Good afternoon, friends. Before we begin, I want to take a moment to honor three recent losses. The first is our own Kurtis Guy, whom we lost last month. He was a Radical SR3 owner, SCCA Enterprises rep, and someone whose occasional correspondence was always distinguished by both clarity and decency. The next is the famous Robert X. Cringeley, long time InfoWorld correspondent. I never failed to read his work back in the day, a habit I unwisely abandoned; even at the end he was the smartest pundit in the room.

Last and least, ladies and gentlemen, let’s pour one out for the Corvette electric SUV. By all recent reports, the moronic idea of “extending the Corvette brand” has been put to rest. The most that can be said about it is that the concept of an Equinox EV badged as a ‘Vette perfectly encapsulated who Mark Reuss and Mary Barra truly are. If you’re in the mood to read a totally real interview with the brains behind the abomination, it’s right here!

Alright, strap up and remember our rules…

From the river to the sea, America shall be voting “D”

In 1994, American voters showed their displeasure with everything from the Brady Bill to Janet Reno’s gleeful murder-via-tank of innocent children by flipping 10 Senate seats and 54 House seats red. It broke a forty-year-long Democratic majority in the House, and presaged the “forever now” of popular Democratic or “RINO” Presidents squabbling with solidly red legislative bodies and blood-red State leadership.

Last night, the tide turned in a big way. The numbers don’t quite measure up to 1994, but they are staggering. Seven Senate seats flipped so far, and more than 35 House seats flipped. The result: a deep and solid blue Capitol, backed by state leadership that went overwhelmingly Democrat.

For some of you, this is refreshing news. For others, it feels like the beginning of the end for the country you know and love. Regardless of your individual stance on the matter, however, I think it can hardly be denied that this election served as a sharp rebuke to President Trump and his hangers-on. Two years ago, he swept to an undeniable victory with what seemed like a simple and powerful mandate: close the borders, bring the jobs back, stop the foreign adventurism. He made major steps to accomplish the first two goals, but his decision to attack Iran will end up defining his Presidential legacy as a losing one. It makes the Kennedy/Johnson decision to pick up France’s slack in Vietnam look like genius-level statesmanship, it wipes the stain off Biden’s capitulation to the Taliban. And while I think our toppling of Iraq was both unnecessary and a bit evil, at least GWB won that war.

It’s now obvious that the United States will need to surrender to Iran, a country that doesn’t appear to have a single data center, hypersonic weapon, or female military officer but does happen to have effective local control over the petroleum-heroin to which the whole world is addicted. The only other option is to treat this as the “total war” promised by the Iranians, which means irradiating one or more of their cities then mobilizing two million American troops to loot and shoot their way across the Middle East until the country has been effectively occupied. Not an easy task, by the way:

You just know FDR would have done it, of course. If I ran the show, I’d solve all of our problems at once by announcing an American Foreign Legion to be manned by the twenty or so million military-age men who have arrived here over the past fifteen years. Let a quarter of them walk across Iran and pacify it sans all the expensive and irreplacable stuff like the F-35. Two-thirds of them will die in the process, but you gotta break a few eggs. Service guarantees citizenship. Staying home guarantees deportation.

Back in the realm of reality, however, there is no way we can have a ground war in Iran. So we will have to back out of our aggression, and pay untold amounts of compensation to boot. It will be our own Versailles Treaty, except instead of cashing out the arrogant French we will be promoting the IRGC to superpower status with taxpayer dollars. The IRGC, in turn, will use their newfound power to scour Israel down to the last grain of sand, and we will be absolutely helpless to stop it.

Well, that’s something the Israelis should have considered before they forced Trump’s hand here. I imagine Netanyahu saying something in the near future like “Evacuate? At our moment of triumph?” Similarly, all the American Jews who worked day and night to ensure the whole importation of Muslims will eventually come to regret those diligent efforts, and sooner rather than later. Of course that charming El-Sayed fellow, owner of a Grand Seiko Spring Drive GMT Chronograph, isn’t gonna kill any Jews, any more than Paul von Hinderburg was gonna kill any Jews. He and his fellow-travelers are just the conduit through which the power shift will flow.

All of this would have been easily avoided had we simply not attacked Iran. Did they have nuclear weapons? Doesn’t look like it. But let’s say they did have a nuclear weapon. What were they gonna do with it? Blow up New York? How were they gonna do it? Fly it over on a double-size DJI drone? How was this America’s problem?

Newsflash: they’re gonna have one now, because we’re going to pay for it.

Of course, there’s more to criticize about the Trump administration than the war. Much of the goodwill that the President got by narrowly avoiding assassination got squandered on shitcoin rugpulls and a “made in USA” Trump Phone where the only “making” was the part where an illegal immigrant on American soil put a Chinese phone in a Chinese box. Say what you like about the astonishing way in which the Clintons and Obamas went from middle-class poverty to nine-figure net worth via their Presidencies, but at least none of it was done via the Home Shopping Network.

At least Vivek Ramaswamy got BTFOed in the process. He tanked by double the margin of Senator Jon Husted’s loss, meaning that about 250,000 patriotic Ohioans, ahem, voted for the entire “R” lineup except for PharmaScammer. So while my state will suffer under the lash of a drunken demon in human flesh for the near future, at least she won’t be hiring her entire extended family to run the State in perpetuity. Anyway, you can look at the Blue Wave one of two ways:

0. Humanity and decency will be restored to a country, and people, who have been desperately in need of both.

1. We are back to limitless indentured labor, crippling citizen unemployment, unfettered bankster shenanigans, and a method of social governance best described as “HR girlboss blown up to Godzilla proportions.”

I suppose both things can be true.

Not that strongly persuaded

Robert Cray called the Blue Wave in advance. “How’s everyone doing?” he asked the crowd at Newark, Ohio’s Midland Theater this past Sunday night. “It’s gonna be better in a few days...”

At seventy-three, “Young Bob” has never looked better or played more strongly. He is a faster and stronger guitarist than ever, something to which I can personally attest since I’ve been catching him live for thirty-two years. Since 2010 or so he’s adopted the practice of having his guitar tech bring him a restrung (or at least retuned) Stratocaster for each and every tune. His hands are so strong that he pulls the whole thing out of whack in four minutes or less. It’s not unusual for him to bend two strings a full one and a half steps, or even two. This is cruel and unusual punishment, but it makes him the most immediately recognizable guitarist in the world. There are a million kids who can sound just like Eddie Van Halen, but you need to be a genetic freak to play like Robert Cray.

Cray started his career in 1980 with a pair of absolutely obscure chitlin-circuit modern blues records. I’m apparently one of just 13,000 people who own Bad Influence, by the way. But his fourth effort, Strong Persuader, rode the tracks “Smoking Gun” and “Right Next Door (Because Of Me)” to double-platinum status. He was the first MTV bluesman.

Given money and power by his label, Cray did the obvious thing of never recording anything remotely like Strong Persuader ever again. Between 1986 and 2014, he put out fifteen (15!) records that put horn sections and elaborate arrangements behind tunes that were directly influenced by his musical hero, O.V. Wright. Nothing past the third one charted anywhere, although I own most of them because I also adore O.V. Wright. This is a solid and charming example:

For years I played stripped-down arrangements of his soul tunes in my lightly-attended live performances, with “Chicken In The Kitchen” being the most prevalent. I’m a Robert Cray fan, a lifelong one, and that’s why I dragged the Commander out to a fourth-row seat for Sunday night’s performance. Unfortunately, we decided to move to the back of the theater after the sixth song, and we left entirely at the 70-minute mark.

The problem was twofold. Cray can’t afford to tour with horns anymore so instead he has this idiot, Dover Weinberg, whom he knows from way back, on keyboards. Weinberg is incompetent, there is no tune he cannot ruin or destroy or simply play over at top volume. For much of the set he was simply holding down three or four keys on his beat-up Nord while the rest of the band tried to play a tune over the screech. I don’t know where he gets his keyboard patches and if I ever find out I’m calling in an airstrike to that location.

I could have lived with Weinberg had he not been approximately 75% of the audible mix. The last time I saw Robert Cray at Midland was 2014, and it was enjoyable. I don’t know what happened to the old mixer, but the one they had this past Sunday was a buffoon. We couldn’t hear the bass player, Richard Cousins, at all — and listening to Cousins play in the pocket was the whole reason I wanted my kid to hear this band. The mix was literally painful and we had to leave the show because neither the Commander nor I could tolerate it.

When I surveyed the audience, however, I understood why we were the only people who left. There wasn’t a single person under 65 there but us. Nor were there any black people. I’m pretty sure Cray’s audience now is nothing but old white folks who also still go on senior swinger cruises. They’re all deaf, they need the “icepick” EQ curve to hear the music. This is why every one of Jimmy Page’s Zep remasters was worse than the previous one, by the way. By the time you’re fifty, your ears cannot be trusted.

In consideration of my son’s future music career, we left before he needed eardrum surgery. It was a shame, because Robert can still play, and the tickets were a bargain by modern standards. Still. I’d have paid twice as much, or ten times as much, to hear him with the Memphis Horns in a competently managed venue. At least I know he’s still out there doing it, and playing well. If you have a chance, go see the man. You might have better luck, and he really is one of the greats.

Veni, Kimi, vici

Quick thoughts on this one:

• Many congratulations to Kimi Antonelli, who has proven to be a first-rate driver with limitless potential. He has no detractors in the field; even Lando Norris stopped his post-race interview so he could watch Kimi’s triumph. “He deserves it,” was the erstwhile WDC’s verdict.

• If Esteban Ocon was fired for the sole sin of disagreeing with Laura Mueller, I agree with this. I adore her and will e-thug against any of her detractors at any time. The fact is that Ocon is an part-time extraordinary talent and a full-time pain in the ass. Gasly made him look weak and Bearman has finished the job.

• There is no baby quite like Sir Lewis Hamilton and his post-race comments regarding his dust-up with Charles Leclerc proved it yet again. The fact is that Leclerc would be a fool to do anything other than race Lewis like his life depends on it — because it does. If Charles allows himself to get beaten by an old man who, contrary to public reputation, has a habit of being shaded by his teammates when this is permitted, then his career is over, finished, kaput. Ferrari cannot win the championship. All that remains is for Charles to beat Lewis for a second year in a row and make sure he can still get a job in the future.

• Everyone knew that Andretti and GM would be embarrassingly slow in F1. What they couldn’t have predicted was that the Cadillac would be both the worst car in the sport and the most dangerous. That suspension failure on Bottas’s car was inexcusable, and it’s not even the first time it’s happened. Apparently the team is up for sale due to the fiscal woes of TWG’s founder, Mark Walter. What’s it worth? Based on these results, it isn’t worth a dime more than the franchise fee. Let’s hope someone competent buys it, fires Andretti, moves GM out, and does something respectable.

Born to be mild

For six grand, Harley-Davidson will be offering US customers an assembled-in-USA take on the small X440 Harley built and sold by India’s Hero Motors. The styling is pretty good. Power will come from a 27-hp single going through a six-speed transmission and chain drive.

At best, this thing is the motorcycling equivalent of the Chevy LUV, but let’s be real: the future of bikes in America is the future of small bikes. The economy sucks and it’s about to get worse for white and black Americans, insurance is prohibitive, theft of “street cred” motorcycles is rampant. So Harley needs to be in this segment, like yesterday.

What Harley should be offering here is a genuine American small motorcycle. It is not rocket science to build something like this. In the short term, however, maybe this would do the trick. Given the success of Honda’s Rebel bikes, it seems reasonable that a USA-assembled equivalent with a fairly large dealer body can do well. The main question: Can that dealer body, which has become accustomed to selling HELOC-financed $40,000 CVO baggers to Boomers, cope with the demands of a young buyer base?

Decency is the last, and the first, rebellion

There’s something thrilling about the way a lot of young people, particularly young men, are reacting to this 65-year-old cycle of American degeneracy, decline, and moral vacancy: they’re rebelling by going straight. In a city where dirt, filth, graffiti, and deliberately offensive “art” have all descended to the level of background noise, “Sweet P” has become globally famous by… repainting NYC mailboxes and old fire call boxes to their original spec.

This enrages people, by the way. The same (largely transplant) “New Yorkers” who consider it a badge of honor to have a bum urinate on their shoes can get incandescently angry about someone just cleaning up a mailbox. “YOU’RE DESTROYING ART AND CULTURE!” they screech, perhaps not realizing that they are the precise modern descendants of the people who complained about graffiti on the subway when it first appeared — because in both cases, what was actually being defended was orthodoxy. The current orthodoxy of NYC thought is that it’s supposed to be awful and dirty and off-putting because… well, it has something to do with being authentic.

For the record, your first and constant response to the word “authentic” should be the same as the famous line from Schlaegeter: “Wenn ich 'Kultur' höre, entsichere ich meinen Browning!”Any time someone starts talking about authenticity, you can be certain that authenticity has left the room.

