Okay, Fine, I Give Up. I Can’t Find A Car Tie-In To The CEO And HR Person Getting Caught Cheating On The Jumbotron At That Coldplay Concert

As I’m sure you’re well aware, the world has been strangely fascinated by an incident where the CEO of some company that does some data somethings was caught on the “Kiss Cam” at a Coldplay concert with an HR person from that same company, entwined in an embrace that appears to have been, um, illicit. They were cheating, it seems, and the lurid fascination of it all and the sort of alarming realization of how public our private lives can become have really captured global attention. But you know what the real tragedy is here? There were no cars involved.

Look, human relationships are complicated and often messy things, and I’m not in any position to cast judgment on anyone for that, or for going to a Coldplay concert or the existence and concept of the Kiss Cam itself or anything. But what I am in a position to comment on is the absolutely miserable lack of regard gearheads and car lovers and, yes, automotive journalists, get in situations like these.

As far as I can tell, there were zero efforts made to attempt to incorporate any sort of cool or interesting car into this scandalous tale. And that is very likely the real crime here.

By the way, if you’re somehow fortunate enough to not know what I’m talking about, allow me to destroy your bliss:

I mean, really, would it have killed them to have run out of the stadium in a fit of panic and embarrassment which quickly bled over into a sort of erotic acting-out where they could have, say, climbed into a nicely-restored Renault Floride and maniacally dry-humped one another until they knocked the hardtop right off the car?

Would that have been so hard? If they had even this most basic level of courtesy to car-lovers, then we in the automotive press could have covered the story as well, and shared in the delightful shadenfreude bounty everyone else was enjoying!

It’s maddening. These people, so caught up in their own inane affairs and Coldplay concerts can’t even take a moment to find, purchase, and drive an interesting car in which they can continue to do their questionable actions.

There’s so many options, too! Either of them could have had, say, a well-maintained classic Porsche 911 or a lovingly-maintained mid-century Lincoln Continental or even a rough but cherished old International Scout – none of those are that hard to find, and if you’re the CEO of an important company and are considering having an affair in public at a concert with a Jumbotron, I’d argue it’s your responsibility to at least have an interesting car for automotive journalists to write about when you make a huge public mistake.

It’s just insulting, this lack of an interesting car angle to this story.

I don’t think it’s going too far to say that we, the car-loving community, are the real victims here. Sure, there’s the families of the people involved and I guess the company, whatever the hell they do, I guess they have some claims to victimhood, but nothing that even comes close to the pain of the Greater Automotive Community as we are denied yet another opportunity to have an interesting car put into the spotlight for the world to see.

What if this CEO and that HR lady had secretly bought one another matching Lancia Aurelias? The first production car with a V6 engine? Now that would have enhanced this story immeasurably. If we had some video of them leaving the stadium in a pair of, say, 1955 Lancia Aurelia B20 GTs. Perhaps one a gleaming red, one a powder blue. Think how much more edifying this sordid mess would be.

Instead of getting bludgeoned with headlines about the affair or Kiss Cams or the willing surveillance state we’ve imprisoned ourselves in, we’d have headlines like Here’s All You Need To Know About The Amazing Lancias Astronomer CEO And HR Lady Drove Off In or Why The First V6 Engine Makes The Ideal Powerplant For Trying To Avoid Ending Up On Jumbotrons or even just welcome digressions into Pinin Farina’s incredible styling choices.

The point is, I’m sick of there being huge viral news stories that just have no car angle whatsoever. It’s blatant and deliberate discrimination, and it needs to stop, today. So, this is my message to every celebrity or business tycoon or scientist or author or noted personality of any type: get yourself an interesting car now, before you do something stupid on a Jumbotron or use some awful racial slur or expose yourself in public. Have the decency to roll up to your social undoing in something worth writing about.

And yes, I practice what I preach. Someday, when I’m caught on a security camera attempting to sensually violate a jelly doughnut in St.Peter’s Basilica or whatever, you can be damn sure that I’ll have rolled up there in something that my fellow car journalists can really get into. That’s my promise to you.

I mean it.