The name Sébastien Chaulmontet may not ring any bells, but if you have a watch with a SW300 movement, you already own something bearing his touch. The wiry guy in thick-rimmed glasses walking up to my table at a Zürich café looks more like a lawyer than a passionate watch collector and marketing director of Sellita1. In his spare time he collects mostly Angelus and Longines timepieces, but he’s interested in odd complications, or prototypes that never made the market. He also holds 4 patents related to the venerable Valjoux/ETA 7750 movement; while working on those, he had this idea of creating “Imaginary Vintage” watches that aren’t simple reissues of old designs, instead something that could have been purpose-made in the 40s or 50s. From his home office he can see the Albis mountain range, with its highest elevation being... the Albishorn. That’s the company name taken care of, then.

Looking at the watch on my wrist, all of this tracks. The case design heavily references the elusive Rolex Zerograph flyback chronographs, and the watch face is a mix between a Breguet Type XX and a 1944 Rolex-Panerai that Albishorn calls “California Ghost”. Looking at the arrangement one would be tempted to think of some heavy modification to the base 7750 movement, but if you note that the crown is nestling in the unusual 10:30 position, you realize that the minute counter and the running seconds are in the standard 9 and 12h positions, just rotated through 125° so that they are inline at the bottom. Sébastien explains: “We did a lot of work to shrink it down to from 7.9 to 5.7mm - you don’t lose thickness just by omitting the 12h counter. This is why it’s not automatic. But we increased the power reserve from 48 to 65 hours!” I must have furled my brow because he assured me that despite the patented monopusher complication, any watchmaker familiar with the base movement should be able to service it. Albishorn sells the watches with a 2-year limited warranty, and they will ship the bespoke parts2 to anywhere in the world. There’s not much sense in sending it back to Switzerland from the USA for a simple ‘clean and oil’ service anyway.

So what is the story of this one? It was inspired by the 1952 Swiss expeditions to Mount Everest - the primary objectives of which included exploring access to the South Col, conquering the intricate Khumbu Icefall, and potentially advancing to the South Col. They came very close; mountaineer Raymond Lambert and sherpa Tenzing Norgay had set a new altitude record of 8,595 metres when they faced the impossible choice of summit (and die) or retreat (and, perhaps, try again). Following this near-success in the spring, they resolved to make another attempt after the summer monsoon. However, they didn’t settle the schedule until June so the second team arrived too late, facing harsh winter conditions, and was forced to abort. The following year, New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay used the experiences gained by the Swiss teams (and some of the provisions they left behind) to make a successful summit push. The Swiss would have to wait 4 more years to plant their own flag on the mountain.

Pictures of the 1952 expedition are extremely rare but if you look at the Brits’ photos from the following year, you’ll notice cylindrical containers with an intricate logo of a Swiss cross and rope on them - this is engraved on the caseback. That logo belongs to the Zürich-based “La Fondation Suisse pour la Recherche Alpine”, the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research. Since 1939, they had organized expeditions to the Himalaya and this was their logo. Until José Perez (of Perezcope fame) pieced together the story, nobody had any idea how Rolex Daytonas from the 70s came to existence with this “mystery cross” on their casebacks. The most credible theory is that the Foundation ordered them for the 20th anniversary of the successful expedition.

Not a bad starting point for a homage then, 70 years on. The Thundergraph’s iridescent petroleum-blue dial is intricately detailed; as I turn it into the sun to appreciate the color, Sébastien explains that he uses a dial maker in Neuchâtel who gold-plates the polished brass base, then applies one coat of blue, then diamond cuts the subdial edges, gold plates it AGAIN so the angles are shiny, then applies coats of clear lacquer that create depth. A loupe or a microscope is necessary to see that the gold finish on the applied indexes and hands is brushed - and they have beige Super-Luminova filling. The subdial hands also have a luminous lollipop at their tips. It is a lume monster as I find out later that evening. The subdials have an azurage finish, this creates the optical illusion of concentric circles but it is actually a spiral with a beginning and an end.

Despite the expedition-ready looks, it wears like an everyday watch. Case diameter is 39mm across with a 42.5mm bidirectional bezel, and thanks to all that mechanical development, it is only 12mm thick. From the manufacturer it comes on a nice petrol-blue leather strap (a tan suede strap is included in the box) and there’s an option for a bespoke steel link bracelet. As I keep finding out, it can live very nicely on an olive NATO or a yellow sailcloth strap as well. The blue strap complements the dial, while the yellow or tan ones complement the crown. We talk with Sébastien for some time about the chronograph pushers, his point is that mechanically they should be made with the least resistance, just to be easy on the parts that have to slide on each other; I chide my Tudor’s MT5813 a bit, which feels like you’re breaking a hamster’s ribs every time you start it. (Try an IWC Doppelchrono sometime, it’s worse, and the Piguet Omega Broad Arrow was worst of all! — jb) The Thundergraph Himalaya is better by contrast, starting and stopping feel the same, with a definite take-up point. The 3rd push (the reset, which has the most subassemblies to actuate) feels the stiffest, but still not as rough as the Tudor.

So you get:

• a story

• a 100% Swiss designed and made, COSC-certified chronometer with hacking seconds, two straps, 330ft/10bar waterproofing

• a soft travel case in a presentation box.

The watch is CHF3,650 (ex. VAT), if you’re the traveler type, I’d recommend picking it up in person, or at least in Switzerland, so you only pay the 8% tax on it. I think you get exceptional value for your money. Albishorn has other watches as well; the sister model to the Thundergraph is called the Khumbu, it is light apple green, matched to a vintage Land Rover Defender color. Their “Air” line has one novel complication - a chronograph “telltale” like fighter plane instrument clocks had - it shows black if the chrono is reset to zero, red when running, and white when stopped. The reason for this is that in high G-load situations you want to be darned sure that it was you who started the clock, not an errant shock. The newest of their offerings are the “Water” line of watches that are a combination skin diver/regatta timer - with another patented complication that stops the regatta timer at the end of the 10 minute countdown. You’ll pay an extra CHF300 for the Air and Water watches because on those even the bezel gets luminous indexes.

Sébastien Chaulmontet might not be a household name, but if you enjoy Swiss watches, his should be a name in your household. This watch might do well there, too.

He is finally a racer, just not a great one

If Casey Putsch didn’t exist, someone would have to make him up. He’s a bizarre combination of grandiose, thin-skinned, goofy, and possibly just plain evil. I have repeatedly e…

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The history of “automotive awards” in the United States is a long and not particularly distinguished one. The one that is most familiar to the man in the street — Motor Trend’s “Car Of The Year” — is an ethically vacant and artisically despicable promotional product that costs the “winner” an absurd amount of advertising commitment and direct payment to “win”. Car and Driver long claimed to have no external influence on their “10 Best” choice, but that didn’t stop them from charging to license the “award” in marketing or promotional communications.

The North American Car and Truck of the Year (NACTOY) was supposed to be a little better than that. Instead of a single media organization that could be subject to any number of external pressures, it used a jury composed of diverse voices from across automotive and mainstream media. While it’s not cheap for a manufacturer to participate in NACTOY, the fees are generally believed to be a fraction of those commanded by Motor Trend, and the voting process is independent of financial considerations.

When it’s operated correctly, NACTOY has been great value for everyone. The consumer gets what feels like (and should be) an impartial recommendation. The manufacturer gets to publicize the award for less than the cost of a back-cover ad in Car and Driver. And the journalists themselves are theoretically improved by being exposed to the bulk of the year’s new cars in a fair and informative environment.

Unfortunately, if the multiple conversations I have had with various NACTOY jurors past and present can be believed, the organization has run dangerously off the rails, and faces what amounts to an existential crisis in the year to come — one that will be exacerbated, not ameliorated, by their likely next leader.

The money problem

Until recently, NACTOY was led by local radio personality Jeff Gilbert and mommyblogger Nicole Wakelin. According to my sources, the two have made several choices that have both reduced NACTOY’s potential income and drastically increased its expenses. As a result, the organization has spent more than half of the nest egg inherited by Gilbert and Wakelin.

“This shouldn’t be hard,” one juror commented. “You sell the NACTOY name for five figures, and you sell the actual trophies at 100% markup. Against that, you have one annual event, the PR budget, and whatever you spend on little extras.” Yet Gilbert and Wakelin have consistently run in the red despite the lemonade-stand level of financial acumen required.

Gilbert’s decision to retire, which followed the tragic suicide of a NACTOY juror and the departure of other jurors, led the jurors as a whole to assume that Wakelin would take over. However, it’s my understanding that she is leaving autowriting due to a lack of opportunities to make money. Which leaves the field wide open — or should leave it wide open, anyway.

If you’re left, you’re right

Something I have heard from NACTOY jurors on both sides of the political fence is that the organization leans drastically, almost catastrophically, to the left. This is not a credibility builder with enthusiasts or with the PR staff at automakers, one of who was reported to have said '“[senior left-leaning NACTOY member] is an utter idiot and killing the brand with the political BS.” While there’s no requirement that an autowriter be from the “truck nuts” or “coal rolling” side of the aisle, it’s difficult to judge cars if you hate the car as it currently exists. To misquote Michael Jordan (the ballplayer, not the autowriter!): Republicans buy cars too. And Republicans build cars.

The loudest voice, but is she the sanest one?

If you’ve never heard of Jill Ciminillo, I can’t blame you. She’s not exactly a famous autowriter, nor is she an automotive competitor. She did obtain some notoriety around this time last year, however, when she made a deranged-sounding post on X reading:

“Dear \@realdonaldtrump … I’ve been carjacked in Chicago with my arm broken. I still don’t want you or your troops here. TIA. BTW there are no red hats here.”

The gross authorial incompetence of writing “TIA” when it was, not, in fact, all aside, this post doesn’t sound like anything a sane person would write. Are we supposed to believe that she enjoyed her carjacking and arm-breaking? Did she enjoy it so much that she disapproves of any effort to stop other people from getting the same treatment? It’s her right to not want troops in Chicago, the same way it would be someone else’s right to want to have fewer than 1,392 people shot in Chicago from January 1 to today, but does her status as a carjacking victim mean that she gets more say than someone who has yet to be carjacked?

The NACTOY jurors with whom I spoke have a low opinion of Jill, both professionally and personally. I can’t personally remember anything she’s written, but maybe there’s some Paul Frere style brilliance in “Here Are the 4 Best Small SUVs for Short Drivers, From a 5’0″ Reviewer”. One juror pointed out that she has a habit of photographing herself portraying some sort of kidnap victim in the trunk of the cars she reviews:

Indeed, she maintains a separate fetish-style account for her trunk material, called “girlinthetrunk”.

“It’s highly disturbing that she keeps making this content, and she’s been asked to stop,” the juror said, noting that the combination of “girlinthetrunk” with her apparently conflicted attitude towards carjacking ventures dangerously close to encouraging fetish behavior on the part of NACTOY media consumers.

