Many years ago, while enjoying a nice leisurely fall weekend in a correctional facility, I got into a disagreement with a fellow over an issue that escapes me in re…

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Good morning, friends. A few extra reading links for you, if you’re so inclined. From our own Dave Ryan, we have a sentimental guest post about turning to motorcycles as an adult. Also, our fan favorite Crabspirits has finally done the obvious thing and started his own Substack. Here’s a new piece from him, featuring a Porsche 944!

Alright, off we go.

The meat grinder continues

Had I known I was going to spend the better part of half an hour front and center on MotoAmerica’s live feed, I would have tucked in my shirt and gotten my hair done. Oh well. Vanity is the lowest form of self-respect. Once again I was the safety car driver for this often discombubulated organization, running the tires of an old Acura ILX down to the cords and performing all sorts of time calculations in my head: If the front runner runs a 1:32 and I run a 1:53 lap six seconds behind him, how much time can the medic stay on site with this downed rider until we have to red flag?

One consequence of driving the safety car is that you don’t actually see the races, so I’ll leave it to our usual correspondent to give you the play by play. These are my brief observations, outside competition:

• The Superbikes turn the same laptimes I do in my Radical, but they hit 184.6mph on the back straight instead of 154-155. It’s fascinating to see the same results through a completely different method.

• Keanu Reeves was hanging out on Friday. I was at the Arch garage but I didn’t bother him. I did call my wife and tell her to come over, but she couldn’t leave work. What a drag, to have a job! In real life, Keanu is slightly shorter, and considerably more frail, than I am, while being infinitely more handsome and engaging.

• ARCH, Keanu’s firm, is apparently about to debut a two-liter V-twin “Super Hooligan” streetbike. I am awfully excited about this motorcycle that I cannot afford. The race version is ultra-choice.

• Not for the first time, I noticed the differences between high-end sports car racers and high-end bike racers. The former are cheerful, often carrying ten extra pounds, bright-eyed, full of energy. The motorcycle men, on the other hand, are starved down to hollow-cheeks levels. Some of them are always in pain; I recognize the facial expressions from my own life. They look perpetually concerned. Many of them are quite tall, which you would not expect. I respect them more than I respect my four-wheeled counterparts, for one simple reason: they are less likely to be killed but far more likely to be hurt. They deal with this by being single-minded. Twice this weekend I had to dissuade a rider from getting back on his crashed bike with a broken hand and cracked helmet shell, respectively. The latter rider took an ambulance to the pits, refused further attention, got back on a different bike for the next race, and crashed again. Then he went to the hospital.

America’s shortest Internet bully debuts new vaporware, the crowd goes wild

You might know John Hennessey as the person who was repeatedly sued for stealing money, defrauding customers and losing court judgments, and threatening to “make an example” of a random ViperAlley reader “in front of your family”. I know him as the person who, after I interviewed him at his Texas shop and brought up all of that stuff, apparently called McKeel Hagerty and complained that I was “bullying” him.

Which is ridiculous. If I’d wanted to bully him, I would have slapped him unconscious at his office, which would have been as easy as deadlifting the bare bar. Anyway. One entirely foreseeable consequence of our automotive media’s hollowing-out is that the same outlets that used to hold Henny to account, like Car and Driver, are now blowing up his four-inch limp balloon for him. From C/D we get:

Hennessey's latest supercar produces less than 1000 horsepower, but the mad scientists down in Sealy, Texas, haven't gone soft. Instead, the Hennessey Blackbird signals a shift in priorities for the American outfit, from chasing speed records to focusing on maximizing driver engagement. While the Blackbird packs less muscle than both the Lotus-based Venom GT and the most recent Venom F5, it will prioritize putting a smile on the face of anyone who gets behind the wheel thanks to the combination of a naturally aspirated V-8, rear-wheel drive, and a six-speed gated manual transmission.

Let me say this louder for the people in the back: you are a fool if you deal with this person. His “Venom F5” is most famous for the way in which its Microsoft-Paint-level “aerodynamics” resulted in a complete destruction of the car, and some damage to an airport runway, during testing. Give Henny credit for realizing that he isn’t competent to design a high-speed supercar — but it would be nice if he would just give up the business together and leave it to more honest people, like Ultra Car Company.

Ask Jack: Empty nester seeks petite European for unsupervised afternoons

When we last spoke to hp12c, he was choosing between several European coupes for his 50th birthday. He ended up getting a nice manual transmission 997.2. Now he is back, looking for a track rat to enjoy as his children escape the home!

I will be an empty nester later this year when our youngest heads to college and will be in a position to have hobbies and/or friends for the first time in a long time. I have been considering some HPDE days at the track closest to me, NCM Motorsports Park, which has many offerings. I have two other “sporty” cars in the household that could double as novice track cars and need help picking which one to use. Neither one is particularly fast nor valuable, so I could develop my driving skills without worrying too much about bad outcomes on the track. Here are the contenders:

2006 MINI Cooper S John Cooper Works

• Front-engine, front-wheel drive

• 101,000 miles

• 6 speed manual

1998 Porsche Boxster Base

• Mid-engine, rear-wheel drive

• 47,000 miles

• 5 speed manual

• Brey-Krause rollbar and factory hardtop

I believe the answer is “Porsche” due purely to driving dynamics, but the MINI is a hoot to drive and I was actually surprised how close the performance specs are between the two. Keep in mind I need to drive to and from the venue - no desire for a trailer - so whatever I need for the day needs to fit in the car. A set of track wheels and tires fits in the MINI, the Boxster not so much. I presume the running costs and consumables will be similar.

Before I answer, let me take a moment to reflect on how easy my job is compared to, say, the “Tough Love” lady from The Free Press. She is always dealing with the most awful questions, usually about collapsing marriages. Picking a car is light work compared to advising the lady who just bore three kids to a dude she dislikes.

