Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Return to Glory
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Montclair
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdebord/ * http://www.groveatlantic.com/?title=Return+to+Glory#page=isbn9780802126504-bio
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| 670 | __ |a Return to glory, 2017: |b ECIP title page (Matthew DeBord) ECIP data view (Matthew DeBord is a Business Insider senior correspondent covering transportation. He is the author of The New York book of wine and wine country, USA) |
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PERSONAL
Born April 4, 1967.
EDUCATION:Clemson University, B.A., 1989; New York University, M.A., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Business Insider, New York, NY, senior correspondent, 2014–. Solve Associates, communications consulting firm, CEO, 2007–. Mas taught writing at University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
AWARDS:National Magazine Award for blogging, 2009.
WRITINGS
Contributor to print and online periodicals, including New York Times, Slate, Washington Post, Huffington Post, CBS Interactive, Nation, and New York Observer, and radio stations, including KCRW and KPCC.
SIDELIGHTS
Matthew DeBord, a journalist covering transportation for Business Insider, chronicles the Ford Motor Co.’s road to triumph at the 24 Hours of LeMans race in France in 2016 in Return to Glory: The Story of Ford’s Revival and Victory at the Toughest Race in the World. Ford had come through the late-2000s financial crisis better than other American automakers, thanks in part to CEO Alan Mulally’s prescience in refinancing its debt, and did not have to accept government funds to survive. In 2015 at the Detroit Auto Show, the company introduced a new GT, a version of the car that had won LeMans in the 1960s, and executives decided Ford should return to the endurance race the following year. Drawing on interviews with the car’s creators and other Ford insiders, DeBord offers insights into its development, its testing at various races leading up to LeMans, and finally, its victory there. He also provides a history of Ford’s competition at LeMans in the 1960s.
“The GT is the pinnacle of Ford’s automotive technology,” DeBord writes. “It is designed to go fast in the straight line and through the corners; crafted almost entirely from carbon fiber, the most advanced material in the carmaker’s manufacturing playbook; and powered by one of the most sophisticated engines Ford has ever built, the race-proven, turbocharged EcoBoost V-6. Styled to turn heads, on the street and on the track, it as an emblem, a new icon. Its reveal provided stirring evidence that Ford was back, and better than ever.” It created excitement even amid a rapidly changing auto industry, he continues. “For twenty-four hours in June 2016, we were going to forget all about disruptions and electric cars and self-driving vehicles and the twilight of the supercars,” he relates. “The best racing teams in the world were headed for a showdown at the toughest race in the world, and I knew I wasn’t the only one still excited by the raging machines, at an almost primordial level.”
Several critics found DeBord’s book stirring as well. “Like Ford, DeBord has triumphed,” remarked Jonathan Kellerman in the New York Times Book Review. “The author’s years as a journalist specializing in transportation at Business Insider and other publications gave him access to major players, creating a you-are-there verisimilitude. His assured technical knowledge, supercharged by the enthusiasm of an aficionado, brings home the beautiful, brutal realities of endurance racing.” A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Return to Glory will appeal to both auto aficionados and those more interested in corporate strategies, summing it up as “an upbeat, feel-good business story.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Bookwatch, June, 2005, review of Wine Country USA: Touring, Tasting and Buying at America’s Regional Wineries.
New York Times Book Review, July 9, 2017, Jonathan Kellerman, “Power Drive,” p. 18.
Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2017, review of Return to Glory: The Story of Ford’s Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World, p. 70.
ONLINE
Bookreporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (November 19, 2017), article on Return to Glory.
Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/ (July 8, 2017), excerpt from Return to Glory; (November 19, 2017), brief biography.
Grove Atlantic Website, http://www.groveatlantic.com/ (November 19, 2017), brief biography.
Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (November 19, 2017), brief biography.
Matthew DeBord Website, http://matthewdebord.com (November 19, 2017).
Matthew DeBord:
Matthew DeBord is a Business Insider senior correspondent, covering transportation. He has written for the New York Times, Slate, Washington Post, Huffington Post, CBS Interactive, and has appeared regularly on radio and television to discuss the auto industry. He is the author of The New York Book of Wine and Wine Country, USA. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Matthew DeBord
Matthew is a Business Insider senior correspondent who covers transportation. He has written for The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and CBS Interactive. He has commented on the auto industry for a variety of media outlets, including MSNBC, Radio France, KPCC, and KCRW. His book, "Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory at the Toughest Race in the World," was recently published by Atlantic Monthly Press.
Matthew DeBord
Writes on economics, infotainment, finance, and cars.
Matthew DeBord has written about cars, car culture, the automobile business, sustainable mobility, energy policy, carbon finance, and greentech for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He now write the Shifting Gears blog for BNET. From 2008-2010, he was a regular contributor to Slate's The Big Money. While there, he was nominated for a 2009 National Magazine Award for blogging.
DeBord has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, and a variety of other publications. He has appeared on Dan Rather Reports, MSNBC, NPR, China Radio, the David Magee Show, and Russian TV. When he isn't writing about cars, he writes about wine and sports, with a focus on golf, tennis, and motorsport. He has written two books on wine, both published by Rizzoli. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.
Matthew DeBord is a Business Insider senior correspondent, covering transportation. He has written for the New York Times, Slate, Washington Post, Huffington Post, CBS Interactive, and has appeared regularly on radio and television to discuss the auto industry. He is the author of The New York Book of Wine and Wine Country, USA. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
Matthew DeBord
Matthew DeBord
3rd degree connection3rd
Senior Correspondent at Business Insider
Business Insider New York University
New York, New York 500+ 500+ connections
Connect Connect with Matthew DeBord More actions
Experienced communications professional and prominently published automotive, transportation, business,
and financial journalist with extensive new media background. Successful opinion and thought leader who can translate strategy into action and leverage media resources. University-level educator.