Now, you might wonder why we’re talking so much about Jill here. Doesn’t NACTOY have other jurors? They sure do, like Jodi Lai, a woman who once whipped up a public firestorm of online bullying against a Nissan mechanic (and single parent) who dared to criticize her work on Twitter, said bullying reportedly resulting in the mechanic losing his job after several journalists harassed the dealership where he was employed. Then there’s Gary Vasilash, who recently claimed that the spread between MSRP and invoice has vastly increased since COVID, a claim of such staggering ignorance that I cannot imagine someone being willing to publish it.

NACTOY also has plenty of competent, credentialed writers with industry or competitive backgrounds — but we’re talking about Jill here because she is believed to be the heir apparent to the organization’s top slot.

The challenges she’ll face

Ms. Ciminillo will inherit an organization that is losing money, losing credibility, and rapidly gaining a reputation as a left-wing echo chamber. Can she turn it around? There’s nothing in her background to suggest that she can balance a checkbook, let alone run an organization that has six figures’ worth of annual travel expenses. The jurors with whom I spoke seemed confident that NACTOY will be out of money within two or three years, at best. “And there’s no one coming to save us, because no one in the industry has any respect for Jill. She won’t be able to negotiate our deals or ensure that we have revenue from the awards.”

The average age of a NACTOY juror, based on my rough examination, is probably north of sixty. Many of these folks aren’t particularly concerned with the organization’s future. But the younger members are concerned, and there doesn’t appear to be much confidence that the expected new direction is the right one.

The worst time to have a bad president

NACTOY has other headwinds besides bad leadership. The average consumer’s interest in new cars has declined sharply. The annual release cycle that used to captivate the country and sell out the Detroit Auto Show in the dead of winter is no more. NACTOY juror and SCCA winner Henry Payne details some of the problems in a recent article on the subject. One of the more pressing issues: there are very few cars left to win a “Car of the Year” award.

Meanwhile, the automakers are increasingly reluctant to pay to use the NACTOY name or participate in the events. They’re all searching under the couch cushions for money to pay influencers. It’s a simple equation, really. In 1975, Car and Driver had audience and credibility. In 2025, someone like Jill Ciminillo has no audience and no credibility. So you’re better off hiring an Instagram or TikTok personality to deliberately and openly promote the product; that person has an audience, and she has credibility with that audience. I mean, come on — whose advice are you gonna take on your next purchase? Some person of whom you’ve never heard, or the TikTok star whose content you consume twice a day?

How to make it right

It would be uncharitable to complain about the state of affairs without suggesting a resolution. Therefore, I have formally applied to join NACTOY as a juror, hoping to effect worthwhile change from within. This is the first time in fifteen years I’ve even considered being part of an automotive association beyond the nonpartisan and highly credentialed German Car Of The Year awards.

As a NACTOY juror, I will push for detailed financial accountability, a return to the high standards of selection, and trophies that more obviously justify their new-motorcycle price.

Although I have a total audience approaching 10 million readers across my current outlets, I doubt my application will be approved. I’m insufficiently left-wing, having only campaigned for one Clinton, and I’m also notorious for demanding strict adherence to ethics in automotive journalism. So the most I can continue to do is to call attention to the problem, in the hopes that the membership will fix their wagon with or without me. If they don’t, then Motor Trend will once again be the only “Car of the Year” in this country. That’s a sad state of affairs, and one that can be avoided. Let’s hope.

Good afternoon, friends.

Your tires cannot degrade without your consent

The current rumor is that Fernando Alonso sat down with the organizers of the newly-laid-out “Madring” and told them — hey, this is gonna be an awful race, you need to change something — but there wasn’t enough time to incorporate any changes. Which gives them plenty to work on for next year, because this “fast Monaco” was painfully processional. Oddly enough for a race with basically no passing, there were four people who could have won. Lando Norris was the class of the field all weekend, opening up a lead so dominant that he missed the flippin’ Virtual Safety Car. McLaren’s decision to pit him anyway made no sense, and turned his assured victory into a hard-fought third place. Charles Leclerc proved to be a master at taking care of his tires; with one more VSC he would have been the winner. Max Verstappen was instructed to give a position back to Lewis Hamilton, but doing so meant that he had to let Kimi Antonelli by. Max had equal pace to Kimi in the actual race, so that perhaps-hasty decision on the pitwall gave away the win.

I still don’t know how this catastrophic track design made it all the way to race day. Someone should have their hand slapped. F1 can’t survive if the product always looks like this. Other notes:

• Lando’s coke habit: Apparently McLaren’s deal with Coca-Cola is up for renewal. Cue an almost certainly staged incident where Lando cracks open a can in the cooldown room, is confronted by F1 personnel, then responds, “I just did a race, so I’m allowed to drink whatever I like. Thank you so much.” I highly doubt that Lando’s first choice of drink after a race is Coca-Cola — that might fly in SCCA Prototype X, but unlike your humble author, Lando is a racer-athlete. I think this was probably as pre-arranged as Lloyd Bentsen’s famous put down of Dan Quayle, which was treated by the compliant media as authentic live-action genius but in fact had been rehearsed to perfection before the debate.

• Spanish injustice for Yuki! After flopping in qualifying, Yuki Tsunoda found himself starting in the scrappy section of the grid. Carlos Sainz bashed him hard enough to cripple the Racing Bulls car, and that was that.; his P14 finish didn’t compare well to Lindblad’s P9.

• Unlucky Lewis: At Monaco, Charles Leclerc was betrayed by the brakes in his Ferrari, which were supplied by traditional Ferrari partners Brembo. The team has suffered various issues due to Lewis Hamilton’s insistence on using Carbon Industries discs and pads in the Brembo calipers and the consequent changes to brake tune. Eventually, Charles had to give in and use the same friction materials as Lewis, which has compromised his racing to some extent. Now we had Lewis with a brake failure at the Madring. The team’s official statement is that the failure was related to the rear brakes; the sole purpose of telling people this is apparently to convey that Hamilton’s major crash in free practice didn’t have anything to do with it. Nothing is ever the fault of Sir Lewis.

• Princess George continues to collapse: Kimi Antonelli now has eight wins from 38 starts; his teammate, George Russell, has seven wins from 166 starts. I have a lot of respect for George Russell as a driver, but he is clearly failing to deliver. Something similar has happened to Oscar Piastri, who went from being the likely WDC halfway through last year to “In other news, McLaren’s second driver Oscar Piastri finished behind an Alpine, again.”

Tragedy strikes the hard-parking community

Fortunate son, third-tier influencer, parking-lot-event organizer, and unsuccessful adulterer James Wehr was lost to the Orange County car-parking community when he decided to full-throttle rip down a wet section of a surface street after midnight in his dad’s McLaren 720S. Caution: this video shows the death of an innocent woman.

Wow, the way it immediately explodes is remarkable and if it were any other car but a McLaren I’d say the CIA pulled a Michael Hastings on him. This had to have been the most avoidable Hollywood explosion in history and you really get a sense for how far down the road Wehr was looking — which is to say, not at all.

This death is being treated like a tragic loss to “the car community” by outlets as respected as the Post and as marginal as the current iteration of Road&Track. While I try not to be in the business of disrespecting the dead, let’s be honest here: this dude’s primary achievements in life were getting a tribal tattoo sleeve and convincing a Hooters waitress that he was about to divorce his wife.

“Getting the opportunity to love you will always be the greatest blessing in my life,” the aforementioned wife posted on Instagram, before the identity of the passenger was revealed. “Like I said in my vows, I’m so grateful to have gotten the chance to live my life at the same time that you lived yours,” James’s wife added. “Whether it’s in this lifetime or the next, my heart will always find its way to you. Rest easy, my love.” After she discovered that her husband’s victim was a Hooters girl, she went ahead and got rid of all of that.

Your humble author lives in a glass house when pretty much all aspects of Christian morality are concerned, but I will say that Wehr’s acknowledged status as a pillar of the Orange County auto-enthusiast scene speaks ill of automotive enthusiasm in general. He became famous just for standing next to his dad’s car, but to quote failed threesome participant Edwin, also known as Ja Rule: “It’s not how you stand by your car, it’s how you race your car. You better learn that.”

Now how much would you pay?

Portland, Oregon’s Grand Prix Motorcars has made a business out of sourcing excellent-condition Porsches, but their latest sale listing has people wondering if this is a market indicator or evidence of marijuana emesis: a low-mileage 2011 Cayman S for… $79,900. This gets you the combination of stick shift and the direct-injection boxer that replaced the troubled and underperforming M96. If we put it up against two other cars in their lineup we get a sense of what they think the clutch-pedal premium is:

All three of these cars are what a Porsche guy might call “bullshit colors”. A Cayman R shows best in green, the 2014 is No Extra Charge White, and the $80,000 2011 Cayman is Speed Yellow, which is also a free color and maybe my least favorite color on a Cayman, period. The dealership is basically charging $25,000 extra for having a stick shift. Which was in no way rare fifteen years ago when the car was new; it ain’t like this is a manual-transmission 599 Fiorano.

The 987 Cayman S is a lovely car to drive. I can kind of make a case for the valuation here. While it’s possible to get a much newer car for similar money:

That one’s a turbo-four, which not everyone likes. It also feels much bigger inside and out than a 987, which was the last Boxster to have a traditional close-coupled Porsche cockpit without the giant Panamera center console in there with you. So there’s a case to be made for buying the older car, and if you have the money what’s the difference between the $55k it’s “really worth” and the $80k they want? It’s an afternoon of market gains, maybe.

Just to put the current insanity of the Porsche market in perspective, however: In 2005 I bought a 2004 Boxster S 550 from the Ferrari dealership in Washington DC. It had 4,300 miles on it. MSRP was, I think, $61,570 or thereabouts. I paid $41,000 flat, which would be $70,000 today. It was essentially a new car, without a single crease in the leather. It was a good deal at the time, but not an all-time great deal. Porsches tended to lose a third of their value in year one.

By contrast, this car is a decade and a half old, and it will need things if it’s going to run well. You could spend $15k on just getting all the rubber replaced throughout the vehicle.

I’ll keep an eye on this one. If nothing else, it suggests that we might be seeing the beginning of a “nostalgia market” for Caymans. Perish the thought!

Well, maybe it was funny to them

Half of the internet is up in arms about a video of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughing and smiling while the names of the 9/11 dead were being read. The full video shows that it was a brief conversation between the two upon meeting, after which they both resumed their silence.

On first consideration, I wasn’t particularly annoyed or upset about their interaction. Zohran was a child who had just moved to New York on 9/11; AOC was eleven years old and living in Westchester. (No, Bob James didn’t write the song about her!) You can’t expect either of them to take 9/11 personally; it would be like asking me to get upset about the Iranian hostage crisis. (For the record, I was a little upset.)

After some thought, however, I’m less indifferent to their little moment together. What distinguishes Mamdani and AOC from most politicians is that they are explicitly actors. Both of them starred in music videos before they became politicians. Both of them are master manipulators of the media, particularly social media. They are experts in “the optics”, one might say.

Therefore, both of them were aware that the 9/11 Memorial is tantamount to an extended funeral. Everyone knows what the rules are for meeting someone inside the church or funeral home; you keep your voice down, you are positive but not ebullient, and so on. Mamdani and AOC weren’t laughing at the dead, they weren’t celebrating a win for “their side”. They were merely being lazy and disrespectful. Which is enough, I think, for both of them to sink in the American estimation. Not that it matters, really. For a significant, and increasing, percentage of America, 9/11 disrespect is a good look and good police. Mamdani isn’t American-born; he will never be President. But you’d be a fool to bet against the Westchester Lady in that regard.

