event felt more regional than in previous years, but I still had a good time.  As often is the case at car shows, the parking lot provided many unexpected and exciting car sightings, from a perfectly restored Lancia Fulvia HF to a really great vintage Maserati Quattroporte.  For me, the highlight of the show itself was a fascinating and diminutive Lotus Mark VI with polished aluminum body and snappy red leather interior.  What a cool and historically significant machine! Plenty of pics of it in the gallery. See the full 2-page gallery HERE or click on the photos above!

Truth in Advertising: the 2011 Mediocrity

Last month, Subaru unveiled a series of hilarious videos poking fun at mainstream family sedans. If you haven't seen them yet, you have to at least watch this one, which features earnest, hardworking designers articulating their vanilla-tinted vision of motoring ordinariness. The ads are funny, but they do sort of dance around the hard question of why it is that mediocrity is so pervasive in corporate design culture --even at Subaru. Sorry guys but the B9 ("benign" like a tumor that won't kill you?) Tribeca is nothing but warmed over Alfa 147 design cues stretched to grotesque proportions.

In reality, designers usually don't sit down and figure out how to make an intentionally bland car, but somehow at the end of the process a bland car is what results. If only it were a question of just setting out with the right goals from the start, but in truth mediocrity is a result of an insidious and self-destructive corporate culture that warps otherwise talented individuals into collectively ruining the fruits of their own labor -- a non-process that twists good notions into bad results.  What I love about this campaign is to see the truth of it all so perfectly labelled: Mediocrity is the only way to describe it.