That does not mean, however, that we don’t have some “tough love” coming up in this one. The first answer to our reader’s question is simple: Either of these cars will suffice as a track rat, don’t worry, they’re both fun, just try both of them and see which one you’d rather drive! He can walk away with that answer: it is a good and true response.

Now for the tough love. Neither of these vehicles is a serious track car in the modern era, for two reasons:

0. slow as shit to drive

1. expensive as shit to run

It can be fun to run a slow car on track, if it’s cheap. It can be fun to run an expensive car on track, if it’s fast. But what our friend has here are two cars that will have the approximate pace of a well-sorted NC Miata with the parts availability and running costs of, respectively, a 2006 BMW M3 and a 1998 Porsche 911 Turbo. There are very few cheap problems with either of these cars. Regular track use will almost immediately result in significant costs related to: bushings, bearings, tires, brakes, brake lines, power steering, and so on. For the MINI, add the supercharger drama and a panoply of leaks. For the Porsche, add hyper-expensive control arms and, very possibly, an engine seal or two.

Either car will suffice for the occasional low-pace, entry-level trackday where you don’t feather the tread blocks or boil the brakes. If our reader gets in the habit of driving on track, however, the correct answer is to sell one or both of these cars and buy an NC Miata with a proper roll bar. Alternately, get something like a Z4M, which won’t be much more expensive to run than the above cars but which will do a much better job of keeping up with traffic.

For now, however, there are no hard choices to make. Start your trackday career with the MINI, because it is less likely to loop on you. If you get tired of grinding the front tires, switch to the Porsche. But don’t make long-term plans with either.

One more thing: Note that I said “NC Miata” above, not “Miata”. I’m no longer recommending NA or NB Miatas for anything on track. They are basically vintage cars with awful crash performance. Unless you have a need to run a 1999 NB in Spec Miata, get the car that wasn’t designed during the Reagan Administration.

Please, God, let this be real

Harley-Davidson has filed trademark paperwork for two new model designations: RMCR and RMXR. Assuming that The Motor Company continues along its general previous model-designation path, these models should connote:

RMCR: Revolution Max Cafe Racer. This one requires no detective work because Harley revealed an RMCR concept earlier this year, seen above. Everyone wants it to be a forward-leaning bike with the 150hp version of the RevMax engine. It could wind up being a forward-leaning bike with the 121hp Sportster version, but there is really no reason to do such a thing.

RMXR: Everyone is hoping this is an XR750 flat tracker tribute with a full-power Revolution Max engine. This would be a natural successor to the XR1200, which was kind of like the Harley that everyone but Harley buyers seemed to love. They were showroom poison but resale platinum. Fitted with the 975cc RevMax, on the other hand, this new bike would have about 90 horsepower, which is just what the XR1200 had.

The consensus of Internet Expert Motorcyclists is that the RMCR is the fancy, expensive 150hp bike, perhaps costing $20,000, and the RMXR is the $11,000 entry-level option with 90hp. This makes sense because Harley will want some sort of pricing ladder for their “sporting” RevMaxes. What I hope the company does is to send them both out the door with 165hp. This would probably drive a stake through the heart of the revitalized Buell operation in Grand Rapids, which is currently doing business on the basis of having a USA-made 180hp cruiser for sale.

I would like to say that I’m a candidate for an RMCR but, honestly, I’m still a Pan America guy. I think. Let’s see it in the metal. ‘Cause if it’s super-dope, I could get an RMCR to ride locally then get a V85 Strada for longer trips.

Limits to growth

Our old friend Pete Dushenski is back on his (not quite) bullshit, this time discussing five reasons why the personal automobile has no future for broad-scale transportation. He’s not arguing against the existence of the car. He is kind of stating that cars will be the horses of the future: mostly owned for recreational purposes by awful people. His five points are discussed thoroughly in his article but here’s the nub of it:

0. Thermodynamics. There will be less energy available in the future. Cars are the worst way to take one person from A to B.

1. Land. Urban real estate is precious. A lot of it is covered by asphalt when it doesn’t need to be.

2. Geometry. Every car added to an urban road network makes things worse, while every person added to a transit network helps scale the costs and improve the service. No one who has ever lived in New York City would believe the latter, but there you go.

3. History. The car was imposed via government fiat, and could be removed the same way.

4. Human health. Cars are bad for our health, they make us fat, they poison the environment.

Obviously, Pete isn’t the first person to make these points, which can be found in every thinkpiece ever published everywhere. However, he is probably one of the more naturally intelligent people to look at these points collectively and say, “Well, this doesn’t mean cars are done, they’re just done as we know them.”

What depresses me about Pete’s list is that there’s a missing sixth point, and I’ll provide it below.

5. Intelligence on the wane. It is highly likely that human beings, taken as a statistical whole, have not been this stupid in ten thousand years. Every high-IQ population on this globe is in demographic free-fall, while the low-IQ populations are reproducing at positively rabbit-like rates. Each time you fail to add a new smart person to the planet, you are reducing the number of possible solutions available to all the above problems. Each time you add a stupid person, you increase the urgency and magnitude of the problems.

Allow me to demonstrate: The availability of cold fusion would immediately render all five of Pete’s points irrelevant. With essentially unlimited energy, we could build arcologies that house 100 million people each and have plenty of road access. But the majority of the scientific brain mass that would likely perfect the technology is, as we speak, being absorbed by a tissue in front of a computer screen. Meanwhile, the planet is forecast to add at least 2 billion new citizens with a median IQ of about 85 between now and the year 2080.

I’m not trying to make some sort of eugenicist argument here, merely pointing out the obvious. Smart people of all races no longer bother to reproduce at replacement rate. Your humble author is as guilty as most here, by the way, so I’m hoping that my son represents a sort of bottleneck point in a future million-strong population of arrogant, unpleasant-looking Baruth-lineage six-footers.