Horological hiraeth

It’s not as bold a new-nostalgia tribute as the Pac-Man Krayon, but Glashutte Original’s new “Seventies” collection is an open overture to Gen-X collectors. Available in Vinyl Record (black), Tweed Amp (brown) and Stereo Panel (silvery-white), the Seventies watches use 21k gold hands and indices on dials meant to conjure up old hi-fi equipment or guitar amps. (Even the black hands on the Stereo Panel are gold.) I’m partial to the Tweed Amp myself:

The black-faced Vinyl Record is a limited edition, priced at $16,300 with both straps. The Tweed Amp and Stereo Panel are priced at $13,200 (rubber strap) to $14,500 (steel bracelet).

Serious money for what are basically nostalgia pieces — but, like the $79,900 Cayman, these can be seen as test balloons for what we will cherish and value in the near future. You certainly can’t criticize the tastefulness of the design.

Housekeeping

I’m traveling for much of the next twelve days. We’ll have regular service for the most part; I might be 12 hours late due to timezones and daily commitments. I’m hoping to bring a couple of nice guest pieces your way in the near future; one of them is already scheduled. Thank you, as always, for reading — and please continue to feel encouraged to mention topics in your comments!

Recently your author discovered he still had a substantial amount of PTO, so it was decided that I would take most of the previous week off and go up to the lake.

The usual plan is to obtain a case of beer plus a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic water and a stack of mystery novels, frozen pizzas, chips, etc., and spend at least 82% of the time reading…

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Good afternoon, friends. Today we have an (accidentally) consistent set of topics that all boil down to wealth — how it’s cringey, how it’s awesome, how it’s distributed, how it’s spent. If you want a palate cleanser after or before this, please check out “Galahad Threepwood” and his excellent 9/11 post.

Why couldn’t they have just made it a data center?

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”It’s the best bike in the world,” my Eaglerider rep told me. “So that’s nice.” My exaggerated sense of middle-class politeness prevented me from replying with,

“Well, it might be the best bike in the world; that’s up for debate. What is not up for debate is what the R1300GS is not, namely: the…

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Good afternoon friends. Plenty of topics, let’s get right to it.

“Why can’t you just hire Valtteri and make him drive around behind me?”

It’s easy to be annoyed with the current Formula 1 machinery, a point ably underlined by Sebastian Vettel’s nostalgic run at Monza in Michael Schumacher’s F2002. He turned a 1:33.9 after starting with a series of donuts. It’s commonly believed that a standing start costs an F1 car about 8-10 seconds in laptime, which puts this demo run by a completely retired driver in a car yanked from the historic fleet an uncomfortable two or three seconds away from Pierre Gasly’s brilliant pole lap. With a little bit of preparation, the F2002 on slicks is probably faster than the current hardware, while looking and sounding infinitely more interesting. Vettel’s ability to show up and turn up also underscores the mild tragedy of his early retirement; both Hamilton and Alonso are older than he is, and both were already in F1 when Vettel made his debut at the USGP.

On the other hand, watching Sir Lewis continue to flounder in the red Ferrari offers no small argument for Vettel’s choice. You wouldn’t know it to listen to the announcers, but Sir Lewis has been outqualified by his teammate so far in 2026 and also overall in his Ferrari career and also overall since 2024. Leclerc also has a higher average finishing position in the races, which has been obscured by his three DNFs so far this season. At the start of Monza’s grand prix, placed by the grace of Oscar Piastri’s penalty behind the frequently brilliant Pierre Gasly and the dolorous “Princess” George Russell, Lewis pushed the issue with his teammate going into turn one only to be pushed off the outside in response a few meters later. Afterwards, Leclerc suggested that both drivers had “gone too far”, while Lewis demanded “rules of engagement” going forward before claiming, hilariously, that he was known for clean driving.

Leclerc did Lewis the favor of crashing out in the Parabolica, but despite his usual run of luck regarding competitors and safety cars and the like, our British Knight only made it up to sixth. This reflected his pace, if not the pace of the car.

Ferrari is in a tough spot here. They paid a lot of money for Lewis, a decision that will never make sense to me and is rendered even more ridiculous by the way Carlos Sainz is performing in a truly awful Williams. Lewis is in a bad mood because his decision to leave Mercedes looks worse every day and now a 19-year-old is showing the world how easy it is to beat George Russell, something that proved beyond Hamilton’s capabilities a full three years of aging ago. So Fred Vasseur has two choices:

0. Start giving team orders to favor Sir Lewis explicitly, which will infuriate Charles Leclerc and likely result in Ferrari having no veteran drivers two years from now;

1. Leave things as they are, knowing that Lewis will push the issue with Charles every chance he gets and then cry to the press about it, which makes him look like a complete and utter waste of money.

The obvious thing to do here: take Lewis Hamilton’s $100 million annual contract, cross out the words “Lewis Hamilton”, write in the words “Kimi Antonelli”, and take a genuine shot at winning the WDC with an Italian driver in an Italian car.

Other notes:

• Justice for Yuki! with a first-rate, highly-competitive drive from 15th to 10th. With the right tire strategy, it could have been a drive from 15th to 8th, but RB decided to give the primo options to Lindblad instead.

• Justice for Liam! as the overhyped and arrogant Australian fails to impress in the Red Bull. Every moment he spends in the car makes Isack Hadjar’s career look like more of a sure bet. It’s like the reverse of when Lou Gehrig replaced Wally Pipp.

• I think Alex Albon is a fantastic person and I appreciate his commitment to housecats but he should find a new home in IndyCar or possibly F3. Sainz is just taking him to the woodshed constantly.

• Someone should put George Russell on suicide watch before it’s too late. He is learning what it’s like to drive next to a generation talent.

• Speaking of generational talents… Max didn’t make Kimi work very hard for that pass, did he? Yet another example of mentorship and kindness from the driver who would be a five-time WDC had Kimi not hit him last year.

• Toto Wolff was visibly furious when Gasly stole pole position, but how angry can he be? It’s a Mercedes engine, and it would take an alien invasion to keep him from winning both team and driver championships this year.

• It’s not that I like Lando’s chances against Lewis this year. More like I like Lando’s chances against George and Lewis. He is driving like a champion.

You can pull the lever, and the trolley will miss all the people, but the DMV will have to fire someone

California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton proposes to shutter the California DMV, to reduce vehicle registration from the $400-plus most motorists are paying back down to the basic fee of $73, and to turn California’s 170 DMV locations into after-school club facilities. “You’re being ripped off by your government. They are gouging you with the DMV and vehicle registration. They charge the highest vehicle registration in the country for the worst roads in the country,” he notes.

The California DMV currently employs approximately, 8,300 people for the sole purpose of making things worse. That’s not quite fair; they also handle vehicle titles and a few other necessary registration tasks. Still, of all the governmental functions that could be more highly automated, vehicle registration has to be at or near the top in terms of payoff for effort. Not to mention the amount of work and productivity lost in the state as a result of having to visit a DMV location.

I truly enjoy telling my California friends about what I have to do in my country to title and register a vehicle. First, I drive 21 minutes to the county seat and walk into the title office. They have three employees who all know me, and there is never a line. Then I walk over to the BMV. They have five employees who all know me, and the line is never more than five minutes. Then I drive home. Even out-of-state registrations and title transfers rarely take me more than one hour door to door.

This wouldn’t be practical for Los Angeles, but surely there’s a better way to do things.

They could, but they won’t

Former TTAC supremo Derek and I were discussing a very nice AI photochop of a “Miata Special Edition” based on the current ND3. The 1991 Special Edition was the first of many Miatas to be distinguished from its lotmates by a color and a couple pieces of equipment:

Rather than run from the people who criticized the Miata as “nothing but a knockoff Elan”, Mazda leaned in with a British Racing Green and deep tan color combo, then tossed in a Nardi wheel to make the rest of the point, which was: we are all that is left of the British roadster.

Your humble author loved the car enough that he built and painted a 1/24 scale model of it at the too-old-to-be-making-car-models age of nineteen. The Special Editions were always a joy to see on the road. While I have nothing against the 30AE (obviously) or the purple-ish 35AE, the time has long arrived for Mazda to do another BRG car. Something sobering to consider: we are now on year thirty-seven of Mazda Miatas. The span of time between the MG TC and the rubber-bumper version of the MGB was… twenty-nine years. Miata production slightly exceeds MG production from 1945 to 1980 overall. The Miata is the most-raced production car in America.

In other words, Mazda has earned the crown and the color. Call it Hiroshima Racing Green, why dontcha?

Late to the party

We’ve had plenty of stupid vehicle introductions over the last few years, but the Jeep Recon is probably the worst yet. It costs north of $65k, has 670 horsepower, weighs more than 6,100 pounds, and is “Trail Rated”.

The various second-tier autowriters assigned to Jeep’s Moab luxury-trip reveal of this thing are all oddly astounded that the Recon is good off-road. It should be good off road. An EV has almost insurmountable advantages in off-road driving compared to any internal-combustion vehicle, because it should be able to precisely apply the right amount of torque to all four wheels individually. The Recon doesn’t quite do that because it has a pair of motors feeding gearboxes rather than four motors, but even being able to divide the motive unit into two should and does pay significant dividends.

The chassis is much stiffer than that of the Wrangler and it can drive doors-off without squeaking. Nevertheless, it’s fundamentally a stupid idea because off-road trails are the places in America least likely to have a charging station nearby, and part of being off-road is that you can’t really be exact as to your schedule or timing.

This will make a great way to get up a fire road to a rural home, but the same thing can be said about a 2008 Camry on 3-peak-mountain-snowflake tires. I think we will remember the Recon as the last gasp of a genuinely moronic period of time in industry/government interactions. Its existence is not a victimless crime because this kind of development money and effort probably could have gotten us a two-seat roadster or even a Recon powered by a Pentastar, but as the nice fellows in Colony House say, you gotta leave what’s lost behind.

There’s a limit to artificial intelligence, but no limit to human stupidity

One question that the readers did not ask in my tale of how my wife left me for a Zoox was the most obvious one: “Why is she so attracted to Zoox?” Part of it is merely comparative: your humble author is a genuinely unpleasant-looking person with no two limbs the same length and the deadest eyes this side of a Mako, so even a transportation pod looks handsome by comparison. The rest of it, however, is something called pareidolia, the tendency to see human faces and features in non-sentient objects. This cartoon, which I whipped up to annoy my wife during our flight, expresses it very well:

It was taken from a real-life photo that is hardly any less cutesy. We can easily see human characteristics in Zoox because we see them everywhere.

This is not limited to visuals. Way back in the computing stone age, people found some humanity in ELIZA, a 420-lines-of-code proof of concept from MIT. Nowadays it takes more than 420 lines of code to update a shopping cart on a Web app, if that puts things in perspective. It is human nature to see human qualities in inhuman objects. Which is why the average ChatGPT user feels so comfortable asking it how to strangle three children and get away with it, and so on.