The only reasonable way to understand the antipathy of people who pay $15/month/sqft in rent to something like a clean mailbox is to see New York as they see it: a modern-day theme park where bums and dirt and filth and depravity are the equivalent of Space Mountain. To them, the more than 350,000 people who are at least occasionally experiencing homelessness in the city, not to mention the 100,000-plus who are subject to some level of drug dependence or mental illness… well, they’re like the “Museum Fremen” in God Emperor of Dune. They are there to keep it real.

It’s not enough for NYC to have all the great art museums and all the great jazz gigs and all the great orchestras because — ssshhh — none of these people have the time or inclination to see any of that stuff. So they need their NYC experience to be immediate, local, and omnipresent, and they need it to be something that separates them from all their relatives and high school classmates back in Peoria. Thus their attachment to stuff like a vandalized mailbox, a signifier of decline that they’ve mistaken for a signifier of cosmopolitan status. The fact is that NYC was the most important city in the world when this video was taken:

Notice how clean and decent everything was. This was the NYC of Gatsby, the NYC of jazz, the NYC of Edward Hopper. None of it looks like an open sewer. Turns out you can have art and culture without trash all over the place — although it’s still a little dirty compared to a small town of the same time period.

There is no artistic frontier that moves further into social sickness than what we’ve achieved right now. The lesson of “Sweet P” and others like him is the same one that informed the Victorians and their actions: when the status quo is sick, the only way to rebel is to embrace health. Which is why he’ll be remembered when the “artists” who create the stickers he scrapes off have long been forgotten.

Sixteen years and a couple months ago, I received a single foam shoe insert in the mail from Audi of America. Right foot, of course. It was labeled “Audi S5”, and it was one of a few different cutesy little gifts sent by Audi of America to all the folks out there who were going to wait another six months (or longer) for the new-generation, V-8-powered S…

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Good morning, friends. Sorry I’m late with this one — the Commander and I made a last-minute decision to catch Robert Cray’s Sunday night show here in Nowhere, Ohio.

Artificial malice

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Can-Am Spyder Review: March 2011, TTAC

One hundred miles per hour. The once-fabled “ton” which my 1990 Volkswagen Fox struggled to indicate on its outrageously optimistic speedometer is now a commonplace, ho-hum event. Many modern cars will get there in ten or eleven seconds. Even heavy-duty pickups have no trouble pushing their Maximum Overdrive front fascias into the triple digits nowadays — and everything from the Fiesta to the F-450 feels rock-solid at that speed.

The magic, thrill, and terror are all gone from the one after ninety-nine… but if you want to bring it all back, and then some, it’s as close as a trip to your local Can-Am dealer. Driving the Spyder three-wheeler at that speed is, frankly, terrifying.

The Can-Am Spyder isn’t a three-wheeler in the same vein as the renimated Moggie trike, although it also has two wheels in front and one behind. No, this is very much a motorcycle-plus-one instead of a car-minus-one. The rider sits in a position very familiar to BMW touring-bike pilots and operates a motorcycle-style set of controls. If you don’t have some experience on bikes, the Can-Am won’t make any sense to you.

If, on the other hand, you do have some experience on bikes, the Can-Am probably won’t make any sense to you either. I’ve been riding street bikes since 1991 and I was immediately made quite uncomfortable by the way the Can-Am steers. Real motorcycles are steered by pushing down/away on the handlebar end in the direction of one’s intended turn. This causes the bike to fall to that side and to veer, er, steer, that way. The Spyder, on the other hand, is steered by turning the bars towards one’s intended direction.

Once the turn begins, the rider is forced to hang on to the machine by pressing his knees against the seat and pulling on the handlebars. It literally feels like the Can-Am is trying to throw its rider off. It takes an extremely vigorous (and extremely dorky-looking) lean towards the inside of the corner to preserve anything like cornering force. If you’ve ridden a snowmobile, you will be good at riding a Spyder — although the reverse is not true.

There are now several different models from which to choose in the Cam-Am lineup, from stripped-down monocrhomatic sportster to full-dress tourer. Two transmissions are available: a traditional five-speed clutched box or a clutchless five-speed operated by an electronic paddle shift. I took a Spyder rS which had 106 horsepower and the standard transmission to push 699 pounds dry weight. That’s about the same power-to-weight ratio as a base Corvette, and acceleration is similarly rapid…

…or similarly slow, if you’ve been riding modern sportbikes. Not to worry, because you wouldn’t want this vehicle to be any faster. On an open two-lane near the Road America track, I twisted the throttle and hung on for dear life as the Spyder zoomed to nearly 110mph. The front end started to wander — did I mention that each of the 165/65R14 tires at that end are inflated to just 15 psi? Consider it mentioned — and I was yanked back and forth as crosswinds tried to blow the trike out from under me. My motorcycle-trained steering responses were all wrong, actually pointing me towards a ditch. I oscillated helplessly for the approximately one minute I had determined would indicate that I was not an arrant coward before throttling down to a more sensible fifty-five. That’s a law I can live with, at least on this rig.

Oops! Time to make a fast turn. I hung my entire body off the Spyder and prayed. As the inside front wheel lifted off the mother-flicking ground I idly wondered what the effect would be of applying extra throttle, or any brake input, in midcorner. Probably death. That was the last corner I took at any speed much above the suggested limit. I can only imagine what a road like the Tail of the Dragon would be like on a Can-Am Spyder; most likely, it would be the long-non-awaited combination of a particularly vigorous P90X workout, one of the “Fry Guy” spring perches for children at a McDonald’s PlayPlace, and Russian roulette.

The rest of the test drive passed in kind of an odd haze as I wavered between going slower (to save my skin) and going faster (to make it come to an end sooner). Automobile drivers looked at me with open mouths, motorcyclists clucked in pity, and cyclists were ejected, screaming, into ditches as I wobbled left and right across the road. Twenty miles or so later, I was safe and sound in the parking lot, kneeling in what I hoped would look like genuine interest in the brake calipers while I thanked Almighty God for my survival.

I’ve operated a lot of fast machinery, from the Hayabusa and its compatriots to eight-hundred-horsepower Porsche GT2 tuner cars, but nothing has ever made me sit up in sheer terror like the Can-Am Spyder. It’s a true challenge to operate at speed and if you have no children about which you should be worrying I’d recommend giving one a shot. For the fifteen grand or so it would cost to buy one, however, I think most of us would be better served with a Yamaha R1 and some PTSD therapy to forget the test ride.

As a tourer, the Can-am probably works very well. As a sporting machine, it’s mostly notable for the way it delivers thrills at all speeds, even if those speeds are well south of the modest 100-mph mark.

Can-Am Spyder F3-S Review: March 2015, TTAC

Let the record show that, on the morning that I rode one hundred and seven miles each way to ride the new Cam-Am Spyder F3-S, I nearly dropped my motorcycle.

I’m still not quite sure how it happened. Something like this: I was turning my VFR800 Anniversary Edition around on the slope of my driveway. My left foot slipped on a bit of oil or maybe just water and the whole 539-pound machine fell as my foot continued to slide. About a tenth of a second before it would have been too late, I caught some traction with the outside of my heel and then all I had to do was arrest the slide with my left arm. It felt like deadlifting twice my weight and, for a moment, I thought my thrice-broken left wrist was going to snap again and add a medical bill to the cost of a replacement fairing.

When everything came to a halt and I’d yanked the VFR to vertical, I paused for a moment to consider the following: I’m forty-three years old, I’ve broken eighty-plus bones, and the day that I drop a motorcycle is coming fast. So with that in mind, I clutched in, grabbed first gear, and headed north to meet what I was now quite happy to think of as an un-droppable motorcycle.

This is my cellphone shot of the F3-S, but because the trike has so many edges and curves, and because there were so many other trikes around, it’s not easy to see what it actually looks like. Let’s use a PR photo, shall we?

It’s really quite handsome in an odd way and very different from the Spyder RS that I absolutely hated when I rode it a bit over four years ago.

Fox shocks…

Brembo brakes. What else can you get for $20,999 that has this kind of equipment? Oh, and it had cruise control, apparently. The contrast-color trellis frame has the same appeal here that it has on a Ducati or KTM sportbike. You can see plenty of the engine, which is not the case with the other members of the Spyder family.

To push the Spyder’s 850-pound dry weight, Can-Am offers a Rotax-badged 1330 cc triple capable of putting out 115 horsepower and 96 pound-feet of torque. That’s as much motor as you can get in a Spyder, and it’s the same one that pushes the full-dresser RT tourer now, but we live in an era where most sport-touring motorcycles have over 150 horsepower. Even my conservative old-man VFR has 110 horsepower. So if you’re expecting to keep up with your neighbor’s Beemer K1600GT or Kawaski Concours-14 as they rip to 10.3-second quarter miles, you should walk right past the Spyder and ask for the Yamaha V-Max.

Before I was allowed to ride the Spyder F3-S on public roads, I had to complete a small autocross course with it. Really just an oval with a small chicane down the back straight, intended to be taken at about 15 mph. I negotiated it easily, remembering that the Spyder doesn’t steer like a motorcycle. The fellow who was coaching the novices gave me a solid piece of Can-Am advice I wish I’d gotten back in 2011: “Push the outside end of the handlebars away from you to turn instead of pulling on the inside handlebar.” This also gives you some leverage to get your body moved over to the inside of the turn, which is absolutely necessary if you don’t want to just roll over into a ditch.

Having completed Spyder School without incident, I was then allowed to choose my Spyder. I picked a grey one with the six-speed manual transmission. The majority of Spyders, I am told, are sold with the electronically activated semi-auto. I had no fear of stalling it as I headed down the road for my lead-follow thirty-minute test ride. Only a moron could stall this thing. It’s all torque and no action. I was the second rider of a four-trike group in which both the lead and last rider were Can-Am employees, but the fellow in front wasn’t inclined to take it easy on me and I soon found myself using full throttle to keep up.

The back roads around Lodi, Ohio are rather beautiful. There’s a lake and there’s some elevation change and there are a bunch of great curves and, in short, it’s a completely fucking terrifying place in which to ride a Can-Am Spyder. To begin with, the roads have heavy crown and they’re narrow. On a motorcycle you’d deal with this by riding the centerline unless there was traffic; in a car you’d just deal with it period. But the Spyder wanted to fall into the ditch all the time and my instinctive countersteering motions just helped it in this goal.

With that said, the new seating position provided by the F3 really helps matters compared to the Spyder RS I rode in Atlanta. You’re sitting in the trike, not on it. The footrests are ahead, not under. It’s much like a Harley V-Rod in that way and the footpegs are adjustable to make sure you can stretch out as you like. The lower seat really helps you lean in the turns and, as a result, the F3 never feels quite as ornery as the older Spyders. The swept-back bars are similar to the ones found in the newer touring bikes, and they’re chock-full of controls, including a button that you must press in order to be allowed to start the bike. “Pressing the button signifies that you’ve read the owner’s manual,” I was told.

“I can in no way see that holding up in court, especially since the button is labeled ‘ECO’,” I replied. Nevertheless, you have to do it.

There’s an electric parking brake. But there’s no hand brake lever. Only a big rubber pedal for your right foot. This alone was almost enough to cause me to crash the Spyder no fewer than four times. I don’t use the rear brake foot lever on my motorcycles. Maybe once a ride to clean off the machinery, but that’s it. My VFR has linked brakes, so squeezing the front brake applies the back brake a bit, and my CB550 has a near-totally useless drum back there that I only activate when it’s raining. Time and again I found myself squeezing air when it was time to stop. If you want proof that the Spyder is meant for “cagers”, there you go. No hand brake. How hard would it be to add one as an option? Well, the Can-Am has ABS to go with its ESP, so maybe pretty hard.

My next beef with the trike was this: In a car, you only need to find two smooth lines in a bumpy rural road. On a bike, you only need one. But a trike needs three. If there’s a pothole or a pavement wave out there, a Spyder can find it, and the steering geometry seems ideally suited to following grooves in the road. So I was constantly struggling to keep it going straight on the frost-heaved Ohio two-lane. Now were you to find yourself on a freeway, you’d appreciate the stability of three wheels against wind and fatigue – but ripping down a twisty backroad, it’s miserable.

I also noticed that applying full throttle on said backroads with pavement waves and ripples was quite exciting, causing me to hang off the thing left and right like I was in the original version of Mad Max. Luckily, the F3-S isn’t a Hayabusa and the same amount of twist that gets the VFR to 110 or more only shoves the Spyder to maybe 65-70. If a modern V-6 Camry wants to run you for pink slips, be aware that you’re in what the old hands at the dragstrip call a “driver’s race.”

On the positive side of things, the transmission could not be easier to use. I found myself bumping past neutral into first a lot, but that just speaks to

a) me being a cack-footed moron who rides a 1975 CB550 in traffic

b) the excellence of Can-Am’s synchros.