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Experience
Business Insider
Senior Correspondent
Company NameBusiness Insider
Dates EmployedJul 2014 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs 5 mos
Media (1)This position has 1 media
Takata under pressure for air bag malfunctions | Al Jazeera America
Takata under pressure for air bag
malfunctions | Al Jazeera America
This media is a link
Solve Associates
CEO
Company NameSolve Associates
Dates EmployedAug 2007 – Present Employment Duration10 yrs 4 mos
LocationPasadena
Solve Associates is a high-velocity marketing, advertising, branding, communications and education consulting firm that emphasizes rapid turnaround problem solving for companies large and small across a range of industries. Areas of speciality include meeting facilitation, thought leadership, blogging strategy, content creation and training, and media coaching.
KCRW
Auto Correspondent
Company NameKCRW
Dates EmployedMar 2014 – Present Employment Duration3 yrs 9 mos
Contribute frequently to the daily talk and news program “Press Play,” hosted by Madeleine Brand. Discuss local and national car issues, ranging from consumer-oriented matters to business questions that affect car culture.
Media (2)This position has 2 media
Recalls, Spiders and Car Tipping
Recalls, Spiders and
Car Tipping
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Cars!
Cars!
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University of Southern California
Professor of Clinical Management Communications
Company NameUniversity of Southern California
Dates EmployedAug 2012 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs 4 mos
Teach advanced writing for business to undergraduates at the Marshall School of Business.
America Now with Andy Dean
Business Correspondent
Company NameAmerica Now with Andy Dean
Dates EmployedJan 2012 – Present Employment Duration5 yrs 11 mos
Contribute weekly commentary on business and the economy to the nationally syndicated talk radio program, hosted by Andy Dean.
Media (1)This position has 1 media
04/18/14 - Hour 1
04/18/14 - Hour 1
This media is a link
Southern California Public Radio
DeBord Report Business and Economy Blogger/ Senior Reporter
Company NameSouthern California Public Radio
Dates EmployedAug 2011 – May 2013 Employment Duration1 yr 10 mos
LocationPasadena, CA
Wrote the DeBord Report, a blog about economics and business for public radio station. Finalist for a 2013 L.A. Press Club Award. Covered the regional, state, and national economy, relating topics to a large multimedia audience. Appeared frequently on air, as a reporter and business and economics expert. Focused on extensive coverage of the finance industry in Southern California, including fixed-income funds, venture capital, hedge funds, private equity, pension funds, and investment banks. Moderated panels, both at Southern California Public Radio’s Crawford Family Forum and at various regional institutions, including the Drucker School and Art Center College of Design. Represented KPCC, SCPR, and APM in the local and national media. Continued extensive coverage of the auto industry from previous positions.
Media (7)This position has 7 media
Previous Next
Detroit Auto Show - more than cars
Detroit Auto Show -
more than cars
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DeBord Report Live: Is the IPO dead?
DeBord Report Live:
Is the IPO dead?
This media is a link
Check out the new MINIs
Check out the new
MINIs
This media is a video
The all-new Lincoln
The all-new Lincoln
This media is a video
Watch: Facebook and free labor
Watch: Facebook and
free labor
This media is a link
VW has plans for world domination
VW has plans for
world domination
This media is a video
Care to Dare: a challenge to high performance leaders
Care to Dare: a challenge to high
performance leaders
This media is a link
CBS Interactive
Shifting Gears Auto Blogger
Company NameCBS Interactive
Dates EmployedJan 2011 – Aug 2011 Employment Duration8 mos
Wrote a daily blog for CBS Interactive business site, on the automobile industry. Topics covered included all aspects of business and financial operations of domestic and international carmakers; marketing, branding, and advertising; executive management; manufacturing and technology; politics and union issues; new vehicle launches; and the future of transportation, especially electric cars and alternative forms of mobility. Also reviewed new cars and trucks and conducted interviews with auto industry executives, designers, engineers, and marketing professionals.
Media (1)This position has 1 media
Terrafugia Triumph: At Long Last, Here Come the Flying Cars
Terrafugia Triumph: At Long Last, Here
Come the Flying Cars
This media is a link
Industry Intelligence
Vice-President, Communications
Company NameIndustry Intelligence
Dates Employed2010 – 2011 Employment Duration1 yr
Served as member of executive management team for leading market information provider in the energy, packaging, real estate, and forestry sectors. Directed strategy, hiring, budgeting, marketing, and communications for interactive functions of company, including all blogging and social media outreach (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube). Attended trade shows and conferences. Represented company in the media and crafted communications strategies for key executives as well as company at large. Proposed presentations and panels for industry events. Managed high-level relationships with outside marketing and communications vendors. Facilitated business relationships between clients and investments banks, advisory firms, and forecasting organizations. Managed co-branding opportunities with major North American financial services firms and consultancies (Credit Suisse, RBC, PWC, Deutsche Bank).
Slate Magazine
Auto Writer/Shifting Gears Auto Blogger
Company NameSlate Magazine
Dates EmployedAug 2008 – Dec 2010 Employment Duration2 yrs 5 mos
Lead automotive writer and blogger for The Big Money, Slate’s business- and finance-oriented website. Wrote “Shifting Gears” blog, which was submitted for a National Magazine Award in 2010. Also wrote weekly feature articles, primarily on car business but also on technology, new media, public relations, and advertising. Covered the auto industry daily, through the bankruptcies and restructurings of General Motors and Chrysler, the rise of electric cars and advanced mobility, and the Toyota unintended acceleration recall. Created video commentary and reporting from trade shows and industry events and maintained robust Twitter and Facebook presence. Appeared on NPR, MSNBC, Dan Rather Reports (HDNet), Japanese TV, and RT Russian Television.
Media (3)This position has 3 media
Previous Next
Dan Rather Reports - Electric Cars
Dan Rather Reports -
Electric Cars
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Tesla Roadster Sport: The car of the the future is...boring?
