There’s a population within car enthusiasm that have given up entirely on being enthusiastic about cars above their price range. “Oh, another million-dollar hyper-car track toy? Wake me up when the wealth circle-jerk is over.”
And I get it. It hurts deeply to understand there are realms within the car enthusiasm world that are completely closed off to you. A Porsche 911 with a motorsport engine and a manual gearbox is less than a hope for me to afford. Why would I then torture myself watching videos of the latest RS product to roll out of the Zuffenhausen factory? There are people out there dropping house price money on 25-year old R34 Nissan Skyline GT-Rs! Unfathomable.
Kids can post super car posters on their walls because at least the potential to afford them still exists. Those of us entrenched in adulthood? That dream is gone forever. I can see why a subset would succumb to degeneration and gamble in the latest flavor of prediction markets or options trading. It’s their only shot at the cake that everyone else seems to be having on social media. Very toxic.
I try to maintain enthusiasm for even the cars I can’t begin to afford. Because the upper tier of automotive engineering is where the (expensive) magic is. Take for example the Ferrari 12Cilindri Manuale: Maranello has solved the demand for new manual transmission F cars by effectively attaching a joystick gear lever and clutch pedal onto the existing dual-clutch automatic transmission. A real video game driving simulator for the road.
By all accounts, Ferrari has pulled off the convincing facsimile. And if this is how the manual transmission lives on in enthusiast cars - we’re all expecting what Ferrari has done to be copied and trickle downwards - as the EV and emissions cliff looms menacingly, then I reckon it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. Just last year, Volkswagen took away the true manual gearbox from the Golf GTI; it can easily do what Ferrari has done and fit a lever and pedal to the existing DSG automatic gearbox. There, that’s your manual GTI.
In the meantime, I shall be extremely happy with the (true) stick-shift in my Mazda Miata. Granted it’s not attached to a symphonic V12 that revs to 9500 RPM of the 12Cilindri, but the MX-5 costs a whole lot less than the total price of a house.
Cast it into the fire.