Less fun is the difficulty I had operating the throttle smoothly while still using the handlebars for leverage. This is where you’re spoiled on a motorcycle because unless you’re in the middle of the Isle of Man TT you really aren’t leaning on the bars very much. I can operate the VFR with fingertips only on the bars at well over 100 mph but you’d be a fool to do something like that on the Spyder. So in left turns I kept over-throttling. This is called “whiskey throttle” by experienced trike riders, apparently. And when you do it, the front end gets light because hey, you’re accelerating HARD. Which reduces the front end’s ability to turn. Scary as hell.

Several times I thought I was going to get the Patrick George Award For Crashing A Vehicle During A Lead-Follow Event, but each time I managed to huck my big ass off the seat in the right direction and calm things down. I got not a single bit better at this during the course of the half hour.

The end of the test ride came not a moment too soon for my personal satisfaction. I respect this machine, but I don’t enjoy riding it and I think it would take me a long time to learn how to operate it safely. “You sure liked that center line,” smirked the Can-Am fellow who was leading the ride.

“Well, being away from it, toward the white line on the side, scared the shit out of me.” He smirked again. I felt like telling him that I’d driven the Zanardi line at Laguna Seca to take first in a race, then realized I didn’t care what he thought of me and neither did he. At that point, I was 100% done with the whole idea of the Spyder.

But as I walked around the Can-Am tent and saw the people who were showing up for the next lead-follow ride, I noticed that most of them were not what I think of as “bikers”. They were older, they were female. More than a few of them didn’t have their “M” endorsement. There were two different African-American couples that were interested in the Spyder RT full-dresser, and they shared with me that they liked the idea of it being stable on the freeway.

As I got back on my Interceptor 800, which to my immense relief steers in the direction I’m leaning and responds to my wishes without any particular force on my part, I thought about how much longer I could ride something like this. My wrists hurt a bit from the hundred-plus mile ride up and my hands had been a bit numb when I arrived at the demo-ride area. With one more serious joint injury I’ll be done with motorcycling as I know it – or maybe another decade’s worth of arthritis and joint degradation, to say nothing of my right ACL’s refusal to magically reappear, will call time on my riding aspirations. At the age of 23, I could ride my Ninja from dawn till dusk. At 28, I could ride my YZF600R five hundred miles then go for a mountain-bike sprint. Today, at 43 years of age, I can still ride three or four hundred miles in a day if I’m careful. Where will I be when I’m sixty? Confined to my 911 or Boxster or maybe a Corvette droptop? How will I feel about the Can-Am Spyder’s freeway stability and relaxed riding position and relatively modest pace then?

(2026 addition: I’m benching and squatting a lot more than I did in 2015, my joints are more stable, and I expect to ride for another decade. This is entirely because I quit the “sport” of downhill mountain biking.)

On Route 71, heading down a tree-lined section that I’ve long used as a free-fire zone of personal irresponsibility, I leaned over the tank and twisted the Honda’s throttle from my 85 mph cruising pace. One hundred. One ten. One twenty. One thirty. I felt good. As the end of the wooden section approached, complete with a crossover where the Ohio Highway Patrol loves to sit, I crossed into the middle lane and sat up, using my Fieldsheer-clad bulk to airbrake down below go-to-jail speed. Not a problem. I’m not too old to ride this thing, not too frail. Not yet.

But a few miles later, as I alternated the pressure of my weight between my hands to keep the tingles out, I saw a fellow on an old GoldWing conversion trike heading the other way, across the median. He saw me. And he didn’t just do the little nod that bikers do, or the dropped-two-finger cooler-than-thou salute. He actually waved. With his whole arm. It was hopeful, it was friendly, it suggested that we were brothers of a sort, pursuing the idea of being out in the elements and doing our own thing, albeit in different fashion.

I looked up, saw the sun illuminating the white clouds, then I, too, raised my whole hand. And waved. As I will to Spyder drivers, the next time I see one.

Got your own Can-Am experience? Put it in the comments — jb

Good morning, friends. We have two brief commercial messages for you. Sadly, these are not “affiliate links” for me, but I still think you should see them.

Rolling Heavy Magazine is back! Matt Grayson, the man who “put the tits and ass back into vans”, has issue #17 for you right now. It’s always worth reading, even if you don’t like naked girls. Tell him Jack sent you, and also to make the girls taller.

ACF readers can get 20% off the Impex Gold Edition of “Songs My Mother Taught Me”, produced by our own John Marks, by using code “JACK B”. Make sure you leave the space in there. This was Sterophile’s Recording Of The Month in June of 1988. If you’re not sure if this sort of thing is for you, there’s a free audio sample on the page.

Return of the clerk

"I knew it was going to be tight. Max is an animal on track, and I feel like sometimes when I close the visor, I can be that as well. And that's why it's exciting because I know he's not going to leave me much space, and the same I will do for him.” There are times when Charles Leclerc comes off like a sort of F1-parody-as-seen-by-Americans; think “Jean Girard” in Talladega Nights. Kind of fey, kind of gutless, someone who can qualify like a machine but then races like a coward.

He isn’t that person, and the Austin GP made this clear. He’s a few points behind Lewis at the moment, but if you remove the races where his car failed he’s clearly been the better driver all year and now it’s becoming painfully apparent. In what looks like an attempt to compensate Lewis for their awful strategy as of late, Ferrari gave their older driver the undercut twice on his own teammate. It didn’t matter. Leclerc had the better setup and he was also by far the driver with more moxie behind the wheel. His back-and-forth with Max Verstappen was a reminder that when F1 is good, it’s simply miles better than any other spectator motorsport.

This season is a foregone conclusion; Kimi basically needs to finish one race anywhere in the points this year and he’s the world champion. But there is still a lot of pride, and money, to be extracted by the other players. It seems likely that Max and Charles will both catch Lewis before the end of the year. Will they catch George, as well? Don’t bet against it. Other notes:

• Alright, you filthy animals, I admit it: Liam Lawson is getting it done. Whether it’s effortlessly browbeating his teammate, moving through traffic, or playing a John Mayer tune for a crowd of adoring female fans on his own bright-pink Taylor signature guitar, the driver previously known as Yuki Tsunoda’s Punching Bag is coming into his own. The hybrid formula suits him very well and he isn’t missing chances.

• Meanwhile, his only actual competitor, Isack Hadjar, is proving to be increasingly unhinged on the radio, at one point briefly deciding that he wasn’t going to move over for Max Verstappen. The resulting two-corner delay in swapping positions had Verstappen utterly furious, and justifiably so. Red Bull does not operate under Papaya Rules; Hadjar is effectively Verstappen’s employee. It would be different if he could get anywhere close to Max on raw pace, but he cannot and neither can anyone else.

• Kimi Antonellli is probably the second-best driver on the grid right now. Isn’t that amazing? He is utterly impervious to pressure, he makes very few mistakes. He can preserve tires and he can make passes. Meanwhile, Princess George celebrated a second consecutive week of being unable to pass a much slower car. He should go to IndyCar, where he would be the greatest talent the sport has seen since the departure of JP Montoya.

• I read an interesting analysis that claims Aston Martin has the fastest chassis in the field, and that the gap between them and first place is entirely due to the Honda powerplant. God knows Alonso is getting it done. He qualified 12th in a car that visibly lags behind the competition on the straight with overtake enabled.

The alpha desk diver, examined

A Trackday Club member who is Rolex shopping submits this guest review:

I truly enjoy learning the vernacular of specific new hobbies and niches, sometimes more than the hobby itself. As those of the horological bent likely already know, a “desk diver” is a dive watch worn exclusively to bash against burled walnut boardroom tables but in practice, more often the particle board holding up the Bloomberg terminal.

The “desk diver” is a popular piece of kit in my line of work, and perhaps none is as popular or iconic as the black on black submariner. The Rolex Submariner needs no introduction; its been a tool watch (and often a watch worn by tools) for over 70 years, but really coming into the spotlight in the 60s and 70s. The particular model I decided to lay down a not-inconsiderable amount of money on is a 16610, produced from 1988 to 2010. The pictured model is a K serial 2001 production model, which includes solid end links (“SEL”, not a Passat trim here) as well as the super-luminova lume, which represents a significant upgrade over earlier Tritium models.

How does it wear, and should you buy one? One, it goes without saying that you have to want a Rolex. There’s a million reasons to buy a Seamaster over a Sub. You can get a newer box and paper example on the grey market for 75% or less of what you will spend on a neo-vintage Sub. If you are like me and have a strong preference for the Crown, though, you know what you must do. If you don’t get it, then move on – this is much like the Poor-cha market in 2026.

Handling a variety of CPO watches at my local AD, I actually first bought a 36mm Explorer I, which proved to ultimately be small for my 8.25 inch wrist. But the jewelry-quality finish and significant heft of Sub ultimately brought me back – more on that in a second. The Explorer I is a lovely watch and nicely compact in 36mm form, but in 39mm or 40mm sizes, the dial feels oddly vacuous in person. It is, however, incredibly comfortable in a way the Sub simply is not. That heft may be the largest drawback of wearing a Sub every single day. As a man of considerable heft myself, I actually enjoy the sensation of knowing at all times that the watch is there, but women, children, and men of diminutive builds might find it tiresome over a long day. The other thing our bantam weight brothers may not enjoy is the large presence – at 47.5mm lug to lug, its not a small watch. It simply does not at any point “disappear on the wrist”.

Day to day I find the timing bezel useful, the dial legible and easy to glance at, and the finish and appearance appropriately polished and the correct amount of flashy. The lume is strong and particularly helpful when trying to rock an infant to sleep and desperately measuring out the time you’ve spent doing so, and I’d imagine it would also be of high utility when, y’know, diving. But ultimately I find it hard to believe that other formats (save multi-function electronic watches like a Casio) of watches can possibly be more useful in day to day than the timing bezel/date format that is presented to you on the 16610 Sub. One of the reasons I opted to invest in a nice daily wear watch was to prevent the umbilical cord attachment to my phone for something as simple as time, date, and minute tracking – you’re always one email notification away from existential dread and pulling you out of the moment in which you find yourself, whether that is with your children, partner, or simply trying to forget the horrors of W-2 existence. This watch will allow you that freedom while making a statement - if you like that statement, that is up to you.

16610s and other 5 digit Rolexes appear to be getting more popular as the time period where Rolex nailed the luxury and tool watch intersection before veering off into another universe. For me, the aluminum bezel assures cheap and plentiful replacements (at the cost of the slick ceramic look), and the 3135 movement is a known quantity with good parts and service availability.

Does it make sense for you? If you want to scratch the itch of a full sized Rolex that should be a lifetime piece, absolutely. Prices have dropped significantly from the PLANDEMIC highs and settled nicely into the $8.5-$12k range. While production volume (over 525k 16610s were made) means that you’re unlikely to see any rapid or maybe even medium term appreciation, as a wearable value-store and daily driver (diver?), it would fit most people’s bill nicely. Is spending five figures on a stainless steel, black dial dive watch designed in the 80s positively insane? That, dear reader, I leave up to you.

2001 Rolex Submariner 16610
Price as tested: Approx. $9,250
Highs: It’s a Rolex, excellent blend of luxury, utility, and presence
Lows: It’s a Rolex, heavy, the Seamaster exists at a substantial discount

Conclusion: If you think you want one, you do. If you aren’t sure, go get a Seamaster.

In which women swear at Marshawn Lynch

This clip has resurfaced and is being much-discussed again. In it, some sassy fat woman decides to start abusing the coach of a Seattle youth football camp… that coach being wealthy businessman and famous street BMX rider Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch. Oh yeah, he was also in the NFL, apparently.

The sequence of events went like so: A few of the kids were goofing off during a drill so Lynch told them to “get the fuck out of my drill”. This made one of the kids cry, so the mother decided to confront Lynch.

“Is there a man here with you?” he asks. This got a lot of people upset, but that’s because they’ve never operated in a traditional Western culture. Lynch is looking to do the honorable and ethical thing by having the argument, if an argument must be had, with the father of the child rather than with the mother. But of course there’s no father there — look at the woman and you know why. So he patiently explains to her that he expects the kids to participate in the drill to the best of their abilities instead of goofing off. The woman, who has never before been in a situation where she isn’t being treated by authority figures or welfare administrators with the deferential gentleness appropriate to a live human-garbage grenade, repeatedly tries to correct Marshawn, who finally says, “I didn’t want you to get away to go and throw dirt on my name but I understand I’m not gonna be able to please everybody which I’m fine with.”

The reader who sent me the video asked, “If your son was doing a clinic with Stanley Clarke or another prominent musician, and that musician harshly criticized him, would you take action?” It’s a fair question, and I think my best answer is this: My son is not yet eighteen years old. If you have a problem with him, you actually have a problem with me, and I will settle that problem with you depending on my independent evaluation of the situation. But if we are in a situation where I have ceded authority to another person, however temporarily, the rules are different. If I trust Marshawn Lynch to train my son, I’m going to give him some wide latitude in how that gets done. This would be doubly true in areas where I have zero expertise or knowledge. If the Commander’s ROTC detachment commander wants to make him do a thousand pushups or fight him in the ring like Richard Gere and Louis Gossett, Jr., I’m inclined to stay out of that discussion. If you’re going to be a helicopter parent, at least try to not be an attack helicopter parent.