Tesla Roadster Sport: The car of the the
future is...boring?
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DeBord on RT Talking GM-Opel-Germany
DeBord on RT Talking
GM-Opel-Germany
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Jalopnik
Senior Editor
Company NameJalopnik
Dates EmployedJan 2008 – Apr 2008 Employment Duration4 mos
Wrote for, edited, and managed staff for Gawker Media's auto and car culture blog. Reviewed vehicles.
Media (2)This position has 2 media
2008 Pontiac G8 GT
2008 Pontiac G8 GT
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2009 Subaru Forester, Part One
2009 Subaru
Forester, Part One
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Education
New York University
New York University
Degree NameMA Field Of StudyEnglish and American Literature
Dates attended or expected graduation 1989 – 1993
Clemson University
Clemson University
Degree NameBA Field Of StudyEnglish, Political Science
Dates attended or expected graduation 1985 – 1989
Activities and Societies: The Tiger student newspaper, Outdoor Club
Volunteer Experience
Garfield Heights Neighborhood Association
Board Member and Treasurer
Company NameGarfield Heights Neighborhood Association
Dates volunteeredJan 2014 – Jan 2014 Volunteer duration1 mo
Cause Politics
Serve of the Board of Directors for North Pasadena neighborhood association. Assumed Officer roles as Treasurer for 2-year term. Also serve on Media Committee.
Quoted in Sidelights: “an upbeat, feel-good business story.”
Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's
Revival and Victory in the Toughest
Race in the World
Publishers Weekly.
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p70. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World Matthew DeBord. Atlantic, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2650-4
DeBord, a senior correspondent for Business Insider, takes readers inside Ford before, during and after the 2016 Le Mans race and emerges with an upbeat, feel-good business story. After steering itself back to relevance under former Boeing exec Alan Mulally, Ford made a stunning move in early 2015. The automaker released a new version of its famed GT and announced that it would run in Le Mans. The significance of this entry was clear. The 24-hour race had turned the victorious GT40 into a legend in 1966. DeBord shows how Ford, a stalwart of the sometimes old- fashioned American auto industry, learned to embrace "One Ford," Mulally's modern culture of collaboration and culpability, while celebrating its high-octane past. Car enthusiasts will savor the insider information, including DeBord's interviews with key members of the new GT's design team, whose meetings were held in a "gloomy, grungy space" like a "garage set up for hot- rodding on a semi-pro scale." Readers from the business side will enjoy this snapshot into how an American industrial titan flourished by going back to its past as part of its future. (June)
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World."
Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 70. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS& sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971667&it=r& asid=5980001a37f8d2f208b1a03912edb8d3. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
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Wine Country USA
Library Bookwatch.
(June 2005): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2005 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Wine Country USA
Matthew Debord
Rizzoli
300 Park Avenue South, NY, NY 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com
0847826708 $35.00 1-888-330-8477
Wine buffs who enjoy reading of and touring small wineries will want to choose Wine Country USA: Touring, Tasting And Buying At America's Regional Wineries as both a fine armchair planner and destination-oriented guide. It's the only guide to narrow the focus to small, unique wineries across the nation, presenting ten 'tasting trails' to help visitors map out treks to recommended vineyards form Pennsylvania to California. Gorgeous color photos of these unusual areas abound, but it's the focus on nontraditional regions--and the tips on accommodations and local attractions--which keep Wine Country USA intriguing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wine Country USA." Library Bookwatch, June 2005. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps
/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA133317391&it=r& asid=a6412f269adaeb55bcb4c89b7bfde8e0. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133317391
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Quoted in Sidelights: “Like Ford, DeBord has triumphed,” remarked Jonathan Kellerman in the New York Times Book Review. “The author’s years as a journalist specializing in transportation at Business Insider and other publications gave him access to major players, creating a you-are-there verisimilitude. His assured technical knowledge, supercharged by the enthusiasm of an aficionado, brings home the beautiful, brutal realities of endurance racing.”
How Fast Can a Ford Car Go?
By JONATHAN KELLERMANJULY 3, 2017
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Ford’s winner at Le Mans, 2016. Credit Gerlach Delissen/Corbis, via Getty Images
RETURN TO GLORY
The Story of Ford’s Revival and Victory at the Toughest Race in the World
By Matthew DeBord
Illustrated. 226 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $26.
One day, Silicon Valley pooh-bahs may persuade the safe-space generation to completely abandon personal driving. Until that time, the car will persist as a symbol of freedom and the American automotive industry will endure as a major economic player.
A decade ago, Detroit was nearly brought to its knees without the help of socially detached app-masters. The financial crisis did a fine job of that, leading to the rescues of General Motors and Chrysler via an $80 billion jolt of taxpayer-funded defibrillation. But one Detroit giant, Ford, avoided corporate welfare thanks to the prescience of its C.E.O., a former Boeing executive named Alan Mulally. Mulally, sensing the impending meltdown, refinanced the company’s debt through private lenders. His foresight and adroit management gave Ford an edge during the years leading to recovery. By the time 2016 rolled around, it was time for a little fun, as Matthew DeBord shows in “Return to Glory,” a page-turning synthesis of business book and adventure saga. For car people like DeBord, there’s no greater kick than pushing the limits of speed and endurance.
American carmakers’ relationship with racing has, at times, been ambivalent. While luxury marques such as Duesenberg and Stutz always understood the value of proving their products at the track, during the early days fusty G.M. forbade its engineers and salespeople from having anything to do with a sport bluenoses viewed as borderline criminal.
Photo
Priggish and reactionary as Henry Ford may have been in other regards, he understood a simple truth: Demonstrate that your cars go faster than someone else’s and consumer demand will rise. Always happy to claim credit for the accomplishments of others, he even portrayed himself as a racecar driver. DeBord points out that Ford did, in fact, win a 1901 competition when the only other car putt-putting around the oval conked out before the finish.