If you look back through historical media, you will find that our society started being openly pessimistic about the future in around 1972. This was when the fertility rate for American citizens of European ancestry dropped below replacement levels. Things are even worse in Europe. Japan fell through the floor in the early Seventies, but Korea didn’t follow them until 1983. Does that help explain Korea’s vitality compared to Japan during the last few decades? Another country that has been famous for intelligent residents: Persia/Iran, which is now well below replacement rate.

(Topic for another day: The two major crises around the globe, Russia v Ukraine and US v Iran, are both between high-IQ dying populations.)

“With enough eyes,” the programmer’s maxim goes, “all bugs are shallow”. An intelligent, scientifically-oriented population is literally a parallel supercomputer. Every major advance in history, from the pyramids to the low earth orbit, has been a result of a relatively high-IQ nation. If you take the contributions of five countries off the map — Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, and the United States — you are left with a pre-industrial society. Almost nothing of value has ever happened anywhere else.

Today, only four countries really matter:

In the years to come, we will continue to be media-bombarded by panicky statements about “the energy crisis”, “the environmental crisis”, and a dozen other crises yet to be named. (Perhaps, even, the Crisis on Infinite Earths!) Try to remember that there is only one actual crisis: the relative disappearance of intelligent people. What did Matt Damon say? “Our age of bronze is coming to a conclusion.”

Oh — and if you think that “AI” will supplant the lack of smart people, you’re not thinking hard enough.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Come back later this week for

CAT TALES: Tiger Agonistes

(Please welcome Dave Ryan and his story about finding his way on two wheels — jb)

There have been a few discussions about motorcycles here, but I don’t sense there are many in the group that ride (hopefully, I’m wrong). This is not an attempt to convince anyone to start, it’s just the story of how I became a motorcycle enthusiast—in my thirties. There are countless tales of someone having a motorcyclist in the family, often “good old dad” passing along the passion. They recount riding dirt bikes together; or maybe hours wrenching on an old project bike. Then there are those that had to hide their first bike as the family wasn’t keen on their child riding such a dangerous contraption. Usually, a friend was the catalyst in this case. Maybe just seeing a stranger ride past, the sound and the sight putting their hooks in deep. These were the beginnings of a lifetime on two wheels, starting at an early age (teens at the latest). All rather romantic. inspiring, and certainly worth hearing. Mine-- not romantic. Up to you to decide if it fits either of the other two.

As a child I became intensely interested in cars. At first it was probably just the fascination with mobility and wanting to be at the helm. My dad used to say I could accurately name the brand and model of most cars on the road at about four or five years old (parental exaggeration?). Soon performance was the thing that really got me. I was born in 1961, so I was coming of age during maturation of the first widespread performance boom; along with the marketing that went with it. I started getting interested in racing, and dad obliged. He took me to local dirt track and drag races. (Worth noting that my father was interested in cars, probably more than the average guy—but he certainly was not a gearhead.) Car Craft and Hot Rod magazine subscriptions and model cars followed.

During this time, there were four guys on our street that had full dress Harleys. “Baggers” in the current parlance. While I thought they were cool, I was really in love with an old drag racing Pontiac Tempest that lived on the street. (Probably not one of these — jb) I found out later that the old man secretly admired those Harleys and wanted one. He did say, once or twice, that he thought about buying one of those “little Hondas”. He thought they looked like fun. He worked in consumer credit at the time. Always complained about the “deadbeats” he had to deal with. Maybe he wanted to meet some of the “nicest people”.

As I got older, Car and Driver and Road & Track started showing up at the house. The objects of my (automotive) desires started shifting to imports. This was when I really started to part company with my father on what to buy. I remember him wanting me to buy a used second-generation Camaro during my college years (my salary was naturally small, befitting my entry level job status). I ended up with a one owner Saab Sonett III. He wasn’t impressed.

Once I got to the point in my life that I was established in my career and my finances were such that I could afford a nice daily driver—I wanted a toy. This was early ‘90’s and my thoughts centered on either a new Miata or a used Vette. My dad was living in Dallas at the time. During a visit I mentioned what I was contemplating. We went to a local shop specializing in used Corvettes and made a stop at a Mazda dealership. Something fun to do while I was there. He suggested a trip to the Harley store. Why not? He immediately was drawn to the Road King—essentially the same bike he secretly wanted all those years ago. I went straight to the Sportster. Something about the elemental look just captured me. I had heard Harleys forever, somehow the sound tugged a little more at me that day. Suddenly a monkey wrench was thrown into my plans. Maybe a motorcycle? The influence of my dad was pulling me. I knew about an uncle that rode and that my grandfather was an Indian guy. Listening to my father talk about that stuff that day—really talk about it, was powerful. Maybe I should give it a try? My (at the time) future wife was not thrilled, but we don’t dictate to each other.

I signed up for a rider course, and it was over at that point. Why? What is it about riding? “If I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand” sounds like a cop out. There are the old bromides about freedom (hard to feel free with speed limits and distracted drivers in rolling roadblocks), about feeling “one with the machine” (perhaps the genesis of those goofy half man/half bike commercials). That it is the closest thing to flying (being neither a pilot nor a bird I’m not in a position to answer). I’ve repeated the old saw, “you never see a motorcycle parked in front of a psychiatrists office” (but I have seen some pretty crazy things done on a bike). I don’t know. It’s a skill. Like any skill the better you are at it the better it feels. Braking for a corner, altering your body position, dropping down a gear or two, hearing the growl of engine braking after matching the revs (especially on one of my Ducatis), tipping it in as you trail off the brakes, picking up the throttle as you continue to look through the corner, accelerating out as you pick the bike up…then repeat! What an unbelievable feast for the senses. I can tell you that it does free your mind of extraneous nonsense. It better, not paying attention is a recipe for disaster. Complete safety all the time saps the life out of you. I’m far from a daredevil or adrenaline junkie; but there is something exhilarating about being out there piloting a machine that others are afraid of.