The whole situation strikes me as sad. Marshawn Lynch is reportedly worth fifty million dollars. He’s training these kids because he wants them to succeed, not because he needs a paycheck. If someone of his talent and prominence is making himself available to a child, that child’s mother should think twice before squandering that opportunity just because ain’t no man gonna raise his voice to my boy.

News flash: this is not a building where stuff is being drop-forged

A social media influencer has decided to run Wilwood, a well-known supplier of brakes to the aftermarket, up the (American) flagpole for potentially fraudulent claims that their brakes are made in the USA:

Wilwood stamps “Designed • Tested • Manufactured in U.S.A.” on the badge — and their U.S. Customs record tells a more complicated story.

2,627 sea shipments logged by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Taiwan: 1,433. China: 1,058. That’s 94.8% of everything Wilwood brings in by sea — and it’s not packaging. It’s caliper castings and forgings, brake pads, rotors and hubs: the core brake parts themselves, shipped in by the companies that make them.

And it’s current, not history — the most recent shipment landed 10/14/2026, and October alone brought 31,179 kg of brake rotors in from China.

The honest limit, because I print those too: shipping manifests prove import flow, not a company’s total production. Imported castings may be machined and finished at their Camarillo plant — the record can’t rule that out. What it does prove is the volume, the cargo, and this: nowhere on Wilwood’s own site is there one word disclosing imported content.

I salute this fellow, he is doing God’s work. I called Wilwood but they had no interest in talking to me about it, so I went through other publicly available information, in particular a factory tour given to Dirt Wheels a few years ago. The article illustrates the limits of enthusiast media, beginning with the following:

The first stop on the tour was the original Bridgeport CNC machine that William Wood used to fabricate the first Wilwood brakes in 1977. Then, we went into a forest of modern CNC machines and saw an aluminum chip collection and recycling hardware; Wilwood recycles about 20 tons of aluminum shavings per month. We saw billet-aluminum bars shaped like calipers and forged-aluminum ingots before they’re CNC’d and the different products going through different stages of machining.

Emphasis mine. If you look at the Wilwood corporate headquarters above, and if you have any experience in manufacturing, your first thought might be: “I don’t see any way they’re forging anything in there.” The manufacture of forged aluminum billets/bars/whatever requires heavy-duty machinery, and you can see it in this video from a Chinese supplier. These are industrial-scale processes that I’m pretty sure cannot take place in a modern California office park. The environmental implications alone are major; during my time with Honda I would occasionally visit the Anna Engine Plant where the engine blocks were poured, and you could smell the metal before you took the freeway exit.

It seems obvious to me that Wilwood is doing a lot of machining on-site. Most likely they are taking forged blanks that are caliper-shaped, then making the calipers from them. Those caliper-shaped blanks should come from the United States, but it’s far, far, far easier to get them from China, because China hasn’t created an impenetrable forest of regulations to prevent basic industrial processes from happening. Wilwood is also a pretty small company, so they are less likely to be able to cut a deal with one of the major US suppliers like Alcoa or Bonnell. One under-reported way in which China undermines American business is that they will answer the phone for smaller accounts, because their labor and economic model allows them to do business with smaller accounts.

Make no mistake, Wilwood is a smaller account. They bought 31,179 kg of brake rotors from China in October. A 15-inch rotor weighs every bit of 14 or 15 kilograms; what you’re seeing here is just a thousand sets of brake rotors. One day’s worth of production at Honda Marysville. Not that there’s an American alternative for Wilwood anyway. It’s my understanding that no, zero, nada aftermarket-level brake rotor production is happening in the United States right now. That comes from a Centric employee, although the information is a couple of years old. I don’t believe that Wilwood claims to make brake rotors in the USA, only that they are finished here. (Which makes a big difference; brake rotor blanks are neither true nor balanced.)

Does Wilwood have the right to claim that their brakes are USA-made? Legally, I would guess that they do. The value of a forged caliper blank is probably three dollars a pound. The cheapest Wilwood calipers have a wholesale price on the order of $50-75 per caliper. Another way to look at it, if you’re a musician: no one seriously accused Paul Reed Smith of not making guitars in Maryland even though the catalog is chock full of “Brazilian rosewood” and “Honduras mahogany”. The law recognizes that when you turn $300 worth of wood into a $6,000 guitar you’ve essentially “made” it here.

The USA barely mines and extracts any aluminum. We are ahead of Saudi Arabia and behind Norway in the global rankings, mining one kilogram for every forty-seven kilograms mined in China. So it seems likely that even some “USA-made” aluminum raw stock was mined overseas.

Nine out of every ten dollars’ worth of value in a Wilwood caliper is probably generated in the United States. This is not the equivalent of the Hermes Birkin bag, which is a Chinese-made item that receives final finishing in Italy then sells for $40,000 against a total production cost of $1,400. It’s not even like a made-in-USA suit that uses Italian or English fabric. More like the 1950s-era Martin guitars that didn’t use any USA wood because it was still easy to get Brazilian rosewood and Alpine spruce.

So I’d suggest that Wilwood has the moral right to claim that their brake calipers are made in the USA. I’d prefer that they had a 100% American supply chain but that is letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. As soon as someone figures out how to work with a US aluminum raw provider to make fully USA calipers, I’ll immediately switch my preference over to them. For the record, Alcon also uses out-of-house blanks for their “made in UK” brakes. They don’t have a forge.

Truth be told, I don’t like Wilwood calipers and I have never driven a Wilwood-equipped car that particularly impressed me. Like it or not, the gold standard in cars is probably Brembo/AP, even though most of their production is slightly more Chinese in origin than the USA Math Olympics Team. I’ve also been tremendously impressed with the UK-made (from imported billet) HiSpec calipers fitted to my Radicals, although to be fair it’s not a difficult job to stop a Radical. Ironically, every source I can find suggests that the Nissin calipers on my ZX-14R, and the Sumitomo calipers on my LS430, were machined in Japan from Japanese billets. Japan no longer smelts aluminum from raw bauxite but they are doing nearly a million tons of recycling a year.

I’m glad for the readers who sent me this Wilwood “expose”. It’s not really a smoking gun but it does lead to some hard conversations about what “made in USA” really is, and what it should be. Keep talking to me about this stuff. It should be important to all of us.

One day you wake up and you’re part of the old guard. I think of myself as a novice motorcyclist, someone who is still learning, still able to improve. While the calendar can’t say anything about my skill as a rider, which is modest, it can certainly remove my illusions about being new to this. I bought my first motorcycle in 1994. It was a 1986 Ninja 600R:

75 horsepower, 135mph top speed (mine wouldn’t budge above 130 indicated), 12.4@108 quarter-mile. This was considered the absolute minimum motorcycle among my local group of riders, who were all in the process of exchanging their dubiously-titled ZX-7Rs for dubiously-titled CBR900RRs. It was assumed in this crowd that I’d bought the 600R solely to have a title via which I could register a stolen ZX-7R; when I just kept riding the thing, one of the Fireblade-mounted brothers at the 7-11 meetup said to me, with a note of concern in his voice, “You’re not a fag, are you? I mean, it’s okay if you are, but…” and he glanced meaningfully at my 592cc motorcycle.

Truthfully, it felt like enough motorcycle for me, as did the 100-horse 2000 YZF600R that I bought new in the showroom a few years later. Eventually, the 7-11 crowd just kind of gave up on me. I couldn’t wheelie for shit at freeway speeds and I insisted on riding homosexual motorcycles. On the other hand, I wasn’t a cop, so I could keep hanging around.

Let me explicitly state that even this reluctant tolerance would not have been extended to me if I’d shown up on anything besides a sportbike powered by an inline-four. Like everyone else in the Midwest, our group took its cues from the Starboyz up in Akron, a mixed-race group of angry young men who glued fur to their fairings and whose VHS videos depicted a lurid combination of freeway stunts and defiant thumbs-ups issued from the intensive care unit of the Cleveland Clinic. The Starboyz, and everyone else, did not ride any motorcycle that couldn’t explicitly trace its conceptual lineage to the 1984 Kawasaki Ninja 900. That meant: water-cooled inline-four in a perimeter (later, twin-spar) frame, displacement of 750cc or above, at least 115 horsepower, miserable riding position.

Naturally, we were aware that other motorcycles existed. Harleys, Ducatis, Beemers, Gold Wings, Moto Guzzis, metric cruisers, oddball stuff for swingers or meth dealers like, say the Honda Nighthawk S. But they were all beyond the Pale. If you were a young man with something to prove, you rode an Japanese inline-four sportbike. Period. That was the bleeding edge, literally. Everything else was worthy of nothing but contempt. It was all slow. That fearsome Ducati 900SS, immortalized by Hunter S. Thompson in his “Song of the Sausage Creature”? What a soft-ass motorcycle. A Honda CBR600F2, the famous “Goof-Two” ridden by girlfriends, novices, and teenagers, would rip out a Ducati’s lungs and step on them. The lovely Ducati 916, winner of Superbike championships? During a 40-150 roll a Fireblade owner could idle for three full seconds then run the Duck down before his helmet visor started to chatter from aero pressure.

The other bikes, the BMWs and whatnot, weren’t even in the picture. They were easy meat for stuff like a 1979 Yamaha XS Eleven.

I’ve spent my entire life in a Starboyz-derived mindset. I bought a ZX-14R new in 2015 and it’s sat next to a dozen or so other inline-four superbikes since then. I’ve had two VFR800s, purchased from the same patient fellow and cherished as occasional palate cleansers, but in general I haven’t had any interest in anything that didn’t bring four cylinders and over 100hp to the table.

Two years ago I semi-accidentally traded a Yamaha XS11 for a Suzuki DL1000 “V-Strom”. Strictly speaking, it’s an L-Strom, because it’s a 90-degree “V”, but Suzuki understands the marketing value of calling something a V-Twin even if it doesn’t share anything with a Harley-Davidson. The twenty-something Jack Baruth would weep to see me on something that is barely any quicker than a Ninja 600R but in truth the V-Strom makes much better pace than that baby superbike in the real world. You can see around traffic better, the handling is more predictable, it literally makes twice the power of a 600R at 4,000 rpm.

What’s more, the V-Strom is charming. It is well known that the inline-four is simply the worst-sounding and worst-behaving engine format in general use. You don’t ride a ZX-14R or Super Blackbird for the auditory or tactile qualities of the engine, because they barely exist. The powerplant groans, then groans louder, and then the next thing you know the speedometer says “175”. You have a choice between the factory exhaust, which keeps things quiet at the cost of ten horsepower, or some aftermarket can that frees up a bit of top-end juice at the cost of making it sound like you are perpetually about to be overtaken by a Spec Miata. Also, every cop in the surrounding county can accurately chase you by the sound, which is my ZX-14R has the factory silencer. It’s astounding how many young riders never figured this out. The 7-11 crowd would put a Yosh pipe on an R1, flee pursuit at 12,800rpm, then wonder how they got arrested at home. Meanwhile I’d be eating an untroubled hamburger at McDonald’s watching an evening rain splatter and vaporize on the dorky factory pipe of my YZF600R.

The V-Strom sounds alive. It feels alive. If you ride any inline-four bike south of a Hayabusa, you know that traditional superbikes are sleepy and lazy below 6,000 rpm. You have to get them into the right rev range then you can click off the hyperspace shifts at the extreme right of the tach, over and over. The Suzuki is different. It growls and pulls from low revs then tapers off before 9,000. So you find yourself short-shifting it to keep it growling.

This particular V-Strom is in beater condition and I’ve had to perform a couple of different odd fixes to keep it going, the most embarrassing of which is a duct-tape strap I made to keep the airbox firmly planted on the front throttle-body intake trumpet. Yet it’s pretty solid for having 24 years and almost 50,000 miles on it. On Friday I rode it 261 miles to visit the Recording Workshop in Chilicothe, OH. I encountered everything from dead-stopped downtown traffic to winding rural roads; the Strom handles it all with aplomb. I really like this motorcycle, and I respect its abilities, but finances permitting I would happily replace it with a newer one, or a better ADV bike from a different manufacturer, and not think twice about it. I don’t love the V-Strom, I do not adore it, I do not yearn for it.

Instead, I’ve fallen, madly so, for its sister.

$1500 was enough to take this SV1000-with-stories home last December. It is now a $3,254.45 motorcycle, not least because it’s rolling on a proper new chain and Pirelli tires. It uses a 120hp variant of the 996cc L-twin that makes 100hp in the V-Strom, 125hp in the famously-deadly TL1000S, and 135hp in the less-deadly TL1000R. We live in an era of 200-horsepower motorcycles now so this unfaired Suzuki, which wasn’t considered rapid on its debut 23 years ago, is now just slow.