Continue reading the main story
There was nothing priggish about Henry Ford II. Known as the Deuce, the founder’s grandson was a bon vivant with a sleek Italian wife and a sleek Italian Ferrari in his collection of fast cars. In 1963, he tried to buy Enzo Ferrari’s financially strapped Scuderia (Italian for “stable”). When that deal fell through acrimoniously, he set out to humiliate Ferrari by besting the Maestro of Maranello where he’d long dominated: a stunningly hazardous test of mechanical and human endurance played out on French country roads called the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Ford’s initial attempts to win at Le Mans failed, but from 1966 to 1969, he came in first owing to a virtuoso racing team managed by Carroll Shelby and a massively powered, bespoke creation known as the GT40. Having achieved his revenge, the Deuce ceased competing; been there, done that.
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Half a century later, a thriving Ford Motor Company decided to tackle Le Mans again, using a new, technologically advanced offspring of the GT. “Return to Glory” provides an account of that car and the people who designed, built and drove it. Like Ford, DeBord has triumphed.
The author’s years as a journalist specializing in transportation at Business Insider and other publications gave him access to major players, creating a you-are-there verisimilitude. His assured technical knowledge, supercharged by the enthusiasm of an aficionado, brings home the beautiful, brutal realities of endurance racing.
“Return to Glory” is a spirited celebration of American initiative, perseverance and creativity that tells a story no less dramatic for its happy ending.
Jonathan Kellerman is the author of four nonfiction books, two volumes for children and 44 novels. His current thriller is “Heartbreak Hotel.” His next book, “Crime Scene,” written with Jesse Kellerman, will be published Aug. 1.
A version of this review appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Power Drive. Today's Paper|Subscribe
About the Book
Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World
by Matthew DeBord
[Buy this book at IndieBound]
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In January 2015 at the Detroit Auto Show, Ford unveiled a new car and the automotive world lost its collective mind. This wasn’t some new Explorer or Focus. Onto the stage rolled a supercar, a carbon-fiber GT powered by a mid-mounted six-cylinder Ecoboost engine that churned out over 600 horsepower. It was sexy and jaw-dropping, but, more than that, it was historic, a callback to the legendary Ford GT40 Mk IIs that stuck it to Ferrari and finished 1-2-3 at Le Mans in 1966. Detroit was back, and Ford was going back to Le Mans.
Journalist Matthew DeBord has been covering the auto industry for years, and in RETURN TO GLORY he tells the recent story of Ford. A decade ago, CEO Alan Mulally took over the iconic company and, thanks to a financial gamble and his “One Ford” plan, helped it weather the financial crisis and a stock price that plunged to $1 a share, without a government bailout. It was enough for the company to dream of repeating racing history. DeBord revisits the story of the 1960s, details the creation of the new GT, and follows the team through the racing season, from an inauspicious debut at Daytona where the cars kept breaking down, to glimmers of hope at Sebring and the team’s first victory at Laguna Seca in Monterey.
Finally, DeBord joins the Ford team in Le Mans in June 2016. This fabled 24-hour endurance race is designed to break cars and drivers, and it was at Le Mans, 50 years after the company’s greatest triumph, that Ford’s comeback was put to the ultimate test.
Quoted in Sidelights: “The GT is the pinnacle of Ford’s automotive technology,” DeBord writes. “It is designed to go fast in the straight line and through the corners; crafted almost entirely from carbon fiber, the most advanced material in the carmaker’s manufacturing playbook; and powered by one of the most sophisticated engines Ford has ever built, the race-proven, turbocharged EcoBoost V-6. Styled to turn heads, on the street and on the track, it as an emblem, a new icon. Its reveal provided stirring evidence that Ford was back, and better than ever.” It created excitement even amid a rapidly changing auto industry, he continues. “For twenty-four hours in June 2016, we were going to forget all about disruptions and electric cars and self-driving vehicles and the twilight of the supercars,” he relates. “The best racing teams in the world were headed for a showdown at the toughest race in the world, and I knew I wasn’t the only one still excited by the raging machines, at an almost primordial level.”
'Do you want to see the car?': The story of the day that Tesla stunned the world
Matthew DeBord
Jul. 8, 2017, 12:04 PM 32,068
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Return To Glory Cover Grove Atlantic
In early 2016, Ford was intensely preparing to stage a history-repeating assault on the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.
With two teams and four new Ford GT race cars competing in both North America and Europe, the goal was to grab a win at the grueling endurance competition and remind the world of Ford's 1-2-3 triumph in 1966 over Ferrari — 50 years before.
But while Ford and Chip Ganassi Racing were battling it out on the track, another challenge was taking shape.
In California, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was preparing to pull the cover off his long-awaited Model 3 mass-market vehicle — a car intended to show the auto industry that Tesla was ready to take its disruption to a whole new level.
In this excerpt from Business Insider Senior Correspondent Matthew DeBord's book "Return to Glory: The Story of Ford's Revival and Victory in the Toughest Race in the World" (Atlantic Monthly Press), we get a front-row seat at the Model 3 reveal, a vehicle that began production this week — and watch as Ford and the rest of the 100-year-old car business try to respond.
And so it begins ...
On a balmy March evening in Los Angeles, just three months before the most advanced Ford race car ever built would take to the Circuit de la Sarthe in France, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk took to a stage at his electric-car start-up’s design center, just a few miles south of Hollywood and the American cinematic dream factory.
Musk was there to pull the cover off a dream that had nothing to do with movie magic. Instead, he sauntered onstage dressed entirely in black and, after some awkward jokes, made a few comments about the impending catastrophe of global warming—one of the multi-billionaire’s overriding personal preoccupations and the reason he bought into Tesla in 2004 after making $180 million when eBay acquired PayPal, the electronic payments service he had cofounded. He then proceeded to preside over the rollout of Tesla’s much-anticipated Model 3, a mass-market electric vehicle that would sell for $35,000 when it hit Tesla’s showrooms in 2017.
