Announcement! New Facility - Taking Reservations

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Following the success of Naples Motor Condos on Livingston Road and after an extensive search for the perfect new location, Naples Motor Condos is proud to announce its newest facility on Naples Boulevard. The new location will have many additional features. Every unit now includes mezzanines, windows, restrooms and private patios. The 72’ deep units allow for storage of many vehicles. The gated facility will have security cameras and will be surrounded by an 8’ privacy wall.


Taking reservations for a limited number of untis. For additional information visit Naples Boulevard or call 239-591-4700.

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Daily Sighting #26

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33 Dodge Brothers DP Sedan

For Our Ford and Ferrari Owners

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‘Ford v Ferrari’ Review: Hurtling Down the Glory Road

- Wall Street Journal

For all its thunderous exhaust notes—movies about car racing sound like operas scored entirely for bassos—“Ford v Ferrari” has significant things to say on worthy subjects: art v commerce, the cowboy ethic v corporate caution, and friendship v everything else, since that’s the powertrain driving the plot. At the same time, the film serves as a reminder that art and commerce aren’t always in conflict. It’s a new and emotionally complex model of an old-fashioned audience-pleaser, with wonderful performances by Christian Bale and Matt Damon and a resonant soul to go with its smarts.

The director was James Mangold (“Logan,” “Walk the Line”), working from a screenplay by Jez Butterworth (the playwright who wrote “The Ferryman”), his brother John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller. The story, grounded in fact although raising its real-life characters to the level of gleeful archetypes, grows out of a battle of corporate titans in the 1960s.

Henry Ford II, a titan by birth—he’s played with a pungent blend of arrogance and obtuseness by Tracy Letts —reluctantly decides to update his company’s stodgy image by getting into international auto racing. To fast-track Ford’s competitiveness on fast tracks he tries to acquire the European car company headed by Enzo Ferrari ( Remo Girone ), a titan not by virtue of mass production but consummate craftsmanship that constitutes art and, more important to Ford, wins races. (One man assembles an engine by himself, Ferrari says proudly.) When that proposition goes humiliatingly bad, Ford adds revenge to his wish list of speed and prestige and calls on the legendary American auto designer and driver Carroll Shelby (Mr. Damon) to build a Ford-badged racing car that can beat Ferrari at the most punishing race in motorsports, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Matt Damon PHOTO: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Matt Damon PHOTO: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Shelby is a rich character from an expansive period of American history, a time when no one could have imagined that, half a century later, the Ford Motor Company would be phasing out production of most passenger cars and automobiles would be driving themselves. A charmingly self-assured Texan played by a star notable for unforced confidence, Shelby has a cowboy’s swagger, but he’s shrewd enough to prevail at the corporate game, even though he’s beset by conniving suits. ( Lee Iacocca, the mastermind behind the Mustang, doesn’t come off terribly well; he wants to be a rebel but remains a company man.) What Shelby can’t do any longer, as a consequence of a heart condition, is race, so his designated driver for the new car he’s building is Ken Miles (Mr. Bale), the lead test driver on his design team and a British racing star in his own right.

In the eyes of those Ford suits, Miles is a beatnik, and thus unsuited to sit behind the wheel of what the company hopes will be the fastest car in the world. The term is too glib to do the man justice. Miles is an explosively kinetic eccentric, a poet of internal combustion, played by a brilliant shapeshifter who, after bulking up to 240 pounds for his previous role as Dick Cheney in “Vice,” is back down to sinews and short-fuse energy in this role. Is that a healthy thing for Mr. Bale to have done? Surely not, especially since he’s transformed his body so many times before. But he and Mr. Damon, in their different ways, portray a friendship that lies at the production’s core. Shelby and Miles need each other, trust each other, fight with each other, and love each other with steadfast devotion. ( Ray McKinnon turns a small role into an affecting one as Phil Remington, the Shelby team’s chief engineer.)

Christian Bale (center) PHOTO: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Christian Bale (center) PHOTO: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

“Ford v Ferrari” is a grand spectacle. Cinematography has come a long way since the days of such distinguished predecessors as John Frankenheimer’s 1966 “Grand Prix,” with its multiple images and split screens, and the 1971 “Le Mans,” with Steve McQueen, sensational racing footage and next to no story. This film, shot superbly by Phedon Papamichael and propelled by a sound track that includes the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” will bring joy to action fans with one pounding sequence after another—the best of them shot at night in the rain—and the climactic race at Le Mans that is faithful to history, even though the facts impose something of an anticlimax.

The script has its witty way with the pomposities of corporate life, but it also notes the role played by American industrial might in preserving freedom around the world. “You think Roosevelt beat Hitler?” Ford asks as he shows Shelby his company’s factory where thousands of bombers were built during World War II: His grandiosity is exquisite, but his pride is not misplaced. In the film’s broadest and funniest scene, Shelby takes Ford for a spin around the track to give him a sense of what racing is like, and why Miles must be the one to drive at Le Mans. Action movies are routinely called thrill rides by providers of advance quotes. This one is the real thing and then some. It’s thrilling and stirring in equal measure.