So, thanks Dad. My enthusiasm took a path that he didn’t really agree with, but it strangely was awakened by him in an unorthodox fashion. Coming full circle, it struck me to thank him in a public way a couple of years ago when he was in the hospital. My passion for Ducati resulted in (among other things) purchasing an example of the first motorcycle they ever made. Which further resulted in my annoyance over the amount of inaccuracy regarding the story of those bikes. I ended up writing an article to set the record straight. I told him about it, and he was proud it was going to be published. He fell ill during the process. Right before it went to print, I asked if it would be possible to add a dedication—done. I didn’t mention it, wanted him to see it in print. Well, I got a call that he was in bad shape. He was still alive when I got there; but wasn’t responsive. I stayed with him, told him of the dedication on the article. No way to know if he heard me, he passed within about 10 minutes. When I got home, five advance copies of the magazine were in my mailbox. With the dedication to John C. Ryan right there, under the byline.

Yes! That was me on the MotoAmerica live feed watching some totally unconscious rider while wearing a shirt depicting a Yakuza tabby cat in front of an S14 Silvia. Next question! Let’s talk about stuff!

Gravity, is working against me

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Hello, friends. Be patient with me today, as I had a 907-mile drive yesterday to bring DG’s race car and a spare engine back from the builder. I’d like to thank Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, and the surely-FDA-illegal Buc-ee’s house soda, for making it possible. Also, I’m currently on the brink of suicide watch because Swatch denied my application for a Moonswatch 1969. I believe many ACFers were also affected by this global tragedy. Last but not least — If you didn’t see it, be sure to check out yesterday’s Harley Pan America test.

The end of high hopes

At 4:30 this morning, Glen Hansard crashed his motorcycle, alone, in Dublin, Ireland, and was killed. He was fifty-six years old. I cannot easily express what his music has meant to me over the past decade and a half. I have performed his tunes in public hundreds of times. If you have never listened to him, I recommend the album “Rhythm and Repose”, which contains his best and most thoughtful work.

He was a busker and local-scene fixture for years before breaking into the public eye as part of a duo with Marketa Irglova in 2007. They appeared together in a film, “Once”, that fictionalized their relationship, and performed as “The Swell Season”.

I could go on about Glen, and I’m tempted to, but instead I will tell a personal story. In 2015 I was doing a thrice-weekly gig at a sandwich shop in downtown Columbus. 11:00 to 1:00, playing whatever came to mind. I was in what the kids call “a bad place” one day and I decided to play through “Bird of Sorrow”:

Tethered to a bird of sorrow
A voice that's buried in the hollow
You've given over to self-deceivin'
You're prostrate, bowed, but not believin'
You've squandered more than you could borrow
You've bet your joy on all tomorrows
For the hope of some returnin'
While everything around you is burnin

It had the effect of silencing what was normally a pretty loud restaurant — oh my god, the crazy guitar player in the corner is going to end this by killing himself — and I was embarrassed afterwards. About ten minutes later, a painfully beautiful woman in her late twenties walked up to me and said, “I have wanted to hear that song live for a very long time, and I needed to hear it today.” She handed me a fifty-dollar bill. I didn’t want to spend it, so I kept it, put it aside, moved it from guitar case to guitar case, car to car, until one day I realized that I had managed to lose it. Just like I have lost so many other things worth keeping over the years. Money, opportunities, people, time, love. Tethered, you might say, to a bird of sorrow.

Glen, I’ll be seeing you.

Some goats stumble, others leap past

This was certainly a weekend to forget for poor Oscar Piastri. His qualifying was ruined by Sir Lewis Hamilton — although it was poor work by the spotters, not by Lewis himself, responsible. Then he leapt out to lead the race in a move that the vast majority of the sport’s drivers would never have considered, only to be struck by a wandering Carlos Sainz and balked back into traffic. Finally, his gearbox died and ended his race.

His teammate, by contrast, qualified up front then easily recaptured first place on pure over-the-road speed in the early stints. It is easy, when watching Lando Norris’s emotional collapses and self-doubt and mistake-prone behavior, to forget the fact that he is a genuinely exemplary driver in the right circumstances. He’s like a modern Jenson Button; mediocre-to-decent in the majority of his races but periodically he will do something that only the greats can do.

The problem, of course, is that he is surrounded by people who execute pretty much every time. Like Super Max, who drove a tractor to second place and pulled a pass on Lewis Hamilton that the latter admitted he not only didn’t expect but didn’t even see until it was too late.

(The alert reader will notice that Lewis has been considerably less competent at watching his mirrors in the past few years. This is almost certainly biological. Your eyes really start to go downhill after the age of thirty-five.)

There was a lot of great racing in this one, even if some of it is artificially generated by the power unit stupidity. On the slow end of the grid, Fernando Alonso shone in the revamped Aston Martin, while Cadillac had yet another suspension failure. Not since the Catera have we seen an overseas-assembled Caddy with this kind of build quality issues. Honda is about to debut their revised powertrain. It could be a tough second half of the year for Cadillac, Haas, Williams, and Alpine if the engine is good.

If only Verstappen had chosen Mercedes. He’d be 75 points ahead, not the 50 that Kimi has. Speaking of — Kimi drove the wheels off the car. When you see him, you are watching a future legend.

You (don’t) have to go back

Much hay was made of the fact that hundreds of thousands of Europeans and other furriner-types fell in love with Buc-EE’s and Waffle House during their trip to the World Cup, but Canada must have also charmed a few of our guests, because they’ve decided to stay there for good. From The Globe And Mail:

Visitors to Canada who applied for visas to attend the FIFA World Cup have so far lodged 175 asylum claims, including from Senegal, Ghana and Egypt. Canada played host to 13 games in Toronto and Vancouver in June and July, issuing 26,000 visas to visitors. Ghanaians, whose national team played Panama on June 17 in Toronto, have lodged the most asylum claims. Fifteen people with visitor visas from Egypt also claimed asylum. Fifteen Colombian nationals, whose soccer team played Switzerland in Vancouver on July 7, lodged refugee claims after entering the country.There were 10 asylum claims from Senegalese nationals who came here for the World Cup. There were five refugee claims from Ecuadorians, whose national team competed in the World Cup in matches outside Canada. Many refugee claims were made by World Cup visitors whose national teams did not participate in the tournament. They include 15 Kenyans, 10 from China, 10 from Bangladesh, 10 Nigerians and five each from Burundi, Nepal and Pakistan.