Tesla was already selling a pair of game-changing cars: the Model S sedan, which in its most advanced configuration, equipped with the “Ludicrous” acceleration mode, could scorch a zero-to-sixty run in less than three seconds, outrunning supercars from Ferrari and Lamborghini; and the Model X SUV, with its exotic, up-swinging “falcon wing” doors and “bioweapon defense mode” air-filtration system. But these long-range electric vehicles (EVs) sold for $100,000 and up, to a well-heeled elite, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and titans of finance.
Tesla Model 3
The Model 3 arrives. AP Photo/Justin Pritchard
That certainly created useful cash flow for Tesla (if not profits), but it didn’t suit Musk’s grand vision, which was to accelerate humanity’s transition from the era of fossil fuels—an era that had filled the atmosphere with carbon, disrupting weather patterns, and making the planet hotter. In early December 2015, Musk gave a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, in connection with the United Nations Climate Summit, in which he called governments’ reluctance to tax the generation of atmospheric carbon the “dumbest science experiment in history” and “madness.” He went on to call for a global carbon tax, as he had done several times before.
No chief executive of a traditional automaker would even consider giving a speech like the one Musk delivered, although several have raised the suggestion that car companies—as producers of a technology that alongside burning coal to generate electricity contributes much of the carbon in the atmosphere—should be part of the sweeping solution.
The multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry has found itself smack at the center of what can’t be responsibly characterized anymore as a debate. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the majority of car executives aren’t global-warming deniers, there are more than a billion vehicles on the roads worldwide, and automakers continue to build millions of new cars and trucks every year. If they stop, or attempt to radically convert to manufacturing vast fleets of Tesla-like vehicles, they’ll rapidly go bankrupt.
They are, however, not stupid. Gasoline is simply the most convenient fuel for their products currently. Almost without exception, the world’s car companies are trying to move in a Teslaesque direction, if haltingly and on a rather small scale at the moment.
Elon Musk and his vision of the future
Elon Musk
Elon Musk had done what the auto industry thought was impossible. TED
Musk bought into Tesla, eventually displacing cofounder Martin Eberhard in an unpleasant management coup, specifically to attack what he considers to be the biggest problem facing humanity. But he didn’t want to be boring. He reasoned that a sexy, fast electric car—such as the original Roadster Tesla soon produced—would shake EVs free of their “glorified golf cart” stigma and convince both buyers and investors to fund the demise of the internal-combustion engine.
Tesla began selling stock to the public in 2010, at seventeen dollars per share. A few years later, the Model S was launched; Motor Trend would name it Car of the Year in 2013. Tesla had endured numerous near-death experiences prior to the IPO, including an episode in 2008 that brought the company just weeks from bankruptcy. But once the Model S started selling, the accolades began rolling in—the luxurious EV, with its brisk acceleration, sharply minimalist looks, and huge central dashboard touchscreen, was a hit with the automotive media. The stock went, as they say on Wall Street, parabolic; in 2014, it would flirt with $300 per share, ensuring early investors a return of around 1,200 percent.
The financials would pitch and yaw wildly over the next two years, as investors tried to figure out when, if ever, the carmaker would make money and whether its innovations, including an astonishing self-driving autopilot feature, would completely disrupt an auto industry that had been selling largely gas-burning cars, and lots of them, for over a century.
But on that early evening in March, Musk was a conquering hero, a South Africa–born heir apparent to Henry Ford and the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Musk’s other company, SpaceX, was taking care of another scope of his vision, the effort to make humans a “multi-planetary” species with a colony on Mars, the planet to which Musk said he would retire.
It is easy to understand why Musk, then forty-four, was a model for Robert Downey Jr.’s character Tony Stark in the "Iron Man" movies. He did cars. He did rockets. He even did solar energy in his role as the chairman of SolarCity, a company started by his cousins. (And acquired by Tesla in 2016 for $2.1 billion.) He was the superstar entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Musk attacked huge problems head-on, like a technologist of old. And he was aware of just how quixotic his ambitions were. Starting a car company, he would say, is idiotic, and an electric-car company is idiocy squared.
An unprecedented number of preorders for the Model 3
Tesla Model 3 Reveal
The Model 3 quickly racked up almost 400,000 preorders. Matthew DeBord
What got Detroit’s attention that night wasn’t the Model 3 itself; the car had been much discussed for several years, and everyone knew what to expect in a smaller, less expensive Tesla. Rather, the star of the show was the preorder counter, displayed behind a bright red Model 3 on a huge screen on the stage.
Analysts had expected something like 150,000 Model 3s to be reserved, each with a $1,000 refundable deposit. By the time I took a photo of the counter at the event, it had crossed 174,000. In a month, 373,000 reservations would be logged, creating the potential for $13 billion to flow into Tesla’s needy coffers, assuming a relatively conservative average price of $35,000 for each sale. Who knows how many of those reservations will ultimately turn into sales? Even if only a quarter or a half of them do, it is still an impressive number and a testament to the potential demand.
"So, do you want to see the car?" Musk winkingly asked, before giving three preproduction versions of the car the stage.
A better question—and one that he would ask as the preorders surged—was, "How many of these cars can we actually build?"
The traditional auto industry is secretly obsessed with Tesla (and not-so-secretly obsessed in the first six months of 2017, when Tesla's market capitalization surged past $50 billion, topping Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — the Big Three had become the Big Four). Not since Preston Tucker, an innovator of the 1950s whose own quixotic life was chronicled in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 film "Tucker: The Man and His Dream," had anyone so thoroughly captivated the iconic world of the American automobile.
The CEOs of major auto companies tend to be either hard-charging, sharp-elbowed "car guys" or technocratic bean counters. Occasionally a major change agent such as Alan Mulally will come along, but many chief executives got to the big chair after decades of loyal service.