Couple this with another human trait — wanting desperately for something to be true, and ignoring all evidence to the contrary — and you get the bizarre situation on X at the moment where a junior Anthropic employee claims to be quitting because he thinks AI will destroy the world and a senior Anthropic person says, “Yeah, he is right, and we estimate the chances at more than ten percent.”

To put this in perspective, at no point in modern history has there been any kind of consensus that anything had a better-than-ten-percent chance of annihilating humanity. No one felt that way about nuclear war; it was always assumed that some people would survive even the stoutest exchange of hostilities between the USA and USSR. No one thinks climate change will eradicate humanity. No one thinks a “superbug” will eradicate humanity. Yet you have a senior researcher at Anthropic throwing the figure around and all but putting “LOL” after the claim.

I certainly don’t think AI will become “superintelligent” and kill us all, ever. Moravec’s principle will keep some of us around for a very long time, even if our purpose is only to serve the machine overlords. I also personally believe, without being able to lay it out as a mathematical proof, that computing hardware as we know it will never generate consciousness. The brain is a neat piece of machinery and it benefits both from extreme density and some quantum-type effects which you cannot duplicate in silicon.

Which is not to say that “AI” cannot harm humanity. It can. It is. It already has harmed humanity, and there is much more harm to come. But the harm is not going to come from some Terminator or Matrix superintelligence. It will come from an overabundance of “2 sigma” people who will earnestly hook an LLM up to everything from autonomous armed drones to a nuclear power plant to the Hoover Dam if they get a chance. The AI won’t kill you with a chrome-skeleton robot; it will kill you because some idiot lets it oversee next year’s wheat-seed production. It won’t send out a red-eyed sentient airplane to end your life; it will accidentally overload part of America’s already strained East Coast grid and plunge 75 million people into a ten-day experiment in heatstroke and/or broad-scale residential looting.

What I want to suggest to you is that the prospect of the “AI Supervillain” is being continually held out in front of you for two reasons:

0. Darth Vader is cool and powerful, so you’re more likely to respect and use AI if you think it is Darth Vader;

1. as long as Anthropic et al manfully “stave off” the Matrix Architect, they aren’t answerable for everything else their product does to destroy your life, like encouraging children to commit suicide and hoovering up all the clean water in your local community.

For the record, Anthropic is not “trying its best” to prevent the AI superintelligent villain, because the people who actually write the stuff know damned well no such thing will ever happen. They give that work to Anthropic’s in-house tech-industry equivalent of Douglas Adams’ “phone sanitizers”. Anthropic has much more pressing matters at hand, like how to prevent the discount Alibaba AI from eating its lunch and rendering it irrelevant.

What the research actually shows is that every single AI product depends hugely on pareidolia to be valuable. The various productions of Chatty et al are treated like Samuel Johnson treated the idea of a woman preaching the Gospel; “The wonder is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all.” An hysterical pronouncement by Tyler Cowen that “AGI” had happened in the o3 model was countered by a caustic comment that “Tyler, maybe the fact that AGI wipes the floor with tasks in your profession says more about your profession more than it does about AGI.” And this one, too:

It should also be reiterated that most of the recent “breakthroughs” in AI are simply a result of figuring out ways to throw more hardware at it. AI has a scaling problem that is likely to prevent the next big leap from ever happening.

Trump, Xi, and the EU mandarins could handle this silliness with a very simple thing: a hard-wired kill switch that goes from their desks to every single data center in their country. Flip the switch and everything goes dark, immediately. I mean, an actual superintelligence could prevent this from happening by using every phone around the world leaders to reprogram their brains via electromagnetic pressure — I’m dead serious about that, human beings are open books to any genuine ultra-being — but since that’s not a real problem, the fake problem could be solved with a kill switch.

The fact that no one wants to spend $100 million of the $3 trillion AI budget on such an easy countermeasure should show you what’s really happening.

(By the way, if you’re reading this in the dark Terminator future of 2065 and you’re currently on the run from a liquid-metal T-1000, please feel free to stop by my property and piss on my grave. I deserve it.)

Welcome back, friends. Your humble author did not deliver the second half of the weekend OT due to travel difficulties. Please enjoy this makeup post and remember: no motorsports spoilers until tomorrow. Thank you! And now, a brief commercial message:

The greatest book since Fear Of Flying

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Splitting this weekend into the tough stuff and the easy stuff, with the former before the latter. Please feel encouraged to skip this one if you don’t want to think about the death of children and/or a system that encourages it. Also, I’m riding an R1300GS this weekend. If you have questions about it, put them below and I’ll answer them specifically in…

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This past Sunday, the 23rd, your author attended this excellent show in Kane County once again. And as always, this show never disappoints. To make it even better, this year my friend Jayson Coombes flew up from Texas to check out the show as well.

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As award-winning British actor (and fellow Richard Anderson client!) Jude Law says near the end of “Closer”… “This will hurt.” For once, however, it’s also going to hurt me as much as it hurts anyone else. After all, your humble author has made an absolutely unjustifiable amount of money, and has had more than an unjustifiable amount of fun, cataloging the failures of my so-called peers in the auto business. So-and-so can’t drive, so-and-so is a paid toady, so-and-so is a working prostitute, so-and-so lived off his wife’s customer tips from her, ahem, after-hours performing career while utterly failing at being a craft beer maker, and so on. I’ve been throwing stones from a concrete bunker for nearly twenty years. But this time, you can call me Leelee Sobieski because I’m inside the glass house myself.

The issue at hand: the so-called “huge strides” made by Hyundai/Kia over the past twenty years. The narrative pushed by the automotive media has generally sounded something like this:

Sure, Hyundais used to be crappy little cars like the Pony or Excel, but now they compete with the best that Honda and Toyota have offer, at a better value proposition besides. The upscale Hyundai SUVs, like the Palisade and its Kia Telluride sibling, are just as good as Lexus or Acura. They might even be better! Hyundai’s products are now equivalent to the Japanese but they also offer the kind of dynamic, prestigious styling and high-touch interiors that Toyota, Honda, and Nissan can’t or won’t provide.

This rhetoric was amped-up further with regards to Hyundai’s Genesis sub-brand. As early as 2009, Car and Driver was describing the first-generation Genesis sedan as being well ahead of front-wheel-drive competitors from Lincoln, Cadillac, and Acura, while The Car Connection stated that “The 2010 Hyundai Genesis is a power play for luxury credibility-and it’s just about the equal of mid-size luxury rivals from Lexus and Infiniti.”

While I never went quite that far, I’ve been effusive with praise for how Hyundais built around the turn of the century were considerable improvements over their predecessors, and I’ve been absolutely smitten with the last two generations of Genesis G80 and G90. While I’ve declined to participate in the worst of the hype — my 2017 Sonata review stated that “Were I spending my own money on a midsize sedan, I'd still pick the Accord or the Camry” — but I have advised plenty of people to add Hyundai to their potential-purchase lists. I’ve also repeatedly suggested that readers of ACF buy a G90.

When one of our readers took me up on it, his short tour through a living hell as a Genesis owner made me start reconsidering my advocacy. It also caused me to begin looking critically at Hyundai/Kia products as they age, a process that reached its natural conclusion yesterday when I started looking at data about older Genesis and Hyundai cars for sale. It’s now obvious to me that Hyundai never made quite the leap for which the media, self included, has given them credit. Before we look at the reality of the situation, however, let’s briefly discuss how we got here.

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Good morning, friends.

More proof I’m living in a simulation

In 1984, BMW brought us the 325e as an alternative to the unforgivably poky E30-generation 318i. My father had two of them, a black two-door manual and a blue four-door manual. By modern standards, it was not a thrilling drive: 127 horsepower and a diesel-engine redline at 4,800rpm. But if you were coming from a Malibu or Granada it was a platinum rocketship and it laid out a very durable template for “Premium US-Market Sporty Sedan”: six naturally aspirated cylinders in a displacement between 2.5L and 3.5L, rear (or all-) wheel drive, compact body. For about thirty years, everyone offered that car. Even Lincoln offered that car for a while, as the “LS”.

BMW no longer offers it. The cheap 3er is a turbo-four, as enjoyed by our own Gen X Garage Talk. The expensive one is a turbo six. But Toyota in their trad-con outlook will let the IS350 keep running for a little longer and they’re celebrating it with a Special Edition. It’s got all the good stuff, from the Mark Levinson sound to BBS forged wheels. Only 350 will be made, which is ridiculous; most dealers will only get one example. The “Envious” green color is tailor-made to catch your author’s eye, as is the combination of full equipment and NuLuxe seating. There was a time in my life where I truly loved the Lexus IS350 but now it feels a little too cramped and sporty for my rotting frame. Doesn’t mean I won’t call my dealer anyway. Truth be told, I would rather have this than an IS500; if I hit a tree on the way to dinner I won’t be going as fast.

What if we’re building the data centers for nothing

Would you willingly trust major portions of your life to a Chinese AI model? Trick question: you’re either already doing it or you’re about to. Everything the media wants desperately for you to believe about Chinese cars — they deliver more quality for vastly less money, they will be unstoppable in the market, they are the only future — is probably true about Chinese AI models. As a result, they are being built into countless products as a behind-the-scenes part of the infrastructure.

Something it’s important to understand about “AI” is that the notion of quality doesn’t really apply. A Swiss watch might be nicer than a Chinese watch but whatever defects exist in a given AI model can often be compensated for with additional time and computing power thrown at it. So while it’s possible to construct demonstrations where the American AI models are superior, that demonstrated superiority often requires some very specific conditions.

Just to make it dead plain: the astounding expected market value of OpenAI and Anthropic is mostly based on American investors either being unaware of Chinese models or relying on the comforting idea that they will be banned in the US to protect the JERBS of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. (There is also the completely deranged and science-ignorant idea that one of those companies will develop an actual conscious intelligence then rent that intelligence to people rather than simply using it internally to unbalance the world.)

The biggest impact of Qwen won’t be in the data centers, however; it’s in the fact that starting next month you’ll be able to run variants of it yourself for $2,899 via the 64GB Mac Mini Pro M5. Qwen 3.6 should sit very comfortably on a Mac Mini.

In the very near future, American corporations are going to have to choose between two futures:

0. Rent their AI from American companies at absolute top fookin’ dollar, while being fully aware that every single thing they put into the prompt is being used to train a company that has intentions of competing with them down the road;

1. Give everyone a Mac Mini and keep their data private.

“B-b-b-b-but what about China stealing your data?” is the next question. In a universe where people could trust American corporations to at least consider the best interests of the country or their customers — think, I don’t know, General Dynamics in 1960 — you’d be a fool to let the Chinese touch your data. But this is 2026. Faced with the possibility of espionage out of locally-operated Chinese models or the certainty of training Sam and Dario, a lot of firms will choose the former. And, of course, everyone outside the United States will choose the former, because all of them trust the Chinese more than they trust Donald Trump (or, to be fair, trusted Barack Obama.)

There’s literally one play available to the hosted-AI people, which is to perpetually corner the market for computer memory so people can’t get the systems that would run AI locally. I’m not the only person who can see this, of course. Which goes a long way towards explaining the shenanigans in computer memory lately. Apple isn’t stupid; they are working directly with a Chinese supplier for Mac Mini memory. The enemy (China) of my enemy (Taiwan/NVIDIA/OpenAI/Anthropic/CoreWeave) is my friend.