The numbers only include people whose stated purpose of the visit was to watch the World Cup.

I’m going to try this in Switzerland next time I’m there. “Oh yeah, I’m just here to see some watchmakers. Also, I’m never going home.”

I’m easily satisfied by the very best

It cost more than $67,000 to restore this beautiful Chesterfield Brown four-seater Fleetwood Talisman. What’s it worth at Bring-A-Trailer? $16,800, which was (wayyyy, presumably) below reserve.

Long-time readers will recall that I drove a Fleetwood Talisman from Columbus, Ohio to Houston, Texas in July of 2011, losing the radiator along the way and inadvertently entering into a astoundingly self-destructive relationship with a much younger woman in the process. It was just fifteen years ago but I struggle sometimes to remember even being that person, in much the same way that you can visit a Korean War fighter plane at a museum and still have no sense of what it was like to parachute half-dead from the bitter-cold sky to the frost-covered ground.

I think the sentiment, and the market, will eventually come back around to these cars. When I see the two-tone Maybach S680s in Manhattan, often in colors that are not so distant from Chesterfield Brown, I see a world in which the sheer impossibility of making a convincingly sporty car in many segments has opened up the chance of a return to luxury. You will perhaps recall that the original Talisman was the product of just such a “vibe shift” when new emissions regulations and higher fuel prices put a bullet in the head of stuff like the Impala 409 SS. Built for comfort, not for speed.

You will know that I have fixed all of my income and employment problems for good when you see me in a two-tone Maybach. I like those cars. I like this Talisman. I’d like to have both of them. Speaking of “luxury cars”, however:

A bad mechanic strikes one final blow

This past weekend, at the AMA Vintage Days, my son and I saw no fewer than three CB77 Superhawk 305s for sale. This motorcycle is most famous for being used by another writer and his son:

Robert Pirsig and his son, Chris, used the painfully underpowered Honda to cross the country in a trip that he would later on recount in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Chris would go on to spend his life helping people at the San Francisco Zen Center. I should say his short life, because at the age of 22 he was stabbed to death at the corner of Haight and Octavia.

Pirsig’s book, and his philosophy, have been of much use to many people, your humble author included. However, it is more or less directly what killed his son. Apparently, Chris misinterpreted the robbery attempt, which probably began as most of them do with a “Hey, man, can you help me out?” as a genuine need for help; his gentleness and seeming recalcitrance enraged the man who then killed him.

You can do a lot of harm in the course of trying to do good. Usually the harm is not as serious as what happened to Chris Pirsig. You can also suffer a few consequences along the way.

For the past six years, my wife and I have worked with a series of students from the University of Northwestern Ohio (UNOH) near Dayton. We hire them to crew the race cars at rates that climb over time as they become more useful to us. We have a few success stories; one fellow is now running a sixty-car competition program for a major Radical dealer. We have a few weird stories, like the kid who worked his ass off for a couple of years, was nearly killed in a car crash, degenerated into a drug-addicted wastrel whom we had to eject from our home, but then turned his life around and became a well-respected machinist and engine builder in his own right.

Then there’s Cameron. I took a personal liking to the kid when I met him, perhaps because he was so awkward. He was tall-ish, scrawny, with the worst acne I have ever seen. He looked at the ground when he spoke. But he was confident in his work and he wanted to do as much as possible. I made a lot of opportunities for him, including giving him two vintage motorcycles as payment for future services rendered. I even bought him $650 worth of tools so he could start doing additional work on the side. One day he basically disappeared and we found out that he had gotten a job with a Radical shop in Virginia. He still owed me about five grand in labor, but I figured we would get it from him eventually.

Then the mistakes started to become apparent. He’d removed the transmission from my Radical PR6 for service… and, it turns out, effectively ruined the engine by over-disassembling it, losing a bunch of critical Radical-specific parts, and letting it corrode. He’d crashed one of my motorcycles and “fixed” it at this own expense, but the fixes turned out be inadequate. Over the course of the winter, we kept finding stuff that he had half-assed or failed to do entirely. It got bad enough that the remaining crew started collectively trying to recall everything Cameron had worked on so they could find the problems before they happened.

Oh, and we were missing a lot of tools. How had he disappeared with all the tools I bought him and others? It boggled the mind. I decided I would start the process of handling this so I reached out to people who knew him at his current Radical gig, only to find out that he’d been fired from said gig for refusing to clean the cars during races.

“Well, I’m still holding on to the title for one of these bikes, so we will eventually hear from him,” was my statement on the matter. But months went on and we never did.

Two weeks ago, after driving someplace in my Lexus ES300, Danger Girl noticed that there was a hot smell coming from the right rear caliper. Sure enough, the wheel was hot to the touch. Another locked caliper, or at least that seemed like the most likely outcome since the hubs were new-ish and the parking-brake drums had been redone 12,000 miles ago I bought a rebuild and new pads from Rock Auto, bringing the total parts and labor cost of this $4500 Lexus to… $11,346.82.

(I have 13,540 miles on the car, so it’s been basically as expensive to operate as a new Cayman GT4.)

I put the ES300 up on the lift, and sure enough the right rear wheel was difficult, but not impossible, to turn. So I removed the caliper and mounting bracket, at which point I got my first surprise. The pads weren’t really worn. On a hunch, I compressed the piston; it was fine. Yet the hub now turned freely with the brake off, so the caliper must have been the problem somehow. I started to worry: do I have an ABS or proportioning valve problem? This was so agitated that I was forced to listen to Natalie Merchant during the reassembly.

