[eschaider]

People talk about Black Swan events that presumably no one could have predicted and the catastrophic effect they can have on in-place operating processes. There are also tipping point analogs that are equally important to pay attention to.

I think the original forum Black Swan event was the advent of social media forums. They provided an essentially unregulated platform for all types and kinds of uninformed keyboard commandos to have their 15 minutes (or less) of fame — an event and experience that was much harder to duplicate on a moderated website.

That said, there were also multiple tipping points that defied recovery and presaged disastrous endings. Some of those would be the transition from car builders to car integrators, where you buy a rolling or other semi-finished chassis and complete the job (this was me). There are not too many FasterPatricks who do or are capable of doing a ground-up build from literally nothing. That not-so-subtle change in membership changes the fortunes of the site.

The next transition was the appearance of the owners, who thought the cars were some sort of an investment and began the fruitless how much I paid vs. how much I made at sale banter. The increasingly older and harder-to-find enthusiast who built their cars for what they were, not how much they could be sold for, has all but disappeared from the forums.

Although I appreciate my car for what it is and what it represents as a special data point on the automotive performance timeline, I was a buyer of a chassis and a builder of a not-period correct powertrain for essentially a toy I had wanted for more than 40 years. I am definitely not a FasterPatrick.

Further aggravating all of this is the continuing use of extraordinarily outdated forum software. Software that speaks volumes about the owner’s ability and interest to maintain the site. Many of the advertisers, like many of the original builders, have been lost in the ether over the years.

Like the tipping point analog, once you become sufficiently over-extended, there is no recovery. I fear that, that is true of Club Cobra. We should enjoy it (to the extent we can) before it finally augers into the ground. It does not appear to have a recovery path available to it.