Motor-noter hardly wrote 'er

The best automotive writers combine adrenaline and grace; they can transport you to the Brickyard or the Nürburgring or wherever, and make you feel you're behind the wheel, or at least right next to behind the wheel.

There are few newspaper slots for the best automotive writers, though, which means that there's room for syndicators. The Oklahoman buys a package from Wheelbase Communications, mostly written by Malcolm Gunn. Generally, Gunn's historical stories come off better than his new-car reviews, generally because there's no sense of immediacy — the star on a Gullwing Mercedes is in no danger of tarnish — and therefore no compulsion to come up with ghastly sentences like this:

Now "ground-breaking content" suggests there's a backhoe blog out there somewhere. Weirder is the description of Cadillac's revival: did the CTS pull this off "singlehandedly," or did it merely help? You can't have it both ways.

Verbiage such as this doesn't transport me to the Brickyard or the Nürburgring; it doesn't even transport me to the Cadillac dealership (which, conveniently, is next door to the Infiniti store).