Automobile

Mechanical passion doesn’t die. It goes quiet

A phone maker just beat Audi and Porsche at the Nürburgring with the YU7 GT, and its electric motor already speaks our language: torque, efficiency, rpm, internal components. Mechanical fascination isn’t dying, it’s just changing addresses, and the very name of the unit, “V8S EVO,” gives away that the mystique of the combustion engine is still the most powerful selling point of all. But let’s distrust formulas that are too neat: this is neither an eternal recurrence nor a clean substitution. It’s a molt. The machinery persists and even hardens, the geek joins the mechanic rather than replacing him, and the sensual side reinvents itself in the whine of a rotor at 28,000 rpm. One question remains: will we know how to pass the old thrill on to those who will only ever have known the new?

The Asphalt Symphony

There are passions that don’t merely occupy the mind: they colonize it. Mine has a name (the automobile) and a scent: burned fuel mingled with hot rubber. I wanted to capture what really happens when a man, a machine, and a road cease to be three separate things. A tribute to the internal combustion engine, to the precise gesture, and to the brief communion that no algorithm will ever be able to delegate. And, in the final line, a confession I couldn’t keep to myself.