Synchromesh-ity


Update: Videos below have gone missing. Too bad.
   
 It was Carl Jung, I believe, or maybe Carroll Shelby, who observed: "Coincidence? Ain't no such thing."
    Which suggests some other meaning for my encounters with Cadillac Eldorado Broughams.
    Item: I read Carlo Gébler's account of his search in Cuba for a 1957 or 1958 Brougham, a rare, ultra-luxury model of which I was previously unaware.
    Item: My brother and I spot a 1958 Brougham outside a classic car dealership in Sarasota, Florida (and yes, hanging around a classic car dealership does indeed increase your odds of seeing a classic car, but remember, they made only 704 of these things).
   Item: Flipping through the TV channels, I'm stopped by the sight of a black, late-'50s Cadillac executing high-speed doughnuts on the Bonneville Salt Flats to a soundtrack of barking exhaust and Pérez Prado's Mambo No. 5. Squared-off fins, stainless trim, doors that meet in the centre -- Hey, that's a Brougham!
    The commercial is one of those "Bridgestone or nothing" spots, and it has a sweet punchline.


   Here's a "making of" video that tells us the actual driver (sorry to spoil the magic) is New Zealander and drifting champ Rhys Millen, and that the car was prepared at the Picture Car Warehouse, a Northridge, California, vehicle supplier to the television and movie industry.

 

    But why a Brougham, which, assuming the subject car still had its original air suspension, would have been more difficult to set up for such shenanigans than any other '58 Cadillac?
   Well, why not? Picture Car Warehouse was up to the job. It knows Cadillacs. It provided the 1962 Coupe de Ville that Don Draper drives in Mad Men. It even works out of a former Cadillac dealership.
    There's that Caddy continuum again. I'm not sure what it means. I'm not sure I'm meant to be sure. Or as Jung was told by his teacher, Sigmund "Fleetwood" Freud, before their falling-out:
    "Cadillac -- don't talk back."

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