All posts by Steve Stern

McLaren

Americana, Cars

McLaren makes awesome race cars, it is in their DNA, just like Ferraris. The founder, Bruce McLaren, was a  race car driver from New Zealand. Early in his career, he started modifying the cars he was driving and, then, designing them from scratch. In the CanAm Series – which featured huge American V-8s stuffed into lighweight bodies, and where I saw my first McLaren in 1967 – they became the dominant manufacturer (if manufacturer can be used for a company making ten to twenty cars a year).  In 1967 they won five of six races they entered and by 1968, McLarens won 11 of 11 races. In 1980 – eleven years after he left home to go to Europe to race, eleven short years – Bruce McLaren died in an accident testing one of his own cars.

As tragic as that was, Bruce McLaren might not have felt that way, he once said about a team-mate that was killed The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone – the company didn’t die and has gone on to become one of the great racing teams in Formula 1.

The McLaren- Ferrari Formula 1 rivalry is the longest-lasting rivalry in motor racing. Now McLaren, about 49 years after the company was founded, has started making street cars1  to go after Ferrari. I think that there is a difference between a company that races to promote their regular cars and a company that sells cars to help them race. McLaren falls into the latter group…with a vengeance. Their cars can go over 200mph and get to 60 from a standstill in 3.1 seconds. There are ten dealerships in the US and one is in Silicon Valley, where I went to take a look.

They are selling  about five cars a month. Sixty cars a year is terrible if you are a Chevy dealership, but pretty good, I guess, if you are selling a little known car that sells for about $300,000. The cars are more subtle than Ferraris and, to my eye, more elegant. Because McLaren has made its living racing cars – they spend about an half billion a year to race two cars in twenty races – it figures that the cars they make would be all about passion but they really aren’t. The McLaren way is about getting the details right. The McLaren street cars are at their best in their details.

From the doors to service area, to the receptionist’s desk, even to a small flower arrangement – in the McLaren “official” color of orange, of course – everything pushes the McLaren image.

 

Having said that, I am not too sure what the McLaren image is. Perfection, meticulous hard word work and attention to detail, I guess; efficiency and attention to detail, maybe. Either way, they are handsome devils and their detailing is exquisite.

From their carbon brakes and wheels with tires that are less like balloons to cushion the ride than like wallpaper,

to the perfectly detailed, 600 hp, turbo-charged, V-8, engine – visible under glass for all to admire –

to the steering wheel and shifting paddles controlling the seven speed transmission (although I am not so sure that I like the leather doily over the tach).

The major design elements are the the tilting doors and the huge side scoops.

I like McLaren, I root for McClearn’s Formula 1 team. When they are leading a race, as they were today at Singapore, and then have a mechanical failure, I am disappointed. But I think that I admire them more than I love them. It would be hard not admire them, they are staggeringly fast, marvelous to look at, and competent in the extreme but, somehow – to me – don’t generate much lust. In the end, this precision over passion is slightly strange; the company was fathered by a passionate man and the CanAm cars, like the one at the top of the page, are all libido. These McLaren street cars will will probably be driven by a guy that is nice enough -deeply nice enough – that anybody would be comfortable having him take out their daughter and brash enough to have had made their first $100,000,000 by the time he is forty (many McLaren buyers already have a Ferrari that they don’t bother trading in).

1. Although they did make a – sort of goofy – three seat, hyper-fast, hyper-expensive, street car for a while and they did most of the heavy lifting on the $450,000 Mercedes Benz SLR.

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Ryan and lying

Politics

With a couple of disclaimers like almost everybody exaggerates – I sure have – and nobody remembers everything, I am fascinated by Paul Ryan’s lying. Not so much the lies themselves, but the foolishness of it; the riskiness. It is one thing to say that he ran marathons when he only ran one or to chop some time off that marathon when having a beer with a group of  business associates and an entirely other thing to put it out in front of the entire world.

For starters, part of that entire world includes people who were there and remember. I am very aware of that as I blog. Anything I say here, opens me up to someone saying, Hey! I was there and you never…. To me, it would be incomprehensible to exaggerate to a reporter, even one from, say, the Portola Valley Almanac.  For Paul Ryan, it is almost a guarantee that it will be checked. For Ryan to imply that he has run multiple marathons or that he climbed close to 40 of Colorado’s 14,000 peaks, just seems nuts.

What was he thinking?

 

 

Michael Lewis on Obama

Politics, Uncategorized

The latest Vanity Fair has an article by Michael Lewis (the author of Moneyball, Blindside, The Big Short, among other books). It is entitled Obama’s World and they sub-tag it  “Hanging out with the president—on the basketball court, in the White House residence, and on Air Force One—provides an eye-opening lesson in what it takes to lead the free world, as well as an unparalleled portrait of Barack Obama”. I am not, particularly, a Vanity Fair fan but I am a Michael Lewis fan and the article is well worth reading.

It is more than just about Obama, it is a fascinating investigation into the isolation and strain of being the president. You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

In reading the article, I ended up thinking about Bush almost as much as Obama. I highly recommend it.

 

Romney and forced errors

Politics

I used to think that Mitt Romney was a very smart man. “Used” is the operative word, here.  Now, I no longer think that he is that smart and I feel, vaguely, sorry for him. As a fellow – but almost infinitely poorer –  businessman, that bothers me. If he is not very smart, how did he make so much money? I know that he started with money, but, but, unlike George W. Bush who started with money from his father’s connections and ended up with less, Romney parlayed his wealthy start into making even more money. According to our national mythology, he has to be smart.

When you are the richest guy in the room, it must be hard not to think that you are also the the smartest guy in the room. After all, Romney is rich, he did make lots of money, and to many people – perhaps most – that is what “being successful” means. He is much richer than Obama so he must be smarter. Paul Ryan said it well when he said, “When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.”  By inference, somebody who does think of themself as stuck in some low station in life – just because they were born black, or grew-up in poverty – is either not very smart or does not have the proper American character (it may not be their fault, but it is not Paul Ryan’s fault, either).

And this is where I feel sorry for Romney. I imagine that Romney thought that once he had a chance to go mano-a-mano with Obama, he – Romney – would have no problem beating him. After all, Obama’s base’s enthusiasm is down, the economy is in the tank and not getting better; how could Romney not beat him? And yet, Romney is slowly losing ground.

Somehow, Obama has a way of making forced errors. It happened to Bill Clinton in South Carolina, it happened to John McCain over the economy meltdown, and now it is starting to happen to Mitt Romney. He should be able to win on the economy but he keeps wandering off to other topics. He is not going to win by making Obama look friendly to radical Muslims! he is not going to win on birth control, and, yet, somehow he ends up there trying to double down on a stupid statement. It must be infuriating to a guy like Romney who is, after all, the smartest guy in the room.