Except it’s not slow. This isn’t a color magazine so I won’t try to shine you on with some dumb-ass story about how it can drop a proper superbike on a back road. It absolutely cannot. Point to point it is slower than a Super Blackbird, even when those points are connected by marked 25mph and 35mph corners. But the way it makes pace is very different. Like the V-Strom, it lives for the middle revs — but because the power-to-weight ratio is 3.9 pounds per horsepower instead of 5.3, it has a vastly sharper response. Because that response is also dead-predictable, you can roll the throttle on in the middle of a corner without worrying about making a big mistake the way you might in, say, a Yamaha R1.

It never feels down on power, it never makes you wait. It’s the opposite of a high-strung inline-four or, say, a modern McLaren. It has the right-now arrogance of a big-block musclecar… without the breathless top end. It runs to 10,000 with no hassle and that’s when you want to shift, because the last 1200rpm to the redline don’t get you much except more deranged noise.

The perception of this power and rapidity, if not the reality of it, is massively aided by the antisocial and absolutely uncorked dual Yoshimuras fitted by a previous owner. Which is part of the reason why the SV1K is so much fun. It looks like a Universal Japanese Motorcycle, but it sounds like a twin. An angry twin. You can rev it at a stoplight and the vibe is Harley, but make it stouter. It sounds more like a “chopper” than a Pan America does, by far. There are always a few Harley types walking around downtown Mansfield, Ohio and I’m in the habit now of locating them visually then revving the Suzuki then watching their heads swivel around looking for the invisible Road Glide CVO or whatever.

There’s nothing significant to dislike about the SV1K. The brakes are really good, which is not something you can say about the V-Strom. There’s no ABS or electronic throttle control but I don’t ride hard enough to need modern six-axis ESC and I have thirty years of experience riding in the rain without ABS. I find the riding position to be exceptionally comfortable for up to an hour at a time. Visibility is good. Fuel economy is in the low forties when I’m cruising and low thirties when I’m hustling. It costs me a grand total of twenty-six dollars a year for liability insurance; that amount gets me four days’ worth of full coverage for my Chrysler 300C.

Yesterday I discovered that it won’t run right after being power-washed. I didn’t know this before because I hadn’t power-washed it since I took delivery in 2024. The V-Strom had also not been power-washed before yesterday. I don’t pamper these bikes the way I do my ZX-14R. That’s freeing, too. You can park the SV1K somewhere and not worry about it. Who would steal it? It has visible loose wiring dangling off the engine. (Come to think of it, that also might be why it didn’t run on both cylinders until it was completely dry.)

I look forward to every moment on the SV1000. I love the way it falls into a corner. They say the SV650 is better in that regard but any man who could have an SV1000 wouldn’t have an SV650, surely. I feel young on the bike, it’s a willing partner and friend, it comes awake and roars at the apices of my little backroad path to lunch.

My unbridled adoration of this thirty-two-hundred-dollar Suzuki makes me wonder what I could buy for more money that I would enjoy still more. The answer isn’t quite clear. I don’t like Mini Danger Girl’s Ducati Monster nearly as much, and I also don’t really enjoy the big-bore high-horsepower Monsters because the riding position is unhappy for me after a few miles. No one else makes a “naked bike”, which is to say a sportbike with conventional handlebars and no fairing, as a V-twin.

I suspect the correct answer is to find a mint-condition 2003 SV1000 then throw the kitchen sink at it. They can make a fair amount more power, there’s race-level suspension available for them, and of course it would be super-nice and quite fancy to have an example of the model that does not have a significant dent in the tank. Probably for ten grand I could build a 150-horse bike with custom paint and switchgear that hasn’t faded to flat grey everywhere the sun can touch it.

Alternately I could just shut up and ride this one until I can’t comfortably swing a leg over it. Surely that day is not far. I’ll turn 55 next week. As Donald Trump once said about a seven-year-old believing in Santa, at fifty-five it’s marginal to keep ripping a sportbike around, whether it’s a 208-horse hyper-Ninja or a 120-horse L-twin Suzuki. There are two statistically significant paths ahead from here. One is labeled “Honda Gold Wing” and the other is labeled “Dead”.

One day you wake up and you’re part of the old guard. I think of myself as a novice motorcyclist, someone who is still learning, still able to improve. These ragged silver Suzukis are part of that. Together they’re worth less than a standard Omega Speedmaster. Or at least they’d be worth less than a standard Omega Speedmaster to someone else. There’s a sort of joy in that, I think. In being nearly valueless, but perhaps not to everyone. Hell, even if you are valuless to everyone. The late C.G. Hill, friend to ACF and many others beside, once wrote about love and wistfulness like so: “And if I ever felt that way about anyone — well, it hardly matters now.” When I was still a callow kid on my Ninja 600R, I would occasionally see the superannuated Aerostitch crowd on their BMW R-whatevers and sneer. Who cares about those old guys, those old bikes? Probably — nobody. Now that I’m on the other side of that visual, I realize that I was right. And there’s a moment in every fast corner when you can feel that lack of remaining value like the bitterness of old tobacco on your tongue, when you realize that most of the people who ever gave a shit about you have long since given up and moved on, that as Townes once said you are not needed now.

Ah, but in that same moment you can put the weight of five additional feathers on your right wrist, stand the bike back up, and thrum your way out: to the next turn, the next road, the next and next and next, the resolution of an equation containing zero value, zero inertia, and seventy-five pound-feet of torque. Trust me, you can’t get that from an inline-four. Twins: it’s the last love story.

Hello friends! So, our pal Brian Makse was doing one of his YouTube videos using Mazda’s heritage-collection 25th-Anniversary Miata when some typical Canadian newcomer drama happened and the car got shitcanned, so he called in the stunt double:

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A surprising number of ACFers have messaged or emailed me suggesting that we have a further discussion about AI. This is a topic on which I’m reluctant to say too much because, frankly, it is deadly to my employment prospects to not be publicly enthusiastic on the subject. It has also apparently cost me my minor position at The Free Press; after I submi…

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Good morning, friends. I’m suffering through a rash of unsubscribes mostly brought on by today’s appearance on the MotoMan podcast, so let’s go ahead and turn the heat high enough to drive the rest of the casuals out of the kitchen. (I’m kidding about the last part. Please don’t leave me.) If you want a reason to stay, however, tomorrow we will do the long-awaited AI discussion for paid readers only.

Tolerating degeneracy is not a virtue, and it never will be

I think I’m a pretty good writer but today we are going to hear from three people who are expressing my sentiments better than I can, and the first is Brad Troemel. He’s responding to this also extraordinary statement by Mayor Zohran:

Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern. Efficiency…has been taken on as a right-wing concern. Rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern… If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’

I mean… duh, right? But it took the willfully foreign actor son of a willfully foreign director mother to say it. Listen up, Team Blue: if everyone gets in line behind this, and acts accordingly, we will never have a Republican official above the rank of county dogcatcher in this country again. But it won’t happen, and Troemel explains why:

This is why radlibs, when they defend the decay of public space with their routine about how “you must be a baby who’s afraid of the big city,” are doing top-notch PR for the rentier class. Their message, accept lowered standards or you’re a racist, a coward, or both, shames people out of voicing even mild discomfort and strips them of hope for a clean street, a safe ride home, or a park where their kids can play, basic expectations in the richest country in the world now recast as luxuries only a Karen would demand.

So what do you do once you’ve been shamed into silence? You develop a survival-based stoicism toward the people screaming, shitting, masturbating, and threatening you on the subway: face blank, eyes forward, phone gripped, waiting for your stop. Turtling into your shell breeds a perverse pride in your capacity to absorb abuse, resting on a story about who gets attacked: the naive, the defiant, the proud, the ones who intervene or acknowledge what everyone else ignores. Your cunning, meek “street smarts” are the difference, so they deserve it and you don’t. The alternative, that violence against commuters is random, is too frightening to live with.

I haven’t liked the “Karen” meme since I dissected it six years ago and Troemel provides further ammunition against it.

The global response to the Paris “student riots” that don’t contain a single student but are infested with Palestine flags is a perfect example of the above. I keep hearing about how only a racist hick would be against burning churches and destroying stores. Some significant percentage of “radlibs” are jizzing their proverbial pants about a video of a Gen X couple calmly smoking and drinking at a Paris cafe while random hoodie-wearing goblins set stuff on fire behind them. “TRUE PARISIENS” and so on. Sure, there’s a certain savoir faire or je ne sais quoi about it — that’s all I remember from two years of college French — but we shouldn’t be praising these people. They are part of the problem. They tolerate and encourage this depravity, they have stood aside while their country was forcibly reshaped by armies of demons acting at the behest of the proverbial one percent.

What’s so uncool, so racist, so hickish about not wanting your city to burn? Would it somehow ruin the art, the music, the architecture if you could let children play on the sidewalk? I can’t say that I’m particularly afraid of most major cities; my son has played a gig in Harlem, we ride our bikes in Queens, I’m happy to walk around in Chicago neighborhoods. But you shouldn’t have to be a man of my general size, bearing, and propensity for mischief to feel safe where you live. And trust me: it could, and maybe will, get a lot worse until both Team Red and Team Blue agree on civic dignity as a worthwhile virtue.

Regulation, of a different sort

If I am lucky in anything besides my slightly-above-average height and reach, it is in my friends. One of them designed and built a Seiko-based watch that he was kind enough to send me as a gift. The dial is his own, the strap is a green shell cordovan piece that I sourced from CAFE in Spain, and the movement is… the notorious Seiko NH35.

The very existence of the NH35 is a testament to our modern society and engineering prowess. It is made in Japan, it has 24 jewels and operates at an acceptable 21,600 vph. And it costs fifty bucks, retail. Never in history has a machine of this precision been so easily and cheaply available, and made in the First World to boot. There’s just one problem: it is a nightmare to regulate. Traditional pocketwatches, and many of the finer movements from Switzerland, Germany, and Japan, all have pretty sophisticated regulator adjustment. To save money, the NH35 forces you to adjust the balance wheel itself using a pair of little metal tabs. You need to tap on them with a non-metallic device so you don’t magnetize the spring, at which point your timekeeping error will be measured in hours per day. I used matchsticks.

Over the course of two hours, I tapped at the balance wheel. If you can actually feel the tabs move, that will correspond to a 100-second per day adjustment. So you tap lightly, which gets you 30 seconds per day. I could not manage a lighter tap than that so I settled for repeatedly tapping in the hopes that I’d settle in at some point. Again, this would take five minutes with a Lange Zeitwerk but that would cost $80,000.

It didn’t help that the NH35 also takes a minute or two to settle in at any given tempo. So you just sit and wait to find out how awfully you’ve screwed it up. But when all was said and done:

So now I have a beautiful watch that was designed by a friend, assembled by a friend, and regulated by me. Like my Lexus ES300, this won’t impress anyone whose desires come from social media and expensive advertising — but like my Lexus, this watch works as well as it does because my friends and I made it that way. So don’t be surprised if I turn my nose up at your white-gold Daytona. I mean, you don’t even know the man who sketched the dial design!

Wheels up, I got to leave this evening

Several weeks ago, I made fun of Fat Brad for wanting airplanes to get rid of their windows. Yesterday I read something neat on Substack that explains part of my issue with his sad little desire:

“A broad loss of a sense of wonder.” I am humbled by this, because it applies to me. For about a ten year period of my life I was flying all the time — not like my brother or father do, but maybe 30-40 trips a year. And I stopped leaving the window up. I started thinking of the plane as a subway of sorts, just a tube that took me to the next annoyance, the next obligation, the next conflict. I would fly to airports in foreign countries, places I’d waited my whole life to see, and I would leave the shade down on the way in. I adopted the ennui of the seasoned traveler, I griped about lounges and transfers and seat assignments. Instead of thanking God for a life where I could travel parts of the world and see things of which my 12-year-old self could not dare to dream, I just existed on the plane.

That was wrong. I’m going to look out the window more in the future. I’m going to be grateful for the time and opportunities remaining to me. I’m going to see more. I hope that you’ll try to feel the same way as you travel — if you travel. And if you do not travel, I hope you will keep your eyes open for the wonders around you at home. A kitten stretching its paws out before bedtime. A child learning something while you watch. The person you love experiencing joy or sorrow. Raise your window. Be a human. I’ll be there with you.

The Red Queen life

An ACF reader shared this observation with me. Once again, someone is saying it well.

Most of my Boomer friends, and some of my Gen X friends, have a story about an astounding opportunity that came their way because there was no one else around to do it, or because of an in-person interaction that would be difficult or impossible to imagine today. I got my first professional writing gig at Bicycles Today because I walked into the office and asked for it. Although most BMX racing was on the coasts, the office was in Hilliard, Ohio. I walked in, saw the editor-in-chief reading Rabbit At Rest, and struck up a conversation. I had just turned nineteen. Today, a mind-blowing thirty-six years later, editors are under a constant assault of emails and social media contacts and phone calls. But in 1990 I could just walk in. Without that meeting, without Jill Geiger, I simply wouldn’t exist to all of you.