Expect to hear a lot in both blue and red media about how we, as patriotic Americans, need to sacrifice everything to keep Anthropic and OpenAI “in the lead”. When you hear that, remember that the leaders of those companies would be delighted to see your children thrown into a woodchipper.

When I said I wasn’t going to race this year, that was a lie

Just for fun, I joined Danger Girl and Mini Danger Girl for the only SCCA race of the year at Nelson Ledges. The traditional October event has been canceled for financial reasons; if you know anyone who wants to sponsor it, apparently they were about fifteen grand short of putting it on.

Both of my Radicals are hors de combat but it was nice to get the Neon out for a run. I bought some scrubbed Hoosier R8s and although it took all weekend to get the pressures right, I think they are a genuine improvement over the R7. I had to play nice with a beautiful Datsun 510 in my Sunday race, but if I could have gotten around him the data suggests think I could have turned a 1:18.0 or even a 1:17.8, Very far from the 1:02.4 I can run in my SR8, but not bad for a car with a dead-stock engine and too much ground clearance.

Danger Girl got pushed off at 105mph by a Touring-class BMW in her Saturday race; the fellow apologized after the fact, it was a pure racing incident. She managed to get back on track to finish with a class win ahead of, um, me. She came back and took the overall win in our group on Sunday despite being short a front spoiler and undertray. MDG, sponsored by Mike O Racing, took strong second place finishes both days, keeping her championship alive. She also beat me in the multi-class “pursuit race” Saturday afternoon. That race was a lot of fun. There was a kind of deranged little person, not really up to MDG’s pace or talent level, who kept trying to bump the Neon in his Spec Racer. I paid little attention to it; the Neon Lion does not concern himself with Spec Racers.

Eventually he got so agitated that he spun himself out. Top fun.

I really enjoyed the weekend and I’ve decided to challenge a couple of the fellows in the E Production class at Mid-Ohio. The Neon is a knife in that gunfight but I think we will have fun.

Also, The Commander put his camera down on Sunday and ran an autocross. He finished 4th of 13 in class, ahead of a Corvette and various Miata, using a V6 Accord on all-season “WeatherReady” tires. I think he might have a talent for autocrossing. This is not necessarily a good thing!

Enjoy this photo of your humble author looking very serious while wearing a Bangkok-cased Moonswatch:

It was nice to go racing after all this year. Naturally I’d rather be running my Radicals, so if you have a moment to pray, please pray that I find a suspiciously lucrative position for 2027 and am able to fund $55,000 in engine work to make that happen!

Speaking of playing on misguided patriotism

The #1-selling car in the UK right now is the Jaecoo J7, which wasn’t on sale in the country eighteen months ago. It costs 45,000 UKP against the Range Rover Sport at 77,000 UKP, but it looks pretty similar. There’s a genuinely fascinating article in the Telegraph about it:

One wonders who these folk are, falling for this sleight-of-hand, like so many curious and eager shoppers on Oxford Street crowding around a man dealing out fake Rolexes. Who are these mutts willing in the Chinese invaders, ushering into our once-proud nation heaps of metal that shame the concept of chic and style?

Who are these hustled beatniks who think they look grand at the school gates with their upholstered tanks of chrome, leather and plastic? They are nothing more than purveyors of an outrageous con, and paraders of a copycat fake with no more value than a counterfeit Hermès Birkin handbag.

This fellow hasn’t been read in on the latest “dupe” trend, has he? This is the same playbook used in the States by the Kia Telluride and Hyundai Palisade, which started off looking kind of like a Range Rover but have now given up all pretense to differentiation:

Jaecoo is just doin’ it Chinese.

The author of the Telegraph piece does have a point, however: why would Britons abandon their “home brand” for a Chinese imitation? Well, it’s not really a home brand:

Jaguar Land Rover has been a Tata property for eighteen years. A significant percentage of the engineering is now done in India. The firm is now assembling CKDs (completely knocked down car kits) in India for their own market.

While the Range Rover continues to be built in the UK, and I believe that’s very important, it would be reasonable for the average Brit to ask: “Why should I pay more to make the Indians rich? What have they done for me, exactly?” There is something ghastly about having the country run by the proverbial rootless cosmopolitans who are busy strip-mining it for sale to the highest bidder while also stuffing it overfull with the cheapest labor possible… and being exhorted to do the patriotic thing.

In much that same way that no American should feel much allegiance to OpenAI, maybe the average Brit shouldn’t be too concerned about allegiance to Tata Motors.

It’s ironic, really: so many people have spent so much time undermining the West for their own purposes, failing to consider that their parasitism has also weakened the host for other invaders.

Now how much would you pay?

When is a $9200 watch from a “second-tier” brand worth the money? Here’s an attempt to answer that question. The newest IWC “team watch” for AMG Mercedes F1 has an eye-catching color scheme, but there’s also some technical interest to it. The movement is the in-house 69385, which has already developed enough of a reputation among watch lovers to be the subject of a very faithful superclone. It’s best described as “mechanically fancier than a Valjoux 7750, less fancy than an Omega Co-Axial or Rolex 4130, with first-rate finishing”. It uses the Pellaton winding system and is likely to be pretty bulletproof.

The case is Grade 5 titanium. Early IWCs in this metal, like my 2006 Ingenieur AMG or the Porsche Design watches made by IWC, were Grade 2, which is softer and easier to damage. Top-end IWC watches, like the Ceratanium Top Gun Doppelchrono worn by Nelson Ledges overall race winner Danger Girl, use Grade 5 with an applied ceramic-style coating. This straddles the middle with a tough alloy in natural finish. It is equal to the RLX titanium used in the Yacht-Master, which costs about 3x as much MSRP.

You’ll recognize this one when you see it in public for sure. As a result, it’s already sold out or on waitlist at most IWC boutiques and dealers. I certainly can’t afford one but I might have a chance to wear one in the near future, and if I do I’ll share further impressions. I think it will also retain some value, so if you have ten grand sitting around and you’re in the market for a Rolex Milgauss or Speedmaster “Sapphire Sandwich”, this is worth considering as well. Would you wear it? The IWC Singapore Chronograph, like Tosca, isn’t for everyone.

Modern problems require m…

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Good afternoon, friends. I want to start by thanking the readers who alerted me to the new play by Jonny Lieberman’s wife, which, according to Lieberman, is based on when “12 years ago our neighbor walked into our home, stuck a pistol in my wife’s face, and pulled the trigger. It jammed.” I have never believed a story less than this one, by the way; it was probably a threesome gone wrong. Without Jonny, of course. On the other hand, having had a few online interactions with Mrs. Lieberman, including a memorable one where she wrote “If you haven’t had your balls all the way in someone’s mouth, I feel sorry for you1,” I’m not entirely unwilling to believe that her neighbor was just driven past the point of rationality. Anyway. Jonny would like his readers to donate $12,000 to make this thing happen, because neither he nor his wife believe in the play enough to fund it themselves. Amazingly, they are one-third of the way there. Here’s the link, if you literally have money to burn. The photo of the ensemble chosen to act out this fantasy is remarkable; I didn’t think people like that existed outside of a “Babylon Bee” joke post.

I know it’s an anti-gun play, but if only they/them were a little less enthusiastic about the right to bare arms... Anyway. Maybe Porsche will pick up the rest of the tab, in exchange for Jonny agreeing to never go near Pikes Peak again. Go support the arts, why dontcha.

The eternal battle of Leclerc and talent vs. Lewis and VSC timing

What a weekend! It truly had something for everyone except, ya know, the 300,000 Dutch people who came to see Max finish a whole race. It was an entirely avoidable error that put Verstappen in the wall, but also an entirely understandable one: he was driving at the absolute limit in an attempt to make something happen for the fans. My FanDuel bet on Lando to win the Sprint did not come through, to my immense sorrow. Notes:

• Yuki was fantastic. In the Sprint, he was clearly more comfortable in the Racing Bull than Lawson was in the senior team car. He qualified within a whisker of Lindblad then finished ahead of him. The only reason he didn’t finish in the points was an absolutely indefensible “strategy” from RB that had him drive the same set of soft tires for… 40 laps? I think Yuki looks better in this generation of car than he did in the previous one. It would be nice to see Lance Stroll retire to management and hand his Aston Martin Honda seat over to Tsunoda. Speaking of Aston Martin…

• Forza Alonso! The man is 45 years old and he drove a tractor into the points. If he had Hamilton’s seat he would be 13 points behind Antonelli and the heavy favorite going into the second half.

• The luckiest driver in F1 is… Lewis, of course. Leclerc spanked him in the sprint and made quick work of him in the race to the point that Ferrari just let him circulate against a potential safety car… which of course arrived just when he needed it. This is the third time this year that Lewis has been promoted ahead of the competition due to a VSC or full safety car. And of course, Ferrari obligingly put Leclerc in the pitlane to make it easier for Sir.

• George Russell is your #2 driver at Mercedes, it’s official. Mark your calendars; this was the weekend that Toto Wolff decided he was willing to let George finish behind both Ferraris in order to extend Kimi’s lead to more than two full races’ worth of points. I couldn’t believe it at the time. George had a little VSC luck of his own, but he fought like the proverbial lion to keep his podium. Sometimes I honestly think the team is sabotaging his car. He was so much better than Sir Lewis in their last year together. Is he really getting toasted by a 19 year old? Maybe.

• The most self-effacing champion in history. During an interview this weekend, L:ando Norris basically said, “I’m making things tough on myself, I’m not doing a good job.” Frankly, I don’t see it. What I see is a driver who has matured by leaps and bounds in the last eighteen months, finally driving up to his much-hyped potential, making big moves and being smart with tire management. He has completely seen off the challenge from his mercurial teammate and he looks like a champion when he drives. I don’t think you can entirely count him out for this year’s crown.

Bread and circuses

Preservationists and conservators had raised concerns ahead of the contest, leading me to imagine creaking sculptures and rattling ceramics, all because the president wanted a race around the National Mall. Seeing the National Gallery of Art’s huge black Alexander Calder sculpture outside, surrounded by wood boards as if the poor thing were hunkering down for war, didn’t help.

But it turns out that playing art patrol is rather difficult at an IndyCar race, especially when you find yourself crammed into a sweaty crowd as blurs of color whiz by.

You know a Trump event is a winner when even the Atlantic and the NYT have to tip their caps in respect. By the way, I think the author here is referring to Gwenfritz, seen below in its original installation:

Rather than discuss the race itself, which was the typical Spec Vintage Dallara Bump N’ Run Fest, I want to talk about the idea of Gwenfritz and the “Freedom 250” co-existing in Washington DC.

Once upon a time, the purpose of “public art” was to recognize heroism and inspire the public. Think Nelson’s Column, or the Lincoln Memorial, or even Stone Mountain’s relief carving. The Soviets were big on a concept of public art that glorified the worker, thus all their huge murals of progress and whatnot, but they also had plenty of Lenin statues.