After Mark Fields got the CEO job at Ford in 2014, he freely admitted that the company had bought a Tesla Model S, taken it apart, and put it back together again. He later said the company would do likewise with the Model X SUV.
But even by the secretive standards of Tesla fascination, the Model 3 preorder palooza was earth-shattering. From Dearborn to Toyota City, the automakers just couldn’t believe it. The astounding number of deposits showed the intense desire to join the club that the brand represented. The only meaningful comparison to draw was with Apple. In the auto industry, you could say that Ferrari held a similar mystique, but Ferrari didn’t have the ambition to dethrone the gas-burning engine or sell half a million cars a year. Tesla did, and it was sort of appalling to mainstream auto executives.
Traditional automakers work desperately hard to capture and retain customers, spending billions to convince them to stick with certain brands and to advance through vehicle hierarchies, from inexpensive mass-market cars to pricey luxury rides. What was astonishing about Tesla’s Model 3 launch was that hundreds of thousands of buyers were happy to give Tesla an open-ended, no-interest cash loan, with no meaningful guarantee beyond Musk’s word that the cars would arrive on time.
Musk’s promises had a poor track record. Both the Model S and the Model X had suffered from production delays and early quality-control problems. In fact, Musk admitted that Tesla had been guilty of "hubris" in designing and engineering the Model X, which had many complicated features that slowed the assembly line. The doors had to be completely redesigned at the eleventh hour. The second-row seats turned out to be so complicated that Tesla would eventually take the supplier off the job and engineer this component itself.
Later, quality-control glitches would appear. The entire Model S fleet was voluntarily recalled in December 2015 because a seat-belt assembly could fail. The initial production run of the Model X, several thousand vehicles, would also be recalled because the third-row seats could pitch forward in a crash.
Much earlier, there had been battery fires with the Model S, and Tesla had been compelled to design a shielding system for the bottom of the car to prevent punctures of the battery pack. Tesla’s advanced electronics and software, while game changing in many respects, were buggy in the way that Silicon Valley code typically is (the ritual is to release the software and fix it later). In an annual dependability survey by J. D. Power and Associates conducted in 2016, Tesla owners reported so many problems that Tesla finished in the bottom five, undercutting the narrative that its vehicles were redefining the ownership experience with rapid software updates.
Even though Musk admitted that the Model X SUV was so advanced that Tesla “probably shouldn’t have built it,” his boundless gumption still captivated the industry.
Musk calls his own shots
elon musk
Musk at the launch of the Model Z SUV. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
In the traditional auto industry, Musk had only one prominent naysayer, former GM product guru Bob Lutz, who had worked for BMW and for Chrysler under Lee Iacocca before coming to GM and straddling the pre- and post-bankruptcy companies. I talked to Lutz about Tesla on several occasions between 2014 and 2016—once at the Detroit auto show in January 2016, when he was preparing to reveal a new American-made supercar venture with onetime Tesla competitor Henrik Fisker—and he was always unflinchingly equal in his praise for Tesla’s cars and his disdain for Musk’s management of the company.
Lutz’s attitudes toward global warming were controversial. While not exactly a climate-science denier, he was skeptical that taking internal-combustion engines off the road and replacing them with more expensive and less versatile electric cars was a solution. But that wasn’t what shaped his negative views of Tesla— he actually didn’t think that Tesla was doing a very good job of running its business. In a sense, he and Musk were on the same page: the cars were simply too difficult to build.
But with Ford’s and GM’s stock prices languishing, even as both carmakers notched steady and impressive profits through 2014 and 2015, executives grumbled about how easy it was for Musk to sell additional Tesla stock, which the carmaker did in both 2015 and 2016, raising almost $2 billion in the process. And even though Detroit had been sweepingly reinvented by the financial crisis, the familiar infighting and territorialism that have always defined the auto industry hadn’t disappeared.
In the 1980s, Detroit had endured the Japanese arrival in force in the U.S. market. The Big Three had been forced to adapt, to become more efficient, and to see their companies as large manufacturing and management teams, “flat structure” organizations, where the lowliest assembly-line worker had the power to stop production if he spotted a problem.
Sure, Toyota and Honda continued to be extremely hierarchical, in the Japanese business tradition. But when it came to actually building cars, the “relentless pursuit of perfection,” to borrow a famous tagline from Toyota’s Lexus luxury brand, was a mandate that Detroit had to accept. Unsurprisingly, customers preferred cars that always started, didn’t rust out in a matter of years, and could be passed down from generation to generation, Dad’s Honda Accord becoming Junior’s college car.
Musk was a different animal—a leader who called, seemingly, all his own shots. He was initially ridiculed when he appointed himself as Tesla’s product architect, while at the same time having an experienced designer, Franz von Holzhausen, from Mazda, for the real aesthetic work, and JB Straubel overseeing how the cars were engineered at the nuts-and-bolts level. But then the Model S arrived, and with it dropped jaws and widespread media accolades.
Musk didn’t have to fight through a bureaucracy—he was the bureaucracy, and at Tesla, bureaucracy was the enemy. So if Musk wanted to ignore structure, he just did. He had a hardworking communications team, but if he had something to say, he took to Twitter, often at odd hours and on weekends, sending reporters scrambling. He had hardworking engineers, but if he wanted to make a change to a Tesla vehicle, he made it.
In Tesla’s required financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company never failed to cite the so-called “great man” risk: without Musk, Tesla would be in big trouble. The CEOs of big car companies think they have power, and they do. But Musk had power of a different order, as well as lots of stress.
Ford's fights to keep up
Mark Fields
A sagging stock price and Silicon Valley's disruption would cost Ford CEO Mark Fields his job in 2017. Ford
By the time Ford was turning practice laps at Le Mans in early June 2016, Musk was running a company that was a decade old. And he was under as much pressure to innovate as everyone else in the industry. Ironically, Ford was probably better prepared to manage the transformation in mobility that Tesla was helping to usher in.