Our young men rarely get a chance like that now. They compete with the whole world. The girl you want to date has a hundred thirsty dudes in her DMs, which could literally include the rapper Drake; I’m aware of a story in which a high school teacher got scouted by one of his people to fly out and have sex with him for a weekend. She agreed, and was richly rewarded — but how does that affect her opinion of the 27-year-old, $58,000-a-year science teacher who asked her out the week after?

Every job posting on LinkedIn solemnly informs you that “100 people have applied for this position.” And it doesn’t matter what the position is, wink wink. As William Meijer notes,

Got to eat healthy and hit the gym to looksmax, got to jestermax on dating apps, got to go to nice places to improve your social media, got to get an advanced degree and contract debt to have an ok job, got to bring your cognitive A-game to work, got to bring your sexual A-game the first time, got to be funnier than her options, got to manage your sleep and recovery to compete better.

None of this is mandatory, and some of it is not unique to our time, but both the reward for competing well and the penalty for competing badly are greater than ever. So you kind of have to compete.

As Michel Houellebecq famously observed in his 1994 novel Whatever, liberalism is the extension of competition to every domain of life. Infinite optionality means zero loyalty, and zero loyalty means infinite competition.

I suspect that some of the youth’s inclination toward socialism is longing for some respite, even as the long-term effect of the remedy might be worse than the disease.

If you’re tempted to respond to this with a tale of some unique or rare 2026 situation where it isn’t so, be aware you’re simply noting the exceptions that prove the rule. We live in a Red Queen world — like the character from Alice In Wonderland, we have to run all the time just to stay in place. And now, many of us have to compete with the idea of AI. Not the reality of AI, which varies from shambolic to gloriously incorrect, but the idea of it. All those people who were blithely told to learn coding are 100% fucked. Most of them would probably turn out better code than Claude does, but their bosses would rather spend $200k a year on Claude tokens than pay an entry-level programmer. Claude isn’t going to take a long weekend off work trying to impress some girl who also has a billionaire rapper in her DMs.

A world of gig work and ephemeral relationships where we are all continually trying to reapply for our own jobs and “sarge” our own wives or girlfriends sounds very impressive from an econ-textbook perspective but it is completely enervating as a prospect for the rest of one’s life. I’m about to turn fifty-five and I’m decidedly unthrilled about the idea of ten or fifteen years more continually competing with the whole world for upper-middle-income opportunities. Imagine being seventeen years old and seeing it as your whole life to come. “If you maxx for every single day of the next sixty years, you might end up owning a Ferrari and a Lange Zeitwerk, but the chances are one in a thousand. Orrrrr… you can vote for the DSA. You’ll never be rich, but you’ll have time to play music or paint or raise your kids. Best of all, no one else will be able to lord the products of their maxxing over you. We’re gonna level the playing field and give you a life back.”

Here’s the worst part: I’m overselling the first half of that. The chances of owning a Ferrari and a Lange aren’t one in a thousand. Ferrari makes 100,000 cars in a decade and Lange makes 50,000 watches. Your chances are actually closer to one in fifty thousand. The actual reality is that you’ll jestermaxx and looksmaxx and workmaxx and kiss-your-boss’s-ass-maxx for a chance to own a used 330i and pay rent on someone else’s townhouse. About once a week I get a message from an ACFer that goes something like, “I have done everything I needed to do in my career, I’m 40 years old, and I’m not excited about a single one of the car/watch/art/home/whatever choices available to me.” And those are the positive ones. The sad ones go on to say that they’re single and they’d rather chew glass than date the women at their job or in their local “scene”, whatever it is.

Individually, I can offer these men some proven advice. The ND3 Miata is one of the best sporting cars in history, and you can probably afford it. If you go to church and try some combo of TRT/GLP-1/farmer’s-carries/CrossFit, you can probably improve your dating prospects. My pal “Jay” and I just found a bad-ass 1975 Glashutte export watch for $300 net shipped that will stand up against any Rolex. But the plural of “vigorous self-improvement” is not “an optimistic society”.

Collectively, the men of ACF are a lucky and hard-working group. Socialism might not have much appeal for us. But we would be foolish not to recognize the appeal to others. So, in addition to asking you to raise the window shade on your next plane trip, I’m going to ask you to look out for the young men in your life. Sons, friends, co-workers, fellow participants in your chosen video game or hobby. Help them out. Look for opportunities for them. Don’t judge them like they have the same opportunities you’ve had. Chances are that’s not so. And if you’re a young ACFer looking for an opportunity, drop me a line. The antidote to the perceived community of socialism is… a real community, and the actions we take to create one.

Speaking of. In the next few weeks I’ll be announcing the return of First Principles. Rather than quick-bake one for 2026, I will plan a Midwest and an East Coast gathering for the spring. I’ll be polling the readership about when and where they’d like to make it happen. This is the one thing I feel that I can do to keep this community ball rolling, and I’ll look forward to seeing you there.

With two decades’ hindsight it’s easy to see now that the S197 Mustang was more than just a retro sop to a fanbase that had suffered through a decade’s worth of awkwardly proportioned and inadequately powered (Terminator aside) fast Fords. Mechanically the package was right on point, offering du…

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Good morning, friends. We are going to cram a bunch of the potentially controversial stuff into a single Sunday. Remember the rules: you can be cruel to public figures and you can be mean to me, but you should treat each other with respect. I’d like to think that we can discuss ideas without a surfeit of emotion. If you see me failing at this goal, you …

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“Horses for courses.” It’s one of those awful cliched phrases that old people like to stick into conversation. The problem is that when you get to be old yourself, you realize that these phrases exist for a reason.

Reliability and durability issues aside, I think the Elantra N is a genuinely cool car. It was designed by people who give a damn about goin…

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In which Max shines and Lewis suffers

Objectively speaking, this was a successful weekend for Lewis, as F1 announced an African GP in Rwanda starting with the 2030 season. Lewis, whose mother is a white broad from Birmingham and whose father is an English-born man with parents from the Caribbean, has long demanded an African GP, for reasons known only to him. If nothing else, this will test Liberty Media’s ability to control reality on the ground. They should definitely hire Lao Yang to do the buildout.

As anyone who has ever been there knows, however, Singapore is the polar opposite of Rwanda, and in the world’s most civilized major city Sir Lewis was well and truly adrift. His Sprint race was actually quite good; having been dusted by Leclerc in quali, Lewis drove a disciplined and rapid race to get past his teammate and take a second behind an untouchable Max. In GP qualifying, the F1TV announcers experienced multiple top-volume orgasms at Sir’s single-lap pace (at one point, I think Alex Jaques just started yelling “HE’S DOING ITTTTT!") right up to the moment that Leclerc easily outqualified him. Come race day, Lewis looked better on the mediums than Charles looked on the softs… but then there was a VSC period.

Radio comms were not good in Singapore, especially for Red Bull, but everyone now agrees that Lewis was explicitly told to pit directly behind Charles. Instead, he either missed the pit or decided to stay out. Probably the latter. He then made the independent decision to run soft tires for 44 laps. This looked brilliant… for a while. Then his race fell apart. Kimi Antonelli passed him with maximum disrespect then the McLarens hunted him down. At weigh-in after the race, Lewis was visibly sobbing. Listen, I understand being competitive no matter what, but the man has seven world championships and he is crying about finishing 6th during one race of a season where he is earning $100 million? The FIA allowed him to skip the post-race media pen due to distress, and he issued a statement afterwards apologizing to the team. Wild stuff. It seems obvious that Max will pass him in the driver’s standings, and likely that Charles will as well. Quite a turnaround for a man who was briefly a legit contender for the WDC.

Other notes:

• McLaren’s car isn’t working and their drivers are crashing into each other, again. This would be a good time to refocus on fundamentals.

• Pierre Gasly is having a season for the ages. He’s thirty years old but appears to be improving in real time. If the Alpine continues to improve under Briatore’s iron hand, we could be talking about a championship. Stranger things have happened.

• The debut of the IWC Singapore Chronograph wasn’t exactly matched by on-track domination, but Kimi looked solid enough and of course he will win the championship, as early as Austin even, making him just the second wheel-to-wheel racer to win a championship wearing the IWC Singapore Chronograph. Meanwhile, it’s come out that Mercedes is actively guinea-pigging poor George Russell, making him run engines to failure and try alternate bodywork to gather data for 2027. He still looked pretty good in the race, but as a reader messaged me after the race, he’s become “Daniel Russellcardo”. Prediction: he’s back at Williams eventually.

• A reminder: if you watched Max stamp his authority on the last two Grands Prix, you are watching the finest race driver in human history. It’s worth cherishing.

Generation(al) Tobacco (ban)

It’s like the recently-passed “Leno’s Law”, but in reverse. The California regulation will gradually make 1976 to 1983 model year cars exempt from emissions. Rather hilariously, and demonstrating how corrupt California is even when they do the right thing, it will be mandatory to have collector car insurance on your 1976-1983 car to make it eligible. Hmm. Wonder who could be behind that part of the law? By contrast, New York is going to stop something, or someone, from smoking…. forever. Assembly Bill 11509 will ban the use of tobacco, in perpetuity, for anyone born after December 31, 2007.

Britain’s already doing it, by the way. On January 1 of 2027, it will become permanently illegal for anyone born after January 1, 2009 to consume tobacco. Doesn’t matter how old they are. The clock stops. Bad news for my son, who is just past the line, but utterly irrelevant to me. Which is how this “generational” law got passed, by the way. They’ve finally figured out a way for old people to permanently screw over the next generation, in permanent law.

Next stop for generational legislation, obviously: Social Security. It will simply become impossible for anyone born after 1970 (maybe) or 1980 (for sure) to collect Social Security.

In some respects, the law just follows reality. Cigarette smoking has not been this unpopular in a century — in over-25 Americans, just 7.2% of men and 5.1% of women smoke cigarettes. For cigars, the numbers are lower, with just 4.1% of adults smoking and they are overwhelmingly male. So it’s easy legislation to write and pass.

At the same time, however, we are at an all-time high for marijuana smoking. Not just use, but actually lighting up. 25% of Americans age 30 to 49 regularly smoke weed.

Here’s the wild part. While cigars are not without health risks, they are significantly better than filtered tobacco cigarettes… which, in turn, are much safer than smoking marijuana. Unfiltered joints are murder on your lungs, even if you forget about all the other known health problems associated with marijuana use. So why is America criminalizing tobacco at warp speed — because as soon as NYC does it, California will follow, and the dominoes will fall — while encouraging the more dangerous pastime of THC smoking?

My theory: nicotine supercharges your mental and fine motor skills while weed makes you a lazy, sex-obsessed moron. The state of New York, just like the United Kingdom, is not interested in you being any smarter and/or more aggressive. You might, as the kids say, start noticing.

DG wins her championship, MDG does not

Going into this final race of the year at Mid-Ohio, Danger Girl was a lock for her divisional championship. She merely had to start both races and complete one lap in each. Which was not a certainty, given that she has had two engine failures this season and is currently racing on a 2.0 MZR stolen out of her street NC Club. Also, the weather was awful and there were many possibilities for mayhem. She was conservative on Day One, finishing near the back of the order. Then she elected to start from dead last on Day Two, knowing that she needed to safely complete one lap. Once that was done, she went from 26th to 9th pretty quickly just for the joy of doing it.

Mini Danger Girl arrived at the finals one point down, thanks to a dipshit 70-ish-year-old steward who had simply vacated one of her wins on the grounds that she had hurt the feelings (but not the car, or person) of a male racer. So she needed to beat her closest competitor both days. On Day One, she lost a plug wire and finished 5th of 6th. Her competitor was running 4th, but two drivers ahead of him, also from Michigan, moved over and let him by so he finished second.

This meant that we needed a miracle on Sunday. And we had it — in the form of heavy rain. MDG qualified second in class and her competitor took fourth. There were a dozen cars from the (nominally faster) SRF3 class between her and this guy, so she would be free to hunt down the win while this fellow struggled to get up to her. That’s about what had happened in opposite fashion on Saturday, when she’d started seven out-of-class cars behind him. On Sunday, however, the stewards declared a split start per class, so she would be just two spots ahead of 13 spots. It was a complete nightmare ruling and appeared to be done for no reason other than to harm her race. Then the third-qualified driver withdrew so he wouldn’t be a blocker between MDG and the other driver. (More Michigan bitch-ass-ed-ness. Imagine doing all this to beat a woman who is faster than you.) Despite that, MDG dusted the fellow pretty quickly and started hunting for first place in class. Then there was a multi-car incident in the other class. So the stewards shut down the race after three green flag laps and handed the championship to her competitor.