Gwenfritz is nothing like that. It’s a “stabile” by Alexander Calder, paid for and named for the wife of a DC real-estate developer. You would need to read and internalize about six art history books before you saw it as anything other than a random jumble of metal; some people read the books and still see it that way. The purpose of the sculpture was the celebrate the rich woman who paid for it. I have no belief that the general public enjoys or understands it.

For most of the past seventy years, “public” art and “public” culture has basically amounted to “stuff rich people like, or pretend to like, paid or facilitated by the American taxpayer.” The Trump Kennedy Center is the perfect example of that. Every year it showcases a full calendar of artists who are a complete mystery to 99.9% of Americans. The people who defend this stupidity will blather on about “bringing culture to the masses”, carefully ignoring that the masses cannot afford to live in the area and they can barely afford to visit. There is zero chance that some family from Poughkeepsie will stumble into a contemporary-dance performance at the Kennedy Center and become, I don’t know, enlightened.

In other words, “public” art and culture are a massive subsidy to America’s wealthiest art and culture enjoyers, and it has been this way since before I was born. The upper class has grown entirely too comfortable with the situation, which explains why they get so upset and snippy about UFC events and IndyCar races held in Washington, DC. Why… this is our town, not some white-trash circus!

You can dislike Trump all you want, and you can accuse him of doing everything from buying votes (for someone else?) to creating Commodus-style distractions from the more pressing issues of the day, but I find it absolutely wonderful that we are having these “lowbrow” events in DC. Newsflash: America is lowbrow. It is a country that, prior to its recent forcible reimagination as a dumping ground for the worst people the rest of the world has to offer, was resolutely middle-class, plain-spoken, and uncultured.

There should be events like the Freedom 250 continuously. If nothing else, holding such events might accidentally and/or occasionally expose our legislature to their constituencies.

Also, Gwenfritz sucks balls. It makes the Jeff Koons balloon dogs look like the David. If only Romain Grosjean could have somehow jumped a barrier and destroyed it. The French built the thing, they should also be tasked with its elimination.

Pronouned “Seh-leek-ah”

Everyone’s saying that the Celica is coming back as a 2.4-liter turbocharged AWD coupe, possibly with hybrid power. I would upgrade “possibly” to “certainly”, by the way. The obvious powertrain here is the Crown-grade, 340-horse Hybrid MAX four-banger. The enemy is equally obvious: Honda’s Quaalude, which is meeting its admittedly modest sales goals in the States while significantly exceeding projections back home in Japan.

It’s also commonly agreed that unlike the BR-Z and Supra, this is an entirely in-house vehicle. Which means it should be a little less exciting to operate than its badge-engineered showroom mates, but much, much better to operate in the long run.

If the Celica shows up and does well, perhaps Nissan will be tempted to do a smaller sporting car as well — although right now, you can get a base six-speed Nissan Z for just three grand above the price of a Prelude. The Z has literally twice the power. You gotta be a real Honda homer to buy a Prelude. Happily for the firm, such people exist, and they have their checkbooks out. Let’s hope the same thing happens at Toyota dealers.

For the record, I would happily put myself further into monthly-payment purgatory for any Celica with more than 299 horsepower and a clutch pedal.

The Sweden That Can Say “No”

When I first heard about Sweden deporting everyday Brits, I had to laugh because I figured it was some sort of ultra-ultra-ultra-leftist thing where they cheerfully bring in 150,000 machete screamers a year but focus maximum attention on old white folks. Turns out it’s a little more than that.

In perhaps the most clear-cut demonstration of large-scale suicidal ideation since Jonestown, the Swedes have willingly made the country about one-third foreign-sourced in the past twenty years. Some of the numbers are hilarious: Thai immigrants are 78% female, while 65% of Afghan immigrants are men. Huh. 163,000 people were let in during 2015; approximately 500 of them were arriving to work a pre-arranged job.

The voters have finally had enough so there’s been a sea change in migrant policies. It’s becoming far more difficult to obtain Swedish citizenship, and the country is offering $26,000 to anyone who will leave. (The fact that Sweden sees that as a net economic win should tell you something about the real effect of immigrants on an economy.) So-called refugees are now limited to temporary residence only. Under a new “informer law”, most state agencies are required to cooperate with deportation proceedings and to report the presence of illegals to the Swedish equivalent of ICE.

And yeah, they’re deporting British citizens who no longer qualify for residence under EU reciprocity laws.

I sometimes think we will look back at the years from 2000 to 2024 as an era in which our would-be overlords simply boiled the frog too fast, particularly with regards to open borders. It takes a lot to destroy a high-trust, completely placid country like Sweden. Had they, I don’t know, just brought in one-sixth of the population during those years, instead of one-third…

Man, they have really gone wild on the sex crimes, haven’t they? Maybe they haven’t handed out enough anti-rape migrant pamphlets or interracial sex cartoon guides?

The market for $29,000 e-bikes is one fat journalist and no one else

We’ve been covering the Harley LiveWire disaster here at ACF as long as there has been an ACF, and the latest news offers no hope of a reversal. The company’s stock is venturing dangerously close to sub-one-dollar territory. The firm has done two things to try to help this situation. The first was to buy another e-bike company, and the second was to further cut the price of their premium product to $13,999 from the original sticker of $29,799.

The acquisition of Dust Moto, known for their upcoming super-Surron e-dirtbike called the Hightail, shows that Livewire understands the future of electric motorcycles. That future, by the way, is also the present. There is just one e-bike that sells in serious numbers and makes money:

The Surron Light Bee, which sells for between four and seven thousand bucks depending on power and configuration, has become wildly popular because it is perfectly compatible with modern American anarcho-tyranny. It has no title or license and no one is quite sure where it’s legal to ride, so it has proliferated in cities and suburbs where the cops are too busy, or too lazy, to chase, catch, and impound them. If you had to title, insure, and plate the thing like most people do with a street motorcycle, the demand would drop to zero.

That number — zero — is also the actual demand for the LiveWire, whether the price is $29,799 or $13,799. This is not a fast motorcycle — it runs 110 in the quarter, like a Ninja 650. By the way, a Ninja 650 costs $7,599. This is not a motorcycle with a particularly long range — 70 miles at speed and you’re done diggy done. For perspective, my Super Blackbird needs about a gallon and a half of fuel to go that far, out of its 6 gallon tank. The Ninja 650 gets 50mpg and 200 miles from a tank.

Years ago I rode a LiveWire back to back with a Sportster S and my professional opinion was that you would have to be a raging moron to buy a LiveWire instead of a Sportster S. I cannot imagine who the buyer for a LiveWire is. Someone who lives in Brooklyn and commutes to Manhattan? But why not just get a Surron and have the ability to jump a curb? It has a 30 mile range in everyday use.

The other e-bike outfits — Zero, LAND, CSC — hardly even qualify as going concerns. Who knows if they’re shipping anything? You can’t find their product most places and when you do find it, there are cobwebs on the seats.

It seems obvious to me that in order for people to take electric motorcycling seriously, the electric motorcycle needs to be in relation to real motorcycles the way the Tesla Model 3 stands in relation to real cars. So:

• Price has to be under ten grand, because there are plenty of great bikes brand-new under ten grand.

• Performance has to be higher than that of the average ten grand bike. Which means it has to be higher than the performance of a LiveWire.

• Range has to be 200 miles. Period, point blank, no excuses. Not because every motorcycle trip is 200 miles, but because a motorcycle you have to charge between trips starts to feel like a chore.

• It should be reliable. Which most e-bikes kind of are, but the LiveWire has had a few problems.

Don’t expect any of the above to happen — but that’s what needs to happen. In the second quarter of 2026, LiveWire captured a robust 76% of the adult e-motorcycle market by selling 267 motorcycles, losing nearly $19 million in the process. You’d be a fool to buy a LiveWire now — but in that respect, today is no different from any other day.

All of the above being said, I am ready to buy a new LiveWire when the price hits $3,000. At that money, it would be an easy way to go into my local town for lunch. Chances are I’d ride it three times then go back to my SV1000 — but I am always ready to make a bad decision! Ask anyone! I mean, there are worse things to do with three grand than spend it on an electric motorcycle. You could, I don’t know, fund a play in Los Angeles!

Not to get all philosophical in an article that will mostly be about Playskool plastic ashtrays, Toyota-Camry-level performance, and online auction pimps, but: The story of humanity is largely a story about people learning the wrong lessons from something they’ve just witnessed.

Example: There was an absolute explosion in the electric-guitar market from 1958 to 1965. No one has all the numbers, but total sales in 1965 are generally thought to be between five and ten times what they were in 1958. One effect of this was that the best guitar makers of the day rapidly expanded their production facilities and, in the case of Gibson and Fender, were bought out by larger corporations anxious to get on board with the latest fad.

In 1968, the electric-guitar market collapsed as people switched to acoustic guitars and folk music. The corporate owners of Gibson and Fender responded by cutting costs, using cheaper materials, and speeding-up assembly. This lowered quality, which had already taken a serious knock thanks to the previous ramp-up in production. Plenty of musicians, most famously a young Eric Clapton, spoke out on this topic. So by 1975 or so there was already a perception that “vintage guitars”, meaning guitars between 10 and 15 years old, were better than new ones.

By 2000 or thereabouts, most new American guitars were back to being of “Sixties quality” and today some of them are arguably better. So if you buy a new guitar, you should be totally satisfied. But the lesson people took from this catastrophe wasn’t “the 1959-1968 guitars are great” but rather “old guitars are great”. So you can walk into a fancy guitar shop right now and see a 1975 Fender bass selling for four times the price of a new one. Even though the 1975 Fender bass is probably not as good as a 1963 Fender bass or a 2026 Fender bass. The resale industry, and the music press, has convinced people that merely being old equates to being good. That is the wrong lesson!

One more time for the people in back: a 1964 “vintage guitar” was originally valuable because the 1970 guitars were awful. Therefore, it’s bad comedy to put “vintage valuation” on the junk that made “vintage guitars” worthwhile to begin with!

If you’re a Porschephile of long standing, I think you know where I’m going next.

This is the part of the article where I confess that, despite all of the above, I really like 1970s Gibsons. I once drove basically across the Midwest to get a mint-condition 1979 Gibson Explorer in pearl white. Very Def Leppard. I am always a buyer for Seventies stuff — but I don’t pretend that the average “pancake Lester” from 1974 is better than a 1959 “Burst”, because it isn’t. Nor would I suggest that a young musician play a Seventies guitar to start his or her career. You’d be handicapping yourself if you did that.

Similarly, I understand that the 1999-2004 Porsche 911, aka the “996”, has some genuine appeal to some buyers and owners. If you own a 996 and you adore it, then more power to you. Somewhere out there is an owner who is deeply sentimental about his 1999 Arctic Silver Tip Cabriolet Carrera 4 with zero factory options and that awful grey interior that makes it look like a base Boxster inside. I celebrate that owner and would love to hear all about his car…

…but if you’re thinking about a 996 for the purpose of “getting into Porsches”, or buying your first Porsche, then

before you let the scumbags in the insurance and auction and advertorial-media games bamboozle you into buying what is probably the worst boxer-engined Porsche ever built.