“But get this through / that I don’t approoooooove” she sang, as I bolted everything back together. At which point I realized:

• The two bolts that had secured the bracket to the hub carrier were very different in condition. One was fully rusted, the other one was like new.

• Also, the like new one was twice as long as the rusted one.

• When I reinstalled the bracket using these bolts, there was a distinct “ping” as the longer bolt hit the disc from behind. I checked the disc. There was a groove worn into the back of the disc, where the bolt was. But it wasn’t significant.

And then it hit me. Cameron and I had done the rear parking brake drums together; me on driver’s side, him on passenger. I got mine done a lot faster than he did, to the point that I went into the house while he finished his side. Surely what happened was this:

• Cameron lost one of the bracket mount bolts.

• And he was too lazy to look for it.

• And too proud to admit it to me.

• So he waited until I was done with my side, then he wandered around the shop until he found another metric bolt of the same diameter.

• But the bolt was too long.

• So he just didn’t put it in all the way.

• At some point in the last 12,000 miles, the bolt vibrated tighter. This normally shouldn’t happen, but it does happen.

• Which caused it to impinge upon the disc, heating it and heating the wheel.

I was lazy myself; rather than grind down the bolt, something that only occurred to me afterwards, I just spaced it out with some washers and resolved to buy the correct bolt before winter. The fix was, indeed, a fix. And now I have a decent spare caliper. Total cost was a rather unfortunate $112.53, but I didn’t use the pads that I bought (USA-made Akebono!) so I can set them aside for another time. Also, $27 of that cost was a new vacuum bleeder that I can use on the motorcycles as well.

This year, we made the decision not to hire any UNOH kids. Part of it was because I’m not racing, and part of it was not wanting to put in the emotional effort involved with getting a crew member up to speed. Next year will probably be different. There’s a cost involved with helping people. As long as you can keep it at the level of “destroyed Hayabusa motor”, rather than “dead son on a San Francisco streetcorner”, that cost is worth paying. The harder part, at least if you’re me, is tallying up what it has cost everyone else to help you, and wondering if you will ever be worth enough to somehow pay it all back.

Meet the quickest Harley-Davidson streetbike in history. Until the Pan America arrived, no road-legal Harley had ever offered anything close to 150 horsepower. On its debut, a standard height PanAm “Special” hit 120mph trap speed for Cycle World; that was a jacked-up, wire-spoke-wheeled ADV with a big windshield and Michelin Scorcher Adventure semi-knob…

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Good afternoon, friends. A couple of links to start the day. From our very own I COME IN PEACE, a great vintage moto show review to start his Substacking career. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I saw the same CB1100F he saw, only here at Mid-Ohio. Guess there are two perfect ones! And via our old pal Pete Dushenski, a moderate paean to…

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As you know, I love classic station wagons as much as I loathe crossover combover potatoes. So I was extra excited when my friend Robert Reed posted a link to this most excellent Jadestone version on a Facebook GM B-body wagon page today.

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Good afternoon, friends. Just like Apple TV’s F1 coverage, we start with the ads.

I was in The Free Press last week with an article on Chinese cars and their media fluffers. Paid subscribers to ACF also had a chance to read a 152-mph test drive of the Denza Z9 GT that offered additional insight beyond the FP article. At the Washington Examiner, I reviewed the latest Olivia Rodrigo album. Spoiler: it’s remarkably good.

I just received 40 hardcover copies of Cat Tales from the printer. For $30, I will ship one to you, signed as you like and with a limited-edition “Sparkle SNOBES” sticker. I take Venmo, Paypal, personal checks, cash, and medically pure ketamine in small baggies as payment. Email hardcover@cattalesbook.com to get in on this. Proceeds will be going towards Tiger Dad’s recent $330 vet bill, about which more later.

The day the computers turned on Princess George

If George Russell fails to win the WDC, last weekend’s race at Spa will perhaps be cited as the moment when he lost his last shred of hope. He was down on straight-line power for qualifying, a situation that some observers are blaming on the AI-powered adaptive-learning algorithms that, at most of the teams, now govern the availability of power from the battery. In other words, there’s a computer that has the ability to determine on the fly how much of the battery the driver is allowed to have at any given point. It might decide to choke the driver on corner exit to preserve the battery for later down the straight, and so on. So in George’s case, his AI might have had a different opinion from Kimi’s AI on where in the lap the battery would be most profitably discharged.

Yes, this is astoundingly stupid. F1 could ban it, but they have yet to do so.

George’s woes continued at the start, where his “SoC”, or State of Charge, changed down the straight and he was unable to fend off Lewis Hamilton, who then managed to wreck him out of the race without incurring any damage himself. This had the nifty effect of putting Hamilton into 2nd once again in the driver’s championship. Despite the awful nut-slurping noises from Jolyon Palmer and Alex Jacques about how it was “just a racing incident”, the stewards disagreed and hit Sir Lewis with a 5-second penalty that ended up having little effect on the race.

Max Verstappen’s brilliant charge to the front didn’t last, but he was able to hold onto a podium. Random thoughts on the race below:

• Whatever mental advantage Sir Lewis had over Leclerc is now completely gone. There is a 35-point gap between the two, but there are a lot of races left and if Leclerc takes the lead position more often than not this will be the fourth time in five seasons that Hamilton’s teammate has been paid significantly less than he was to score more points.

• Isack Hadjar really demonstrated his value to Red Bull this weekend, both as a teammate to Verstappen and in his own right. I don’t think he will ever be one of the greats, but he has certainly shaded his two predecessors in the seat. Laurent Mekies has claimed that Red Bull is getting calls from current F1 drives who are interested in a seat; increasingly it looks like that seat would be next to Hadjar rather than previously occupied by him.