I didn’t know what to say to her, other than: “I’d rather you win on track and have it taken away by old men than have you lose it on track then have it given to you by old men.” She was the class of the field this year, showing she could win in any conditions and beat everything from mechanical adversity to coordinated effort against her on track. What she could not do was override a few ancient stewards who have made no secret of the fact that they find her success annoying. Your humble author has put a fellow driver on the LifeFlight and I’ve racked up probably fifty contact incidents in the past two decades but I have fewer points on my license, lifetime, than MDG has been given in 2026 for such crimes as “bumping in a spec series”. At one point, a Michigan driver deliberately spun her out of the lead of a race then announced plans to protest her for holding him up. Happily, he and I had a short conversation that changed his mind.

I’m infinitely proud of MDG. Years ago, God saw that I’d been cursed with a son who would never have enough free time to win a regional championship and He gave me this extra child in consolation. We’d like to thank Mike O Racing for supporting her efforts, and Tommy Byrne (seen below with your humble author) for coaching her to a nearly flawless performance on Sunday.

Sadly, my daughter will have to miss most of the Spec Racer Ford championship next year due to her new role in NASCAR. I’m hoping she will leave me her car to enter in a few races so I can amuse myself the way I like to.

As for my races: I had about 12th-place pace in my 26-car mixed class, but poor track conditions on Sat morning let me start 7th. I was then able to jump to third on the start:

I didn’t have the raw pace to hold on so I finished 6/26 overall, 3/6 in a class where I am the slowest car by 4-5s a lap under normal conditions. Sunday was a monsoon rainstorm so I qualified third overall and finished the race 4/26 overall, 3/6 in class. It was a real joy to race at all this year, but I’ll be back in a Radical for 2027.

Racing the Neon is very different from racing a prototype; both cars give you different bad habits. I still feel I was about 0.4-0.6 seconds off maximum pace this weekend because I’m taking too many “aero lines” and also being slow to get the steering unwound at corner exits. The good news is I know what I’m doing wrong and if I had another season of sedan racing ahead of me I’d get it fixed.

Oh, and a small bit of bragging: I was the only one of 26 cars not on full rain tires this past Sunday. I was on 2024-vintage Bridgestone RE-71S street tires at 50% tread remaining. So I was full sideways in a lot of corners. Tommy Byrne, who was watching my Sunday race, said “When I saw you go through Turn One like that in the first lap, I knew… you were fucked.” But not so fucked that I couldn’t hold on to 4th!

The raw evil of false equivalence

Columbus Day was this past week. It’s become quite chic to gripe about Christopher Columbus, as mid talent/mid broad Kasey Musgraves did at her Dallas concert.

“Obviously fuck Columbus,” she said. “Literally the lamest person to probably ever exist. Like for real. What a loser.”

There have been a lot of similar sentiments on my social media feeds, so I posted a comment to the effect of “no culture where they build pyramids of children’s skulls is worth defending.” I got a variety of responses, the sanest of which was probably this one:

This fellow is experiencing a subset of what they call Jedi Brain. He has been (mis)educated to see everything through the lens of either “movies for kids” or “The Current Year”. In our conversation, he tried to equate the crimes of “Europeans” to the degenerate, murderous, eternal (until forcibly stopped) nightmare society of the Aztecs. This is also common behavior from the “Fuck Christopher Columbus” crowd. It is the mindset of a child whose entire world is controlled by parental authority and whose idea of everything from justice to triumph exists in a frame of “Does Mommy like what I’m saying to her? I love Mommy.” If the “Europeans” are the worst people in history, it’s quite comforting, isn’t it? Because that means:

0. You can do something about it;

1. There’s nothing worse out there in the shadows waiting for us.

The latter is clearly wishful thinking. Yesterday I had a conversation with an ACF reader, a decent and moral man, who told me he hadn’t been sleeping well since he read about the “Cow Cat” torture incident. I don’t blame him, because it keeps me up, too. To be fair, not all the Chinese are on board with this stuff. There is a group of Chinese men who have attacked and harmed cat torturers in the past. I’ve also heard a report, not yet verified to any real extent, that a young woman stabbed the Cow Cat torturer then committed suicide to spare her family the shame of her imprisonment. Feline Guardians works in China to prevent more of these incidents, with the help of many Chinese.

In the final analysis, however, it boils down to:

• Animal abuse is both criminally punished and considered morally degenerate in Christian America;

• China does not operate the same way.

Some cultures are morally superior to others. I wouldn’t say I have a precise handle on how they stack up; for example, do you give Islam points for controlling sexual degeneracy or deduct points for restricting liberty? Do you give America points for trying to keep homeless people fed, or do you deduct points for permitting no-fault divorce? The precise resolution of such issues is the domain of philosophy and the labor of statecraft.

But this difficulty in making precise determinations should not blind us to the fact that some cultures are simply better than others. The Christianity of Spain was, by turns, capricious and cruel. But the Aztecs lived under a system where it was no big deal to kill 20,000 innocents for a single ceremony. They thought…

cough

that if they created enough human misery and suffering, the gods would change the climate in their favor

cough

so they lined up the children, the women, the slaves, and anyone else they could get for a bit of the old live heart removal.

There is nothing racist about deploring this behavior, any more that it was racist to disapprove of the Final Solution or racist to quibble about Stalin’s cheerful murder of perhaps fifty million people. The people who most loudly and joyfully proclaim their hatred of Christopher Columbus are the direct genetic descendants of his countrymen. They have no genuine idea of what racism is.

You can quibble about Columbus and the conquistadors and the Pilgrims and the US Army’s battles against the Native Americans. Much of what they did was deplorable. And you can quibble about them because you happen to live in a moral and ethical system built by Columbus and the conquistadors and the US Army. You have the luxury of being able to quibble.

In a world where cross-ocean navigation never happened, the “Americans” might still be slaughtering people by the tens of thousands every festival day. There is nothing to say that it would have ever stopped. The intellectual children among us won’t like hearing it, but King’s famous “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” was smoothbrain nonsense. The Chinese have been around just as long as the French have been. Their arc didn’t bend the same way. It is childish and ignorant to think that people will just naturally become moral in the same way that you are moral. Your morality was built on the shoulders of giants. Even the most strident atheist of the west owes his entire “morality” to Saul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo. The “effective altruists” are doing math based on what the Jewish scholars of two thousand years ago believed.

Civilization is a thin veneer. It is the surface of a soap bubble. Anything can break it. I’m not talking about “the Boogaloo” or anything like that. I’m talking about waking up some day and finding that, without you noticing any particular change, we have just transitioned into a nation that believes in child sacrifice.

Assuming that hasn’t already happened.

Anyway. If you want to argue the side of the Aztecs, do it in the comments. Expect to be rebuked — but, because we are civilized people, this rebuke won’t come in the form of simply zeroing out your entire bloodline. That was common practice before the conquistadors, too.

Housekeeping

We will have the “AI Discussion” for which many readers have been asking either late tomorrow or early Friday. I have one more car test to throw at you as well, and maybe a guest post.

Last week we talked about the Volkswagen ID.Polo, a delightful blend of premium and retro that does a lot to restore VW’s tarnished reputation as a manufacturer of EVs (in particular) and small cars (in general). This improvement didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it didn’t happen unprompted. Today we’re going to look at the Geely E2 Ultra, which has dethro…

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It is the worst kept secret in the world that I love the original 1976 to 1979 Cadillac Seville. So not only do I not need a flimsy excuse to write one up, I will do one with no excuse at all. But today I actually have one.

Nick is a friend of mine in New Mexico. And he has some fantastic examples of the Brougham Era, when Detroit didn't make a bunch of sad little gray, black and refrigerator white combovers for fat people as they do in 2026. Some of his “Nimitz Class” vehicles include a 1967 Imperial LeBaron, a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood d'Elegance, silver ‘66 Fleetwood Brougham with red leather, and many more.

He even still owns the blue 1973 Oldsmobile 98 Regency that his Dad special ordered new, and Nick himself actually specced out the car at the time!

But today I want to talk about his most recent acquisition this absolutely fantastic and gorgeous 1976 Seville.

As he related, “When I was 18 years old I was friends with all the Cadillac Oldsmobile salesmen and I was totally fascinated by the new Seville that came out in 1976. The salesman let me drive it for a whole day and I was totally smitten! Well here I am 50 years later and I finally got one!”

“This all original 52000 mile example caught my eye and I brought it home! It drives just how I remember it and I am once again in love!”

At first I thought it was Firethorn, but now I am pretty sure it is Emberglow Firemist. Absolutely gorgeous color, especially with the white interior!

It's fantastic. So until next time ladies and germs, keep calm, Brougham on, and ALWAYS tip your bartender!

Good morning friends. This one’s short due to a long race weekend and some scheduling conflicts this morning, but we will have five posts between now and the next Sunday OT, so feel free to either gird your proverbial loins or activate your proverbial mail filter.

“You’re not poor, you’re broke, that’s different.”

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Other than selling completely unregulated “Surrons” with pot-metal frames and fruit-fly life expectancy to welfare scammers in our country’s urbanized ZIP codes, the full-sized pickup business should be the easiest game in the wheeled-vehicle business. The customers don’t expect the product to ride well, stop well, handle well, or even display a lot of durability in the interior or trim. The chassis engineering is beyond basic. The bodies can weigh anything. Your 3/4 ton and above product gets to escape all sorts of regulation. The client base is intensely brand loyal and, on the aggregate, not exactly over-educated. Oh, and there’s also the fact of markup; I don’t think any mass-market auto product since the original Grand Cherokee has had the kind of profit gap in it that full-size pickups have. It should be impossible to screw this up.

And yet… General Motors has managed to do it. Every engine they fit to a pickup chassis now has a defined and in some cases inescapable set of problems. I don’t even know how to adequately describe the sort of deranged cupidity that causes the company to seek additional cost savings on, say, a $78,500 High Country Silverado. Tony Soprano didn’t run sporting-goods stores with this level of disregard for society.

Which should leave the field wide-open for Ford… except their premier engine, the 3.5TT, has an array of non-fatal (but expensive issues). The 5.0 isn’t widely available in the upscale product. The 2.7TT is durable but not exactly overpowered. And so on.

Which should leave the field wide-open for Ram… but you’ve got MDS issues, camshaft issues, and a few other minor problems.

Then there’s Toyota, which has decided in recent years that the engines in their trucks should fail as often as possible. The Japanese blame the American plant, because the same engine in the LS500 was okay. The Americans reply that the LS500 engine has far more component money in it, and also that no one tows or hauls with an LS500.

Nissan has quit the business.

Alright, let’s get to tonight’s question, which comes from DataDriven:

Jack, i hope you’re really doing well. My son is turning 18, graduating high school, and then shortly heading to college. He currently drives a 2021 HRV, so absolutely no fool factor there. He has said he wants a truck. So for all the above happening at the same time, I want to purchase him a new full size 4x4. I’ve had mostly GM but have also owned a Tundra (5.7, awful towing), diesel Dodge (motor was great, everything else a POS), and a F150 a long time ago).

I just can’t see a Dodge, so it’s out. GM seems like garbage now, Toyota doesn’t seem much better (bought the extended warranty on our LX600 last year, an extended warranty on a Lexus seems counter intuitive). Does that mean Ford? Help me out, what’s the best reliability, trim, and engine for the money?

First things first: props for being a great dad. In 2026 we can forget about all that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “work for your vehicle” crap that (some of ) Gen X went through. It doesn’t build character to drive a piece of junk; it only makes it harder to compete against the kids who don’t. While it’s true I did not get my son a new car, it wasn’t because I thought he would build character driving a 135,000-mile Honda Accord. It was because I wanted to spend the money on buying myself bedazzled Golden Goose sneakers to wear in the Centurion Lounge.

Assuming your boy will use this truck to move forward in a successful academic career, followed by a successful work career in which he is not perpetually spending his evenings under a leaking oil pan gasket, then we should prioritize durability and usability over “rizz”.

But first, a digression: unless he is going to work in “The Patch” as an oil rigger, is a full-sized 4x4 the best way to spend your money? It will be expensive to fuel, to insure, to park, even to maintain. If we can walk away from the half-ton category, we have vastly more reasonable options, like a Camry, Accord, or even (deep breath) a Model 3. I like the Land Cruiser 1958 as a halfway point between a mainstream sedan and a full-sizer. It will last longer, cost less to run, and be worth more when you sell it.

End of digression. I’m prepared to recommend two full-sized trucks in the same $60k bracket as a Land Cruiser:

For sixty-five grand we have the F-150 XLT “Mid” with Max Tow, 5.0 V8, and Chrome Appearance package. That gets you a power slider window, heated power-adjustable front cloth seats, a limited slip diff, and enough gingerbread to not look like a base truck. You can save six or seven grand by choosing the 2.7TT without Max Tow, but trust me: when you list it for sale in ten years, the first question you get from everyone will be “Is it a 5.0?” I left off the various off-road packages because I think they are idiotic unless you’re going to go off-road; that’s why I probably have the only F-250 Platinum 4x4 in the country without “FX4”.

