Just thought I'd share. Couldnt find a publisher to take it so here it is for you to read... Let me know your thoughts!
The Emperor Has No Clothes. An allegory for RWB ownership and automotive narcissism.
The Emperor’s New Clothes is a Hans Christian Anderson story from the mid-19th century. It’s the tale of how two textile makers created a wardrobe for an emperor. As a very wealthy man, the emperor spent an inordinate amount of money on clothing purely to impress others. He instructs his tailors to make him an amazing suit. They are explicit that the new wardrobe is invisible to those unfit for their positions, "hopelessly stupid", or incompetent.
There are, of course, no clothes. His aides and advisors don’t see the clothes. Society doesn’t see the clothes. The emperor is naked, and no one has the courage to stand up to the situation before them lest they be cast out as idiots, or buffoons. Eventually, a child screams out, and points at the emperor screaming: "But he isn't wearing anything at all!". Predictably, the emperor stands taller, and continues the broken charade, with his aides holding up the train of the wardrobe, that wasn’t even there in the first place.
The moral of the story is that anyone seeking fame and notoriety, especially in today’s social media-fueled world, will do almost anything to attain it. The entire car culture today is filled with emperors. They parade naked on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and now Drivetribe. Likes pour in as if shot out of a meme cannon. (And yes, there’s now a meme for that too.)
I know I’m not the only one concerned about the idea of enthusiasts building cars purely for fame. Visual impact is king, over the quality of build. Cars that look like they run nines with 1,500 horsepower remain stock under their robe.
The most obvious and blatant example of this idiom is RWB. (We’ll save Liberty Walk for another article.) I remember when I saw the Stella car pop up on my newsfeed years ago. I sat upright in my chair, elbows on the armrests, and leaned close to the monitor. I had no idea what I was looking at. It was clearly some sort of race car. There were no numbers though, and it was painted flat black. It struck me with it’s absolute insistence through the glow of my monitor. I loved it. It was fresh, raw, and appeared purposeful. I didn't see much after that, until the it showed up on a popular automotive blog.
It all started then, for the rest of the world, around eight years ago with those articles about a relatively unknown man. Akira Nakai-san, they called him. He built cars in Kashiwa, Japan. Notably, he did it in a dingy corrugated steel garage with a cracked green concrete floor. The man didn’t speak much English in the videos about his builds. He smoked incessantly. He didn’t care about what anyone else thought about what he was doing. It encapsulated precisely what most real enthusiasts wanted to be—building for himself and a few others, with no one looking over his shoulder. He was a hero. He freehanded fiberglass body kits on the last couple of generations of the air cooled 911 chassis. He and his buddies would take the cars out to Motegi at the idlers event and race them.
Or used to. As far as I know, the cars were never meant to be masterpieces. They were never meant to be worshipped. They were meant to be moving functioning representations of what Nakai envisioned. The car culture latched on to what was something very real. Nakai, is in fact, about as real as it gets. The man has 50-weight oil flowing through his veins more completely than most other Porsche enthusiasts. His work goes far beyond “little touches”. The “built because I felt like it and fuck it looks good.” theme flows through all of his early builds. We all sat back, looked at what Nakai was doing with a sudden clarity of how uncool we were. It’s what many of us wanted to be deep down. A builder, doing something unique, and special, with one of the most legendary marques ever to come down an assembly line.
But we can’t be that. And we’re not. We’ll never be. Nakai-san is a once in a generation guy. What he builds, doesn't translate to cool when it’s owned by anyone else. People are driving around in them like they are the emperor in their new clothes. They stand there in a $450,000 private garage with coated floors, and nothing on the walls but an overpriced clock and some vintage posters watching this man, this legend, cut up your stock high mile leaky 911 with a pneumatic saw. It’s lauded to be a masterpiece. It’s not. It’s nothing like what it looks like, and rarely does anyone follow through to make it so. There’s too much spray paint, glue, body screws, and lack of measurement. Your $40,000+ free handed body kit sits on a 993 that has no door cards, wiring hanging out from under the dash, and seats that are falling apart. To me, you’re just a naked guy dressed up in an RWB 911 that everyone is afraid to call out. Well, here I am. I’m calling you out. You did it to get a taste of the Nakai-san enigma. You’re not him. You’re not one of his hometown buddies. You’re not hitting up Motegi for the idler 12 hour race. You’re rubbing your way out of parking lots in which your relatively stock 911 just left a puddle of oil in. You’re running 14 or 15 second quarter miles in a car with what you think is enough visual downforce to depress other people's egos just by driving by. These cars, and many like them are the torn and faded jeans of the 911 world. The only way that look is cool, is if you wore them out yourself.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to RWB, 911s, or even cars. Our society today is drowning in blatant narcissism. A glance at any of the social media platforms proves we’re turning into a society looking ever outward for approval and clicks. And you did it for the fame. You did it for the attention. It’s over. There are exceptions to everything, and I’m sure not all the owners are this way, but it’s time for everyone to realize that many of the owners of these RWB cars are as naked as they day they were born. But as bad as this phenomenon is, who’s fault is it?
I got into car clubs, and tuning around 18 years ago. At the time there wasn’t really social media to speak of. You had a local forum, and a national forum. That was it. Still, the writing was on the wall. I remember making random posts on forums about my car, or cars or articles I had shot and written for magazines. I kept a build thread documenting my progress with projects and updated it regularly. In a way, it was the inception of the car culture we see on the internet now. The instant feedback and response to posting when compared to instagram, twitter, and facebook is nonexistent on a forum. Now we live in a society where everything you do can be sent out like instant postcards. Instead of: “Hello from Adenau! Hitting the nurburgring tomorrow! Wish you were here! -Your best friend” being delivered on a postcard a week after you’ve already returned home, we’re inundated with low key drivel daily. While the desire to keep up with the joneses has always existed, it’s now taking every possible Methamphetamine derivative you can think of. The “check out how awesome my life is” family letter we used to get once a year, is now in our face every single minute of every day. In the car culture it's every RWB or Liberty Walk car you’ve ever seen. What happens to these cars after the likes start to fall off when everyone gets tired of seeing them? The quantity of videos and media surrounding these builds is a testament to how much these individuals, and their fans care about showing everyone what they are doing. If I close my eyes, I feel like I’m eating riveted on fenders for breakfast against my will.
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