What’s this? Did I cleverly find a way to bring back Traffic Jams? Nope! It’s a Question of the Day about cars in media. I tricked you!
In case you missed it:
- Consumer Reports’ Most Satisfying Midsize SUVs to Own
- Here’s Video of the F-150 Lightning Fire That Made Ford Stop Production
- These Cars Look Suspiciously Like Their Competitors
My lead example of excellence in car media is a tune — or rather, a set of tunes known as an album — from friend of the site Peter Hughes. Hughes is not only an automotive wordsmith in his own right, he plays bass for a little band called The Mountain Goats. But while I am prepared to write about the Goats for many thousands of words, this isn’t about that glorious band. This post is about a concept album Hughes put together base on a childhood fantasy about the Argentine F1 driver Juan Manuel Fangio. Here’s how he describes the album on his Bandcamp page:
When I was seventeen, for reasons that will remain forever inscrutable, I wrote a song for my Casio-powered solo project Party of One which imagined the 1950s race car driver, five-time Formula One World Champion, and Argentine icon Juan Manuel Fangio piloting a then-current 1980s-model Saab 900 Turbo across the Andes mountains on a covert mission to assassinate the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
Twenty-three years later I bought a well-traveled example of the ingeniously versatile car that accompanied the hero of that song, and began writing songs for an album that would pick up where “A Fangio for the ’80s” left off.
What was once a musical fan fic about a favorite F1 champion driver turned into several incredibly creative, funky, and atmospheric pieces of techno music. That’s some incredible car enthusiast art right there.
When it comes to books, I’m more drawn to nonfiction. I recently finished Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin and Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars by Katherine J. Parkin. When it comes to cars, I love watching in the background of period pieces for all the fun and quirky classics. Remember all the great cars in the Netflix series Mindhunter or in the cult classic cartoon The Venture Brothers? I sure do.
So what about you? Limit one Fast & Furious film per commenter, please.