Here’s the other choice, and frankly I would be a little more likely to buy it:

This will be seven or eight grand cheaper in the real world than the Ford. It’s the Big Horn Level 2, which gets you a stereo and a center screen. It has the 5.7 Hemi, which to my mind is currently the class of the half-ton field, plus Trailer Tow II Group.

If you want to spend sixty-five grand, you can get the Laramie with just the Trailer Tow Group, and that is a very nice truck inside and out.

Is it worth it to spend more? I don’t know if an 18-year-old is going to benefit from the massaging seats and fancy leather in, say, a Ford King Ranch or RAM Limited. Let’s hope he has the sort of adventures that mess the thing up a little bit, ya know?

Alternately, is it worth it to spend less? Not unless you’re really cash-constrained. A base XLT Ford can be a rough place to spend time, and the XL is just miserable. Ram is better in this regard, but if you go too cheap you’ll have a Pentastar powering the thing. There’s also the fact that the V-8 costs more in a lower end truck.

Alright, I lied. I have one more candidate:

Two-thirds the price, just as much truck, with five thousand miles on the clock. There are quite a few of these Titans floating around. While I wouldn’t normally hold up a Nissan as a paragon of reliability, the later Titans have a good reputation and they’ve earned it. This is darned close to a new truck, but it’s not a new new truck. So when your son scratches it in a parking lot or his “situationship” girlfriend spills her White Claw in the passenger seat it won’t be a federal case. Parts and service will be available for a long time to come. It is difficult for me to conceive of a scenario where the resale value of this truck does not eventually converge with that of the other two suggestions; in other words, you save $20-25k up front and always save it.

Obviously, I cannot recommend you buy a GM truck; things have gone sharply downhill there since I got my very nice 2017 Silverado Max Tow 6.2 back in the day. (Although, to be fair, that truck ate torque converters at the rate of one every 40,000 miles.) If you must get a GM, I hate to say it, but… get a TurboMax. It’s their most reliable engine and, if what I read can be believed, has the fewest warranty claims of any half-ton powertrain in the first few years. The problem is that the power is kind of marginal for a modern half-ton, which means you’ll work it harder — and you’d be ill-advised to tow with it. Even the engine doesn’t blow up, you will be running the turbo at max pressure quite a bit, which does not translate to fuel economy.

As always, suggestions from the commentariat are welcome!

Good afternoon, friends. Let’s start with a brief commercial message:

Less new content than The Itchy And Scratchy Movie

It’s been called “one of the books released this year”, and now it can be yours: the paperback and Kindle versions of Rodney Redux are available to buy on Amazon. Unlike Cat Tales, this is a true anthology. Everything you’ll read was previously published at some point between 2011 and 2025. However, every story has been revised, clarified, and (where appropriate) expanded. Owning this book will also save you from having to wade through the bizarre omissions, technical errors, and click-through links that now infest and degrade TTAC. As before, I’ll have a few “Meow and Dent” early paperbacks with approximately 15 annoying typos for sale. Each will ship with what I think is a hilarious “Rodney” sticker, and can be signed as you request. Due to the annoyances of Amazon’s publication system, I still don’t have the books even though I know they are flawed, but you can contact me now at hardcover@cattalesbook.com to reserve your copy.

If you’re part of Kindle Unlimited, you can read the book there; please do so, or at least flip through the pages in a convincing fashion so I get paid.

A reminder: this is an NC-17 book and then some, so don’t buy it for your grandmother unless she’s a real G… randmother.

The return of the king

One suspects this will be the second year in a row where Red Bull’s slightly laggy development robs Max Verstappen of a championship. He was one caused-by-Kimi-Antonelli crash away from it last year; this year he is probably three George Russell crash-outs away from being able to come back and win it all. Had Kimi and George split the early races, it might have been possible. Alas, Princess George continues to suffer from problems not of his own making; he will also be taking a grid penalty at Singapore due to the power unit failure.

It’s worth nothing that Max probably didn’t have the fastest car; that honor would go to the Ferrari. But he had Hannah Schmitz where Ferrari appears to have either an early version of ChatGPT or a Magic 8 Ball (“All signs point to SLICKS.”) Other notes:

• This whole Bahrain-in-Malaysia thing was wild. They had a massive “Bahrain pavilion”, and the announcers were scrupulous about their track nomenclature. Expect this to be a killer trivia question in thirty years: “Name the country where the 2026 Bahrain GP was held.”

• I adore Sepang, not least because I took second place at my lone event there in 2013, and the quality of this race just makes it obvious that we should always have had it on the calendar. It’s a great track. The fans are great. It’s down the road from Singapore but attracts a different audience. We could stand to lose the COTA race in favor of a reanimated Malaysian GP.

• F1 is rightly embarrassed about the ECU lockups during the warmup laps, but remember that this is bleeding-edge racing of a sort; not every situation can be anticipated. In the end, the problem was sorted in a hurry.

• Sir Lewis distinguished himself during the race, both as a driver and an amateur strategist, but the British press was so busy licking Hamilton’s toes for pulling off the 18th-to-3rd move that they ignored Leclerc’s 22nd-to-4th. Charles doesn’t even appear on this week’s official Power Rankings, while Lewis is third. Without a Mercedes power unit failure, they’d have been 4th and 5th, hardly worth celebrating in what is clearly the fastest car on the grid.

• The much-feared Mercedes upgrade appears to have been a complete mistake, at least for Sepang. It hardly matters. If Kimi skipped four of the next seven races, he would still only have to beat George in the last three. This championship is effectively won. However, it is still quite possible for Max to finish third.

• Is this the beginning of the Aston renaissance? Alonso, like Max and Pierre Gasly in the second half of his career, tends to flatter the car. Lance Stroll’s 12th-place is more reflective of the actual pace, one suspects. Discussion for today: Where would Lance be if you put him as second driver in the top four teams?

We go immediately to Singapore, and my only regret is that I’ll have to (pretend to) pay attention to my own race and the races of my family before I can get home and watch it.

Heart like a weasel

It’s the worst thing to happen to drag racing in anyone’s memory. Darryl Cuttrell, owner of a company (Darana Hybrid) that outfits and equips warehouses, bought the IHRA, which is to the NHRA like the ABA was to the NBA (kinda). He spent tons of money and bought a lot of tracks. Then everything collapsed. Now the tracks are set to auction off. This is devastating for the sport. Perhaps Cuttrell saw himself as a straight-line Bruton Smith, but in the end he was more like Carly Fiorina or Eddie Lampert.

Three of his tracks are in Ohio; they represent the vast majority of drag racing here and possibly all the quarter-mile tracks as Norwalk and a few others are doing eighth-mile racing now. Will all of these facilities become data centers? I doubt it, as most of them barely had enough power and access to work as dragstrips. Still, this is an outstanding example of how not to be a caretaker. Hoping to achieve legendary status in drag racing, Darryl Cuttrell will now be remembered as the man whose ineptitude betrayed the sport, perhaps fatally so.

I take back everything I said about the X-Type diesel

The new Jaguar is here, and it’s awful.

While it’s certainly possible to make the case that Jaguar always sold the general appearance of an upscale British car without the attendant price, engineering certainty, or build quality — the late LJK Setright made that case every chance he got — the “Type 01” is about to take that proposition to the levels of parody. This new Jag is a pastiche of faux-Phantom-esque pretensions, battery-powered to the tune of 1,015 horsepower and commanding a minimum $130,500 pricetag. The only thing genuinely “Jaguar-esque” about it is the “reverse-TARDIS” combination of massive exterior size and cramped accommodations familiar to anyone who ever tried to put four people in an XJ-S. Four-wheel-steering will help it park, and at 206 inches it will need the help. This car is the size of an S-Class but appears to have the interior room of a 190E, largely thanks to the E-Type-proportioned bonnet.

Of course, the E-Type (and the XJ-S) had either six or twelve cylinders to hide beneath that bonnet. The Type 01 has… a frunk? Batteries? Nothing?

As a former Series III XJ6 Vanden Plas owner I’m horrified by this crass, ill-proportioned, absolutely unjustifiable late-term abortion of an EV. So I asked The Autopian’s Adrian Clarke for an alternative viewpoint. You’ll be able to find his thoughts in detail tomorrow morning at that site, and I’ll update this paragraph with the appropriate link when it’s ready. (Edit: it’s here.) Adrian says, via e-mail:

We live in an age of flattened culture. The algorithm dictates aesthetics and taste. Coffee shops are all have exposed bricks and string lights. You will drink a small batch IPA. New consumer products invariably end up with rounded corners and come in various shades of griege. Human interactions have been replaced by apps with soft fonts and purple to orange gradient backgrounds. The flip side to this unthreatening bouba-slop norm, is that it opens up space on the outside for hyper-targeted products aimed at very specific audiences. The splashy hyper-neon corporatism of Bungie’s “Marathon” is one of the most distinctive and original art styles seen in a computer game for decades, and like the Jaguar attracted eye rolling amounts of outrage. But the people who love the game (myself included) – really, really love it. By making the Type 01 exterior hostile to external audiences and the interior welcoming to Linkedin AI thought leaders, Jaguar is undoubtedly counting on the buying power of Silicon Valley HNWIs to achieve the same result.

Thank you for that reasoned and intelligent run-down, Mr. Clarke. As for me, I’ll tell you what the Type 01 deserves:

They’ll drink to that

We all know that Virginia is not the place to speed. Former Jalop Patrick George did three days in jail ten years ago when he took a Camaro ZL1 to 93 in a 55. (Astoundingly, he would then go on to crash a different Camaro at Belle Isle; maybe he should just stay away from Camaros.) And if you think they are hard on speeders, you should see what they do to drunk drivers. We’re talking jail time, ignition interlocks, and a Class 1 misdemeanor — for the first offense. Virginia grinds the living shit out of drunks.

Unless, of course, they’re one of the 500,000 illegal immigrants granted de facto citizen status due to DACA. Then the state opens its loving arms and finds alternative solutions. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee questioned Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti regarding her office’s policy of waiving DUI charges for illegal immigrants. She admitted under oath that her office will reduce or change DUI charges if the drunk in question is here illegally, stating

Generally, in Northern Virginia, with a non-elevated BAC, a first offense would not necessarily result in jail time to begin with… DACA recipients and others have been subject to prosecutions, fines, and jail just like anyone else — just not MORE than anyone else. It is the disproportionate collateral consequences that we are trying to manage, and it is for everyone that comes before us, whether it be housing, employment, or immigration status, as long as it is consistent with public safety.

Emphasis mine. To be clear, she is referring to the fact that a DUI can cause a DACA recipient to be deported. Under Presidents Obama and Biden, this did not happen; the general response of the Federal government was to pet the drunk DACAer on the head and say, “You little rascal, run along now!” However, President Trump has deported about 100 DACA recipients due to their criminal behavior, so Mrs. Dehghani-Tafti, who is a native of Iran, has consequently decided that protecting the immigrants is more important than protecting Virginia’s motorists. In colloquial terms, this is called “Brock Turnering”, which is a term I just made up for supporting the bright futures of young people who are more important than the lower-status people around them.

In retrospect, it’s obvious what Patrick George should have done when he was pulled over: responded with a brief “no hablo” before stealing the trooper’s Taser and going buck wild on the fellow’s ball sack.

It could have gone a lot worse

Welcome the not-quite-Neue 3-series, available starting at $51,250 for the 255-horsepower turbo-four sedan and $67,250 for an M350 with all-wheel-drive and a combined 437 horsepower (420 ICE, 17 EV) from a turbo three-liter straight six.

While the i3 and iX3 are all new, and I’ll have an iX3 review for you next week, the car you see above is just a facelifted-and-revamped version of the car already acclaimed as “the best modern BMW” by our friend(s) at Gen X Garage Talk. Of course, it has more screens than does its illustrious predecessor:

BMW used this revamp as an excuse to remove the manual transmission globally; it wasn’t required by emissions or regulatory standards but why not do it?

There’s some value here, as the new car offers a bit more in regards to electronic features while not really costing any more. The 4-cylinder is all the car anyone really needs and the M350 will be more than anyone really needs. If the iX3 I just drove is any indication, the interior will be quite upscale in person. The pasted-on Neue Klasse looks are, in my opinion, a bit of an improvement on what came before.

I’ll give BMW full credit for not abandoning the compact-sedan format. It still matters to many of us. And there’s some satisfaction to be had from the fact that today’s NPC-types all buy crossovers. When you see someone behind the wheel of this car, regardless of color, powertrain, or option load, you’ll know that you’re in the presence of someone who likes driving and wants to do it well.

Would I buy one? Hell no. I’d buy this:

It’s an old, old, old car. Which, sadly, is the best recommendation you can give nowadays.

The Volkswagen ID.4 was a failure in the United States — surprise! who could have predicted this! — but in Europe it was a bigger failure. In fact, the entire “ID” line was a failure. When a senior person from Volkswagen stands up and admits that the cars faced significant resistance from customers, as happened on the final night of the German Car Of Th…

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