• The superclipping and fast-turn downshifting is getting so bad that F1 TV is taking the speedometer and power graphs off the screen during some of the single-car footage. Surely everyone involved must understand that this is a major problem with the series, exacerbated by the “fussy AI” business discussed above. The 2027 and 2028 changes are band-aids. The obvious thing to do is to bring the 2031-proposed V-8 forward immediately and tell the teams they have open cost caps to develop an engine.

• During the final third of the race, I never once thought that Kimi Antonelli might crack or make a mistake under pressure. Had it been George up front, that would have been my only thought. This young man is everything he was supposed to be. There is probably one person on the grid who could consistently beat Kimi in the same car — and that person decided, wrongly, that he didn’t want a fifth world championship this year if it arrived wearing gloss silver and black.

I know I’m sad and old, because I love it

DK Engineering in the United Kingdom is selling a 2021 “Tailor Made” 812 Superfast. I don’t suffer from a lot of envy in my life but I openly envy anyone who has an F12berlinetta, an 812, or any development of that car. I had a chance to track an F12 and put 500 varied road miles on it way back in 2014 or thereabouts. I’m not sure I have ever loved a roadgoing sports car more; the various McLaren LTs absolutely bitch-slap it on track but then again my Radical SR8 is a cut above the McLarens so I don’t yearn for them the way I do for my very own front-engined V12 Ferrari. The minimum asking price on them now in the used market is half a million dollars and, sad to say, that’s more than fair.

And now I’ve found my favorite 812 of all, a “Tailor Made” program vehicle that self-consciously imitates a vintage 166.

Noted trackside photographer and car-culture critic Charlie Grafton calls it “the $600,000 version of one of those ‘Big Ten’ edition Silverados.” He is undoubtedly correct, just like I was undoubtedly correct to be horrified when my grandfather replaced his aesthetically perfect ice-blue 1979 Eldorado Biarritz with a pearl-white 1981 Eldorado Biarritz featuring the Rolls-Royce grille and faux-convertible top, but I now understand the sense of nostalgia that led Jack The First to make the swap.

The colors and interior choice are retro but they are also lovely. Most importantly, this car seems calculated to have absolutely zero appeal to: Arabs, tech bros, young hedge-fund types, and all the other people whose earnest patronage of Ferrari is a blight on the firm’s appeal… to people like me who can’t afford the product. Even if I had the (unspecified) asking price, I wouldn’t buy this 812; I’d buy an LMP2 and a newer Lexus sedan. Doesn’t matter. This is absolutely lovely to see and I hope more people take advantage of Tailor Made to create unashamedly road-focused, gentleman-operated Ferraris.

A vaccine for Gell-Mann Amnesia

The NACTOY jury has forty-nine members. About ten of them could be trusted to find their own ass with two hands and a flashlight. Five of them, to my knowledge, have ever successfully tried racing wheel-to-wheel: Lauren Fix, John Davis, Dan Carney, Henry Payne, and Steven Cole Smith. The rest are mommybloggers, buffet-browsing fossils, no-talent clowns, and Internet-personality wannabes. It is astounding what they don’t understand about cars — and this week, we will take a look at some remarkably confident, yet astoundingly ill-informed, comments by one of them.

The Car Collective is a Substack that claims to be written by credentialed industry veterans. One of them is NACTOY juror Gary Vasilash. In a July 20th piece about “affordability”, he makes some truly remarkable claims:

That is, in 2018 the average number of vehicles sold per dealership was 1,028. The average retail selling price was $35,608. In 2025 the average number of vehicles sold per dealership was 955. But the average retail setting price was $48,205.

Looked at from the point of view of total revenue, in 2018 it was $36.6 million and in 2025 it was $46 million, or a 25.7% increase in revenue with 7.1% fewer vehicles sold. Sure, the average 2025 vehicle costs a lot more. But when it comes to the transactions, the 2025 scenario was better from the sales side. What’s more—and it truly is more—NADA has it that the average dealership revenue in 2018 was $61.23 million and $76.60 million in 2025—or a 25% increase in total dealer revenue.

Emphasis above is mine, because it’s about to be funny. That 25% number for revenue increase from 2018 to 2025 seemed suspiciously familiar, and it should:

CPI inflation from January 2018 to January 2025 is 28.18 percent. So it turns out that “what’s more — and it truly is more” turns out to be less.

Now, there’s an actual useful tidbit in Vasilash’s data, which was earlier in his article. He notes that dealerships got this 25% increase on a 7.1% decrease in vehicles sold. So even if we adjust properly for inflation, we are still seeing a slight rise above general consumer inflation in the price of vehicles. Cars cost more than they used to, even after you take the dollar out of the picture. Since Gary isn’t familiar with esoteric graduate-college economic concepts like “inflation”, however, he missed the actual significance of the numbers.

But wait, there’s more funny stuff:

Consider that there was a 35.4% increase in the selling price between the years 2018 and 2025. Odds are the dealer invoice price—as in what it pays to the OEM for the vehicle—didn’t rise 35.4% but something more along the likes of 15% to 20%.

Consequently, the dealer has a better gross profit per unit.

So it isn’t a matter of selling more. It is a matter of making more.

And more expensive vehicles allow dealers to make more.

This assertion can really only be explained by the fact that Michigan has about the cheapest legal marijuana in the continental 48 states. (This also explains how “Big Gretch” stays around, I think.) If Vasilash is correct in his assertion, then it means that the margin between dealer invoice and MSRP is close to 25%. Vasilash uses Cadillac Escalades in his article, as an example of a high-priced, extremely profitable vehicle, citing the Escalade-V as the most profitable.

If Gary’s calcuations are correct, then the dealer invoice on a $161,990 Escalade-V should be about $121,500, and the dealer would take home $40,490 on every Slade-V sold, plus the 3% holdback and any direct-to-dealer incentives. As it happens, however, the invoice price — and this is a publicly available number — on the truck is… drumroll… $153,990. That is a five percent margin. On the most expensive vehicle that Cadillac actually sells.