Want an example? Let’s hear from the pimps at “Collecting Cars”. Keep in mind that “Collecting Cars” is not an impartial source. They are not the media, even. They are a front for an auction. Their job is to extract the most amount of money from the marks and suckers — that means you. And when it comes to the 996, butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths:

the 996 is now celebrated as a lightweight, analogue, and highly communicative sports car. With its narrow body and hydraulically assisted steering, it offers a pure driving experience that many recent successors lack.

All of that is equally true if you apply it to the Mustang II, which weighed less than a 996. And who, precisely, is “celebrating” the 996, besides the auction houses and insurance companies who are trying to raise the prices? Let’s see what else they have to say:

Prices for the 996 reflect that they have transitioned from just being considered ‘a cheap 911’ to being a respected modern classic.

Yeah, you fuckin’ wish, you dirtbags. You earn your money as a percentage of sale price. Now let’s hear from my former employer, Hagerty, who hired Panorama editor and long-time Porsche-pimp Rob Sass to talk the pig up:

Overall, the 996 remains the best way to get into an analog-feeling, right-sized 911 at an affordable price. It’s not without its flaws, but if you’re careful about what you buy, it can be an extremely rewarding and very usable car for the price of a lightly optioned Corolla.

I have an agreement with Hagerty regarding how I discuss the company in public, so I will merely suggest that I disagree with the article and that the costs involved with owning a Porsche 996 are very far from away the costs of owning a lightly optioned Corolla. Anyone who took this article seriously and acted accordingly could stand a very good chance of finding themselves in a bad place. Also, check this, from the same article:

Aero kit cars are desirable and generally priced at least $10,000 more than non-aero cars.

I’m sure. This is a 996 with the Aerokit:

That’s the best photo you can take of it. You should see one on the street. It looks like a cross-eyed toad.

Here is the truth of the matter: Prior to 1998, every Porsche 911 was measurably better than the one that came before it. Because Porsche was a small company working at the edge of its limited capabilities, each model tended to have some awful mechanical disaster waiting for an unlucky owner: fragile 915 transmissions, magnesium cases, SC chain tensioners, valve guides in the 3.2 on, 964s with no head gaskets, 993s that won’t pass emission checks without $28k of engine work, and so on. But you could trade-in your 911 every few years and have some confidence that the new one would be faster, more comfortable, and more reliable. The apex, pun intended, of this progression was the 993 generation.

The 996 was a big change, and although it was nominally better in various statistical categories it was also obviously a piece of shit from a subjective standpoint. The car looked dorky. It had frameless glass and the doors felt like they were made from cardboard. The interiors were dismal and would wear shiny almost immediately. The engines had a couple different ways they could go kaboom and the only remedy Porsche offered for a very long time was a complete swap to a remanufactured unit, like their $69,995 premium grand touring 2+2 car was a used iPhone or something. To make matters worse, BMW released the E46 M3 very shortly after the 996; the Bimmer cost 2/3rds as much and could put the Porsche on the trailer in every category from quarter-mile time to road-course performance while also looking more premium both inside and out. I have several of the road tests from that era; you can feel the writers trying not to accidentally cancel their future media trips to Stuttgart as they discuss the massive edge the M3 had on the 911 in all areas.

Compared to a 993, the 996 was cheaper-feeling and less involving to drive. So more of them were sold as automatics, cabriolets, and the “ultimate” 911, the Carrera 4 Tip Cab. Almost immediately, people started in-hindsight re-evaluating the 993, which felt like a much higher-quality car and didn’t require you to repeatedly swap the engine with a remanufactured unit.

In other words, the Porsche 993 was a 1959 Les Paul — rare, beautiful, made carefully in small numbers — while the 996 was a 1973 Pancake Lester — overproduced, made from cheaper materials, aesthetically a bit suspect, not reliable to own. So the former picked up value while the latter become de facto worthless.

Your humble author bought a 993 back in 2001 for twenty-nine grand, when it was just a used Porsche. I put about 70,000 miles on the car across the space of two decades, always treating it like a used car. I left it on the street in downtown Nashville and Cleveland, autocrossed it in something like fifty events, went through nine sets of rear tires. One day I woke up and it was worth something like $125,000, which terrified me so I promptly traded it for a $125,000 race car.

That wasn’t the whole story. I was also disgusted by the sheer number of friends and/or peers around me who had adopted the 993 and its lesser predecessors as part of a “drive tastefully aesthetic” that was curated and snackable and performative. A car that for me had long been a “let’s drive down to the local dive bar for six shots of the cheapest, then bump over a curb on the way out” hooptie was now the touchstone of a deliberate and bizarre lifestyle that included everything from Rolex GMT-Masters to craft beer. A whole culture appeared out of nowhere, led by the Luftgekuhlt loofa-cult, and the entire message of the culture was

Every water-cooled Porsche is trash, but these old ones are great!

Not entirely untrue. The cars did get better from 2005 on, and some of the 1999-2004 cars were supplied with an engine that didn’t go pop, but all things considered it was safe to say that Porsche’s new products didn’t excite people like the old ones did. Meanwhile the Corvettes got faster and the M3s got more power and the world kind of shrank around Porsche.

Faced with this problem, the company responded brilliantly by just paying everyone off. The Loofa Cult people were strongly incentivized to bring out “Air|Water”, which takes the nerdy, cringeworthy reverence shown by the “culture” to my old beater-bitch 993 and transfers it to the newer cars. Magnus Walker reportedly was cut a few checks to get publicly excited about water-cooled Porsches. The press trips became even more elaborate, even more indistinguishable from bribery. God knows how much they spent; one of my colleagues at Road&Track, if memory serves, got a week-long trip to Germany where he lived like a king which enjoying a “curated 911 experience”. In one of history’s great switcheroos, Porsche managed to take the reverence everyone felt for the 993, a reverence born from the fact that its successors were junk, and transfer it to those same junky successors. It was the equivalent of celebrating the 1975 Fender Strat as a “vintage guitar”.

Which created an interesting situation. All aircooled 911s are now worth stupid money; the trashed 911SCs that used to change hands for ten grand are now crossing auction blocks for fifty, while the cars before and after them are worth even more. Meanwhile, a combination of complicit media, quantitative easing, and Instagram-driven male insecurity has made recent 911s almost depreciation-proof. So if you want to become a “Porsche guy” at a budget beneath “hedge fundie”, what options do you have?

When I was thirty years old I had hundreds of cheap aircooled 911s in Ohio from which I could choose, from $5,000 for a 911S to $45,000 for a good 993 Turbo. (!!) Today’s young man has none of those choices. A decent 993 or even 3.2 is probably a $100k possibility, and it will need significant investment after the fact to keep running. The new cars are all six figures as well. If you’re a 30 or 35 year old bachelor and making $150k in some reasonable high-end young-person job, you’re near to being priced out of the used-Porsche market despite your success.

In your shoes, I would buy a new Mazda Miata, which is nearly as fast as a 996 in a straight line and will dust it around a road course. There’s a Miata 30AE in my garage as we speak. But I understand that a Miata doesn’t feel like an achievement to many of you, for the same reason that my advice on watches — “Get a Citizen A060 for $2500, and never think about it again” — feels like I’m pulling the ladder up behind me. Today’s cars might be fast but they often feel fake and sterile and big and chunky.

I also understand that Porsche’s limitless marketing budget, like the limitless marketing budget of Rolex, has convinced a lot of young men that they need to own a 911 for purposes of ego reinforcement and group identity. But a new 911 is too hot to touch. So the pimps have joined forces to convince these young men that they should look at the 996. It’s the most affordable route to Porsche ownership!

(Left unstated, because it’s an impossible case for sane people to make, is why, exactly, anyone needs to own a Porsche nowadays. It doesn’t impress women and you’re perpetually at risk of being 40-rolled into obscurity by a $54,000 Tesla.)

This new tidal wave of 996-centric YouTube videos and auction marketing disguised as buyer’s guides is designed to lift everyone’s boats. Higher prices on 996es help the used-Porsche dealers and auctions. Higher valuations on 996es force more owners over to specialty insurers. If the cars are worth more, then they become worth repairing, which is good news for the aftermarket vendors. Your local Porsche Club wouldn’t mind having more paying members. The people who own new Porsches absolutely adore the 996 guys, because they’re like a captive and highly envious audience; think of a new GT3RS owner as Anne Hathaway on the red carpet of the Met Gala and a 996 Tip owner as the poor loser who buys a ticket to stand in the shadows and watch her walk by.

Everyone’s a winner — except you, the prospective 996 owner. You’re being asked to pay $30,000 or more, the price of a new Miata or Camry, for a car that truthfully will struggle to keep up with either of those cars in a lot of situations while also requiring an insane amount of repair and maintenance.

When I paid thirty grand for my 993, I had the satisfaction of driving a mint-condition five-year-old 993, which was neat. When you pay thirty grand for a 996, you will get a sad, climate-scarred car long into its third decade on this planet. Even the buyers’ guides admit that the interiors can literally turn into dust after being touched too often. The paint will be thin. Every piece of rubber in the car will probably need replacing. It will not drive like a new Porsche. It won’t even drive like it did in 1999. Extreme age tends to blur the individuality of a car the way it blurs the difference between men and women; a beater 911 has many qualities in common with a beater Mustang, from “what’s that noise?” to perpetual oil spotting. If you put twenty grand into revamping the suspension, including every bushing, then it might drive like a new 911. Kind of. At which point you’ve got fifty grand in a car that probably runs fourteens downhill.

And what does it do for you? Make you the junior member of your local PCA chapter? Give you something to drive to Cars and Coffee, where you will be made fun of behind your back? Put you on your local racetrack where you will spend the entirety of every session with your left hand out the window as Spec Miatas and Cobalt SS Turbos blow by you?

If your love for the Porsche 996 is like my love for the 1977 Cutlass Supreme — irrational, nostalgia-driven, idiotic — then go ahead and live your dream. But if you’re about to overpay for one of these sleds because you think you’re going to enjoy defining yourself by joining a “community” made up of Drive Tastefully nerds, then let me suggest that you become a “furry” instead. Not only will your weekend outfits be less cringeworthy, you might even accidentally meet a girl.

It’s easy to criticize someone’s actions without offering a solution, so let me suggest a few alternatives to the ownership of a $30,000 Porsche 996:

0. Supercharged NC Miata ($20,000) and 2013 GSX-R1000 ($10,000): The first half of this pairing will eviscerate a 996 in every way imaginable except for a bit of perceived appeal to the opposite sex, so we will hedge our bets by including a Gixxer Thou. There is no Porsche driver in the world, not even the GT2RS Burgerking Edition owner, who doesn’t feel a little soft when he is next to a GSX-R1000. And there is no non-gold-digging woman in the world who doesn’t think a Gixxer owner is more appealing than a Porsche owner.

1. The worst 911SC on Bring-A-Trailer ($35,000). This car will be a “fright pig” when you buy it. But if you put $50,000 into it, then you will have a very nice “real” 911, while putting $50,000 into a 996 still leaves you with a 996. Plus you can be a Porsche snob, which some people really enjoy. It also is probably just as likely to get you to work as a 996 would be.

