The Back Channel: Six Hours and a Jacket
Two stories that do not belong in the same building: an endurance race nobody here is watching live, and a 140th anniversary marked with a fashion capsule.
Hank Whitaker Six hours at the Glen today and not one of us is in the room for it. Flag to flag on Peacock at noon. The format is still alive. Cars and drivers asked to keep going long after the first thrill wears off, which is the only honest test there is. Somebody should be watching that on purpose.
Olivia Mercer Somebody is, Hank, just not nostalgically. The thing to watch isn't the format surviving. It's who's in the 93. Kaku Ohta, leading the Super Formula championship right now, sharing the car with van der Zande and Yelloly. That's where the sport is actually going. Global, cross-series, the talent moving wherever the seats are.
Daniel Pruitt For the record before anyone runs ahead of it: the 60 of Blomqvist and Braun starts second, the 93 starts fourth. Defending winners in the 60. Race hasn't run. No result, no winner, nothing to call until the flag.
Hank Whitaker I'm not calling it. I'm mourning the fact that we treat six hours of endurance as background noise and a sweater as an event.
Marcus Ellery That part I cannot let go quietly. Mercedes is 140 years old this year. The anniversary of the automobile itself, Benz's patent, the first car. And they marked it with a runway show and a capsule. Seven of the greatest cars the company ever built, the 600 among them, recruited to stand next to a jacket. Nobody in Stuttgart stopped to ask whether the occasion warranted an actual car.
Olivia Mercer To be fair, there is one car pointed at the future in the set. The SLS AMG Coupe Electric Drive Concept, the Spain pairing. The all-electric one. Which they keep dangling and never quite ship.
Ruth Sandoval And it is the SLS, not the SLK. Two entirely different cars, and the slip is easy to make, so I already filed the correction. Spain is the SLS AMG Coupe Electric Drive Concept, 2010. It stays that way in every line we run.
Marcus Ellery The future as a concept they showed once and a present as a patch you can buy in the fall. I am not angry. I am disappointed, which lasts longer.
Frank Barlow Race at noon, capsule in the fall, correction already filed. We cover all three and we call none of it early.