In the face of a massive disruption to the accepted way of doing business, scale can be an invaluable asset. At base, Musk’s company was all about demonstrating that there was a paying buyership for its type of vehicle, reversing the thinking that had followed the demise of GM’s EV1 project from the 1990s, which had brought the first mass-produced electric car to market, but only in a limited way, via leasing.
When GM decided to conclude the program and crush all the EV1s, save a few historical examples, it was widely assumed that electric cars were once again going to be at best a sideline of the auto industry. (GM’s decision inspired the film "Who Killed the Electric Car?" which alleged that the carmaker had acted more to preserve itself from an electric revolution than to dispense with a money-losing experiment.)
Ford’s angle on transportation in the twenty-first century was the preoccupation of Bill Ford, who, once Alan Mulally took over as CEO, could concentrate on delivering a deeply counterintuitive message: that the company we credit with creating the mass-market automobile wanted to curtail its dependence on four wheels and an engine in the future.
The idea was really quite logical. Ford would become a mobility provider. If you needed to own a car, Ford would build one, and Ford dealers would sell it to you—and Ford would lend you the money to buy it. But if you didn’t want to own a car, Ford would provide you with transportation. And if you wanted any aspect of your mobility experience to be more pleasant or efficient, Ford would create—or partner with other companies to create—the information corridors to make that happen.
Ford began to tackle this process in earnest around 2010, and Fields made it a prominent part of his leadership pitch once he became CEO. It was a good fit. Fields had always been a forward-looking leader. (But not forward-looking enough; he would be ousted by Ford's board of directors in May of 2017, as the carmaker's stock price lagged. His replacement, former Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett, was a close confidant of Bill Ford and would undertake the major change in Ford's story.)
Scale can be a strength when a company is being actively disrupted, but the classic theory on the subject—articulated by Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen in his seminal book "The Innovator’s Dilemma"—says that size can protect for only so long. And that’s because new entrants can innovate much more rapidly than incumbents, even if the established business is itself actively trying to innovate.
The core problem—an advantage, actually, for smaller, newer companies—is that the very things that insulate the established player prevent it from moving fast enough. The critical sticking point is failure. Big companies can afford to fail, but they can’t undertake the failure process rapidly enough. And unless their businesses don’t require much cash for research and development, as is the case with software-driven internet firms, they can’t afford to invest in hundreds of over-the-horizon efforts.
For one thing, there’s a disincentive for companies that already have scale to do small stuff; it’s more cost-effective for them to simply buy up smaller companies. And for another, they can be undermined by competitive threats that are enabled by the newest technologies.
Silicon Valley wants to eat Detroit's lunch
Travis Kalanick
Uber was just as terrifying to Detroit at Tesla. CEO Travis Kalanick created a company valued at over $60 billion. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
It’s this second threat that was generating the biggest risks for Ford and its rivals in 2016.
The ride-sharing service Uber, founded in 2009, came on the scene with a brash, sharp-elbowed CEO named Travis Kalanick aiming to eliminate the taxi business in big cities.
By the time the Ford GT race cars were getting their first taste of the Circuit de la Sarthe, Uber was valued at a staggering $65 billion and had just taken a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, as the oil-rich nation sought to diversify beyond the natural resource that had transformed it into one of the world’s most influential and richest countries. (Tesla staged an impressive debit of self-driving technology in Pittsburgh in 2016, but in 2017, the company slid into crisis as workplace-culture issues dogged the startup and Kalanick was caught on video arguing with an Uber driver; the CEO later apologized, admitting that he need help overcoming the drawbacks his harsh style.)
Tesla shook up the traditional carmakers. But they could still figure out what Tesla was: an automaker with some high-tech credibility and electric motors, plus a charismatic leader. Uber was much harder to figure out. Pundits began to argue that with Uber, nobody—except for Uber drivers—would ever need to own a car again. And as self-driving cars accelerated their development, the drivers started to drop out of the picture. The future would consist of autonomous vehicles, owned as large fleets, appearing and disappearing as needed, dispatched by software.
Design, horsepower, speed, the automobile as an icon of freedom— that would all be relegated to the misty past, like stagecoaches and Conestoga wagons. All that would matter is that your pod-mobile appeared when summoned and that it moved you from point A to point B.
Tesla Detroit sales vs market cap
Tesla challenged the stock prices of its Detroit rivals. Andy Kiersz/Business Insider
Automakers were far from sure that this—for them—dystopian future would come to pass, but they were determined to avoid a slide into irrelevance. GM began to move very aggressively in 2015 and 2016, investing $500 million in Uber’s competitor Lyft, buying up the assets of a mobility start-up called Sidecar, which had gone bankrupt, and most dramatically, buying an obscure self-driving outfit, Cruise Automation, for nearly $1 billion. By the end of 2016, Cruise’s self-driving technology would come to market under the GM banner, as the automaker began selling its Bolt EV, beating Tesla’s Model 3 by at least a year.
But Ford wasn’t hanging back. It created a small fleet of self-driving cars to perfect the technology, which by 2016 was mainly capable of letting drivers take their hands off the steering wheel for freeway driving, as long as they continued to monitor their vehicles. It was widely expected, however, that over the next decade, higher levels of autonomy would be rolled out, leading ultimately to the end of drivers behind the wheel.
The traditional auto industry is, in fact, pretty good at assessing risks. And the broadly held notion that it just wants to stick to the same old, same old, year after year, is simply false. The industry is far too competitive for anyone to avoid innovation; the carmakers that struggle to sell cars are the ones that are forced to starve their research-and-development budgets for too long.
The internal-combustion engine, introduced in the nineteenth century, had been perfected by the early twenty-first, through a process of continuous innovation undertaken by the global auto industry (the gazillion patents related to the internal-combustion engine were one of the reasons that critics often accused the industry of stalling on change).