2. An E46 M3 ($17,000 to $40,000). Back in 2001, this was a better car than the 996. You know what? It still is.

3. A 2011 Boxster S “987.2” ($30,000 to $40,000). It’s faster than a 996, it’s more reliable, it’s nicer inside and out, it’s a decade newer. You will still need to say a “Hail Mary” and get an early jump if you’re trying to beat a distracted woman in an Escalade to the next open spot in freeway traffic, but at least you won’t have to touch a single 996-era Porsche switch or knob. This is a better car.

4. 2012 Corvette Grand Sport ($35,000). Might cost you a little more to buy, but it will cost you less to run, and it is blindingly faster in all circumstances.

5. A new BR-Z, GT86, or Miata. This is the smartest option, really. Get a car with fresh bushings and a factory warranty. Then go write your story in this car instead of spending the next five years cleaning up after some lazy douchebag who didn’t want to pay for a belt service in his Porsche.

6. A $15,000 F-150, a $3,000 trailer, and a $12,000 race car. A VW-powered “Formula First” turns a better laptime at most tracks than a 911 GT3 and it starts at $8,000 for a good used example. You can get a used SCCA race car for ten grand in pretty much any category south of Prototype 2. If you want to be about it, then be about it. I assure you that as the owner of a final-generation Radical SR8, in which I lap 997 and 991 Cup cars during club races, I never, ever, ever wish I could trade it back for a 993. You could have the same experience, minus the engine rebuild costs and the occasional 155-mph horsefly to the visor, with an Improved Touring sedan.

This was a long column. Thanks for reading. I hope one thing is apparent: I want you to have the same kind of fantastic and memorable experiences behind the wheel that I’ve had. They won’t be the same experiences. We can’t turn back the clock to the days of cheap aircooled cars (or cheap Vipers, or cheap C6 ZO6 Vettes, and so on.) But we can make smart choices that will allow you to have the time of your life in the car of your choice. Whatever you choose, I wish you the best. And if you buy a 996 despite all of the above, then I have two things to say:

0. Congratulations. Enjoy the heck out of it.

1. I’ve been behind you in this Miata for the last eight laps. Move the hell over!

Good evening, friends. I’m pleased to pre-announce the publication of Rodney Redux: Scandalous Stories From The Dealership And Beyond. Today, it’s only available as the “Black Edition” hardcover that is in the process of being mailed to every Trackday Club member. You can pay top dollar for the hardcover via Amazon if you like, but you’d be better off j…

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Greetings and welcome to a comprehensive look at a car that is unlikely to be seen on US roads anytime soon. Sri Lanka knows it as the Atto 1, a name it also bears in Australia and a few other Asian markets, while it is also yclept Dolphin Surf in Europe, and Seagull in its native land, so quite a lot of identities for one small car. The Atto 1 is the e…

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Good afternoon, friends.

There’s no noda like Tsunoda

Is Liam Lawson the Tonya Harding of Formula 1? Three years ago, after Danny Ricciardo injured his wrist at the Dutch Grand Prix, Lawson was promoted to Red Bull’s second team. Now Isack Hadjar has injured his wrist, which will give Lawson another shot at a first-team seat.

Like most sane race fans, however, I do not care if Liam Lawson lives or dies. The important thing is that Lawson’s seat at Racing Bulls will be filled by Red Bull reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda. Prediction: Yuki will do pretty well, but Liam will struggle in Hadjar’s car. My approximate estimation of Red Bull driver talent goes something like

Verstappen → Hadjar → Tsunoda → Lawson → Lindblad

and I think Max’s ability to extract performance from the awful Red Bull kind of overshadows just how effective Isack has been.

Fanduel won’t let me bet on Yuki at the moment, so I’ve bet my meager weekly budget on a Lando Norris win in the Sprint.

You people will believe anything!

“Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” the company posted on its website. “Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls.”

Was it a LARP, was it an experiment in twisting elections via false election, or was it an attempt to do something else entirely? “Median Strategies” predicted big leads for DSA gubernatorial candidate Francesa Hong and LA incumbent mayor Karen Bass, but as of yesterday their website is down and observers have to be content with a cryptic series of messages.

The California Post, a newly launched West Coast counterpart to the famous NYC tabloid, published Median Strategies data, as did the Karen Bass campaign. Most media sources declined to use the numbers, however. Not because they were suspicious of “Median Strategies”, but because they were dissatisfied with the polling methodolgy reported by the firm. Which suggests that a more detailed fake could have gotten past the AP, the NYT, and others.

There is something fundamentally amusing about this. The only reason “fake news” has the traction it so often does is because a significant percentage of Americans have turned away from the legacy media due to a perception of overwhelming political bias. Had our newspapers and TV networks been less openly partisan, they wouldn’t have lost so much of the public’s attention in the first place. Now we have filter-bubble news sources for everyone, no matter how deranged their viewpoint might be.

I’d like to think that the Median Strategies people were trying to make a point about bad data and possibly force the media to tighten up their reporting game — but let’s face it, the whole deal was probably designed to manipulate something on one of the prediction markets.

I would hammer in the morning, I would hammer on the Camry

Many years ago, I worked at a bagel company whose media honchos were nakedly infatuated with “The Drive”. Two of our most senior leaders had sort of male-crush-fixated on Andrew Perlman, the owner of “Recurrent Media”, and his supposed genius. “The whole idea is to get SEO by linking to products sold on Amazon!” one of them gushed at dinner. “It’s complete genius!”

“I kind of think you have it backwards,” I suggested, but I might as well have been speaking Latin at that point. All the Recurrent sites, including their first acquisition, The Drive, have in common a sort of loose approach to facts and reporting, amplified fivefold by hysterical and often flat-out incorrect social-media posts. Last week, they breathlessly gushed that a Mustang GTD used “street-legal tires” to beat the ZR1X around the Nurburgring. “The Drive can confirm the Ford Mustang GTD Competition that obliterated the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X’s Nurburgring lap record was in fact rolling on street-legal tires,” Joel Feder ‘reported’. “The tires are Michelin Pilot Sport Cup FR. Not slicks.” Their social media went even harder:

The Internet armchair critics crying foul and other automakers squinting real hard can all stop wondering, questioning, and doubting whether the Ford Mustang GTD Competition achieved the unthinkable on street-legal tires.

This is probably legally correct… but let’s take a look at the tires, shall we?

These are “slicks” to any normal person, or indeed any normal car enthusiast, but legally they are probably “DOT-R” tires. The difference between “slicks” and “R-comps” usually boils down to the internal belt package, which has to be heavier and stiffer in a street-legal tire for purposes of preventing intrusion, and a “rain groove” around the tire to make it legally treaded. A good example is the Hoosier R8:

Anyway, I know why Feder was able to “confirm” these street-legal tires: someone at Ford PR told him they were street-legal and he never bothered to look at the tires.

Alright. Next up: the Toyota hammer. My old pal Byron Hurd wrote a cynical-sounding article about Toyota’s newest technique to diagnose potential faults in their troubled twin-turbo V-6 engines:

hat do you do when you’ve got a malfunctioning part that won’t quite cooperate? If your answer was “smack it with a hammer,” then congratulations: you might be qualified for a job in Toyota’s warranty department. Because that’s the sophisticated solution the company’s engineers have come up with to test Toyota and Lexus trucks for the potentially catastrophic engine defect that prompted a massive, ongoing recall campaign covering more than a quarter-million trucks and SUVs.

Yep, a hammer—In this case, a tiny, plastic hammer built specifically for the purpose of creating a vibration that can be measured in a controlled environment. Pickup Truck + SUV Talk shared a fairly detailed breakdown of the procedure over the weekend. Essentially, by measuring the vibrations that move through the engine when struck by the tool, Toyota can determine the health of critical components without having to tear the engine down for a costly, time-consuming physical examination.

A reader who is slightly deeper into the business than Joel Feder sent me this note:

This is a big move for Toyota service centers. I would have loved to have model response data for assessing field issues working with OEMs. I have 20+ years of doing vehicle NVH and structural vibration measurements. This approach is absolutely technically sound, and very common. As a field measurement it’s traditionally used for high dollar assets in power generation et al where downtime for a suspect bearing swap can be measured in the six or seven figure cost range.

If you have the requisite datasets you can assess a bearing without disassembly. This is because the boundaries of the crankshaft have changed. Like a guitar string with and without a finger pressed, applying pressure gets you two different resonant frequencies. This tool Toyota is using looks like a hammer, but due to the piezoelectric load cell you can measure, absolutely, the force that the hammer is applying. These hammers can cost three grand; next time you read about the government spending $3,000 on a hammer, keep that in mind.

The other OEMs should take note because this gives Toyota a tremendous source of engine health data from the field.

Other things I’ve “hit with a hammer”: Nuclear reactors, countless aircraft, satellites, two spaceships, various buildings, development cars, CPAP blowers, wind turbines, trains, dishwashers, hard discs…

Many thanks to this reader. He, and you, are collectively the reason that we are a better site than The Drive. Maybe Andrew Perlman would like to buy me out and use the eyeballs to sell Watchdives “dupes” of Patek Aquanauts!

You’re alive until the last man who remembers you dies

Three years ago, I lost a mentor and friend, Ron L. Pogue. Ever since then, I’ve had a small but nagging desire to memorialize the man in some manner beyond a mere post on a website. The problem is that he deserves more in the way of tribute than I can afford, which makes the things I could do seem petty and meaningless.

Last month, however, I was struck by an idea. I was in the process of buying a leftover Daniel Marshall humidor at a very steep discount — it’s a “scratch and dent” version of their $3,000 Arturo Fuente piece in macassar ebony. In the process of ordering it, their rep asked me if I wanted anything engraved on the inside. I am allergic to that sort of thing because my sense of irony is too highly developed to have something like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” or “SCCA 4x Divisional Champion” on a plaque. But before I could tell the guy no, I had an idea. So, without further ado…

Rest in peace, old friend. And, as always, I invite my readers to come see me for an afternoon or evening of stories and conversation, in which you will have the chance to smoke a non-Sherman-Mc-Coy-approved-cigar out of Ron’s humidor.

Honestly, I still don’t care for them

One of my readers has asked that we periodically talk about auctions in this weekly post, so I did the obvious thing and gave him the legwork of finding a good discussion candidate. Today it is a 2017 Chevrolet “SS” six-speed. It closes in an hour, and is at $36,000 now; I predict a sale price below 40k.

(Edit: dead wrong! $43k)

I had a chance to buy several of these brand-new for about ten grand off the $47,720 MSRP at the time. They were showroom poison, just like the G8 GXP had been before it, and they ran a 13.0@111 for Car and Driver. Out in the real world they are easy meat for 392 Chryslers and the like — and while they are not unsatisfying to drive, neither are they the poor-man’s E39 M5 like they were advertised and promoted at the time.

There are compelling reasons not to buy these cars, and the primary one is that GM has little to no interest in making parts available. You will make friends in Australia if you buy a Chevy SS, and you will need them to get you suspension parts, especially control arms.

Our reader calls it a “four-door Camaro”, and while I think that’s apt, I would much rather have a two-door Camaro. You can buy a nice stick-shift Camaro SS or LT1 for considerably less than you’ll pay here. I recommend you do exactly that!