In fact, a few start-ups in the early 2000s and 2010s were even trying to push the internal-combustion engine to breakthrough levels. A company called Transonic Combustion, which failed because it couldn’t make its technology adequately reliable, developed a fuel-injection system that upgraded gas-burning efficiency to unheard-of levels, with engines delivering 100 miles per gallon.
By early 2016, Ford felt awfully good about where it stood, in terms of preserving itself and embracing the future. The company even had an in-house futurist on staff, and had since before the financial crisis, to spot important trends before they became existential threats—or massive missed opportunities.
But as someone who had covered the company for a decade, and who had a front-row seat for everything happening in Silicon Valley thanks to my job at Business Insider, a website that obsessively monitors, analyzes, and reports on technology, I could tell that the pace of change and the multiplication of risk were picking up speed.
Ford had the right overarching idea, as expressed by Bill Ford. It had the right messages, as expressed by Mark Fields (and later, by Jim Hackett). And it had the right people: designers, engineers, and managers who were technologists at heart. Ford even set up shop in Silicon Valley, to be closer to the action.
But this was a global enterprise that employed tens of thousands—and that had to keep its core business cranking. That meant building a million F-150 pickup trucks every year, no small task. Even if 100 percent of the company knew that enormous disruptions were afoot, at best only 10 to 20 percent of the company could focus on Ford disrupting itself.
Detroit tries to disrupt itself
Chevrolet Bolt 6
GM beat the Model 3 to market by a full year with the all-electric Chevy Bolt. Hollis Johnson
The scrappy companies that were undertaking the disruption, of course, could go all out on the effort. For them, there was no point in striving to survive—the only acceptable outcome was to make it big, to hit the jackpot, or to vanish completely.
In late 2015, I went to Detroit to interview GM CEO Mary Barra. The first woman to lead a major automaker, Barra said all the right things about how the 100-plus-year-old carmaker, and by association the industry that it was part of, would ride out all the new threats.
At GM headquarters in the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, sitting in Barra’s large and gracefully appointed but far from ostentatious office, I listened as she accepted the deluge of risk that was sweeping through the industry. Barra had spent her entire life at GM—her father had worked there, and GM was the only place she had ever worked.
"I can’t tell you what technology is going to exist in five years," she said. "All I can tell you is that if we sit here five years from today, it will be something that’s dramatically impacted the industry that we can’t even name right now."
I thought I was being lightly irreverent when I said to Barra that I hoped we could make a date to talk again then. But although she was amused, she wasn’t prepared to make light of what she was up against.
"We’re going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves," she said, her voice unwavering after a nearly hourlong interview. "So we’re not trying to preserve a model of yesterday."
Ford’s Mark Fields unhesitatingly echoed Barra’s message. He came to Business Insider in March 2016, right before the New York auto show, and in an interview came right out with it. "There’s a lot of talk around technology companies disrupting the auto industry," he said. "Our approach is very simple: we’re disrupting ourselves." Before the year had ended, he would pledge Ford to get a fully self-driving car on the road by 2021.
To have the CEOs of the two largest U.S. automakers saying exactly the same thing within months of each other might sound like groupthink, but it isn’t. The auto industry has been unique not just in declaring a self-disruption and getting out ahead of the curve rhetorically, but in enacting that disruption as enthusiastically as possible, embedding a positive attitude toward new technology in everything it does.
For example, when Fields presided over the reveal of the new GT in early 2015, he stressed how advanced the supercar was—and that it was technology joined to emotion and history. Disruptive technologies made the new GT possible.
Don't forget the allure of an amazing car
Ford GT Drive
The Ford GT was the pinnacle of the carmaker's technology. Ford
And for what it’s worth, the GT is the pinnacle of Ford’s automotive technology. It is designed to go fast in the straight line and through the corners; crafted almost entirely from carbon fiber, the most advanced material in the carmaker’s manufacturing playbook; and powered by one of the most sophisticated engines Ford has ever built, the race-proven, turbocharged EcoBoost V-6. Styled to turn heads, on the street and on the track, it as an emblem, a new icon. Its reveal provided stirring evidence that Ford was back, and better than ever.
But it was also the culmination of a century of one type of thinking about cars. The GT was glorious. But all around it, the idea of a person in a machine going fast—the idea that was the animating spirit of the multi-trillion-dollar global auto industry—was being discarded.
In August 2016, Fields announced that Ford would have a small fleet of fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2021, leapfrogging the more incremental approach to self-driving technology that Tesla and others were embracing. Both the established automakers and the newest of the new entrants anticipated that the driver would exit the stage in the future; at around the same time that Fields made his announcement, Uber rolled out its own driverless test fleet in Pittsburgh.
At one point, a year before the GT hit the floor at the 2015 Detroit auto show, I went on a drive with a company that offered seat time in some of the world’s most exotic and exciting cars. I sampled a Lamborghini, a Porsche, a Ferrari, a Maserati, an Aston Martin, and a Mercedes. My partner for the event was a former Ferrari owner, a young guy who knew and loved high-performance cars. We stopped several times during the day to switch vehicles. At around noon, the gorgeous machines were all lined up in the parking lot of a grocery store in the New Jersey suburbs. My partner had made money when a tech company he was part of was sold. He understood how fast things could change in the new century.
"Look," he said, gesturing toward the supercars, a few million bucks in the best the auto industry had to offer. "We aren’t going to see that for much longer."
Was he right? I wasn’t sure, even though I knew he was without question onto something. Everyone who built and sold cars for a living was trying to figure out what that something would mean. But for twenty-four hours in June 2016, we were going to forget all about disruptions and electric cars and self-driving vehicles and the twilight of the supercars. The best racing teams in the world were headed for a showdown at the toughest race in the world, and I knew I wasn’t the only one still excited by the raging machines, at an almost primordial level.
Read more about "Return to Glory" at matthewdebord.com.