BMW and Mercedes have margins closer to seven percent; Honda and Toyota often have margins in the four percent range. It’s true that if you could set the time machine to 1980 you’d find Lincoln Town Cars with a 20% invoice-to-MSRP gap — but a 1981 Escort would have been eleven percent max. The margins have squeezed a lot since then.

In fairness, these numbers don’t represent the actual cost picture for a car sitting on a dealer lot. You subtract holdback, you subtrack some incentives — then you add floorplan cost, which is much higher than it was in 2018, and you add insurance cost, which is skyrocketing as our vibrant technicolor dreamcoat crowd of diverse true Emma Lazarus Americans becomes increasingly interested in trashing dealership lots and stealing the inventory thereof.

Had Gary bothered to pick up the phone and call a single dealer principal at any point in the last fifty years of his automotive journalism career, he also would have learned that dealerships love volume. Turning inventory is a primary passion of a dealership. There are many, many programs that pay them more for volume. The banks pay them more in F&I kickbacks when they sell more cars. Increased turnover can even decrease floorplan costs if you finance with a captive like Ford Motor Credit. There is a reason a Lexus dealership is worth more than a Ferrari dealership, and that reason is: volume.

Vasilash and others like him are the people who pick your Car of the Year, who infest the print magazines, who serve as “industry experts” on panels and suchlike. It’s all a scam, it’s all worthless. There’s a reason the autowriting business has collapsed in favor of shiny-faced influencers: it deserved to.

Turns out they’re just about equal, in a way

Two Mercedes-Benz grand tourers with wacky doors, both alike in dignity. The SLR was the much-ballyhooed collaboration with McLaren. It cost $495,000 in 2005, which would be $875,000 now. It ran 11.6@125 courtesy of a 617-horsepower specially fettled take on the 5.5-liter supercharged V-8 that Mercedes-Benz slapped in everything including the CL55 I used to drive to work. It was hand-built at the McLaren Technology Centre using a carbon-fiber monocoque. The doors went up in dihedral fashion. The nose was very, very, very long for no reason anyone understood.

The market has never really liked the car, not least because around the same time you could buy an SL65 AMG that went exactly as fast for around one-third the price.

The next time Mercedes-Benz did a unique GT car, they did it themselves. The SLS cost $232,000 in 2013, which is $337,000 today. It ran 11.9@123 courtesy of a 583-horse version of the in-house 6.2 (badged 6.3) liter AMG V-8. It had gullwing doors:

For the record, The Commander was a massive fan of the SLS back in the day and I took every opportunity to give him a ride in the cars. I wonder if he remembers.

While everyone loves the SLS Black Series, which I drove with murderous abandon during a couple of different tests and pronounced the greatest thing since sliced bread, the jury was more ambivalent on the standard car and there were a few years where you could get a silver one with no options for $105,000, give or take.

Well, an SLR and a base SLS both closed on Bring-A-Trailer today. Which one fetched more money? Take your guess… then scroll

all

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here:

A low-mileage SLR for $391,000. That’s all the money, isn’t it? What about the SLS?

Same color, same low mileage because I’d say 1,700 miles on a 2013 isn’t morally distant from 7,000 miles on a 2005, and a hammer price of $405,000.

Which car will history venerate more? If you come back fifty years from now, which will be more expensive? My money is on the SLR. The older the cars get, the less likely they are to be driven, at which point the remarkable pedigree of the SLR will come to mean more than the AMG-built status of the SLS. The fact that the latter car is a little easier to drive and maintain won’t matter much.

A friend of mine came to see me last week, driving his newly-acquired stick-shift 991 Carrera. “Everything costs too much now, and everything’s awful,” he opined, which is an odd thing to say when you’re in a nice new-to-you Porsche but is perhaps justified by what he had to pay to get it. And he is kind of right. It is ridiculous that the SLS costs so much. Would you like a much better and faster car, running 11.2@130 and capable of lapping either of the above piggies in a single 25-minute session? Then you want this, photographed by the mighty Matt Tierney as I was zooming around NCM at a pace just a little short of what JR Hildebrand did in a flippin’ Senna:

One of these is for sale, right now, in Ohio, in this color even. The price is just $138,995. It is a better car than the SLR or SLS. Faster, more usable in the real world, much more competent on track. A real joy. Now, if I had $138,995 sitting around, I still wouldn’t buy it. I’d buy a rebodied Elan sports prototype and go win the P-class at the SCCA Runoffs. But if you buy it, I’d sure like another session behind the wheel. Today’s column is concluded; go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.

Let me admit this right up front: there was no reason for me to go see Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”. I have no patience for Redditors and the like whose response to every new denigration of Western culture is “Just go CONSOOM THE MEDIA before you judge it.” We don’t treat any other product like that. Imagine telling someone “I think the new Ferrari Luce is awful,” and having them respond with “Wellllll… you really need to pay $640,000 for the thing before you decide you don’t like it.” The Hollywood machine can’t tell the difference between “NPC rushing to the newest capeshit” and “critical thinker giving a fair shot to an obviously ridiculous idea”. The money spends the same on their end. You are under no obligation to pay money for any product that is obviously designed to upset and/or annoy you.

That being said, I had a few friends who really wanted to see the film and I am also a big fan of not letting politics or social positions affect my real-life relationships, so I grabbed the proverbial popcorn and sat down for the worst Christopher Nolan film of all time. And that includes “TENET”.

Much of the discussion surrounding “The Odyssey” has focused on the incomprehensibly “DEI” nature of its casting, which demeans both the original roles and the unfortunate people compelled to inhabit them here. Everyone agrees that Lupita Nyong’o is a talented person with her own sort of beauty; why force her to play two famously flawless Greek women? Let’s not forget that both of her characters are cousins to Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway. It’s just senseless.

There’s a strong devil’s advocate position to be made here, and it goes something like: The Odyssey has been cast as a play since time immemorial and very rarely has it had an all-Greek cast. Diane Kruger was German, not Greek. There is also a long Hollywood tradition of ignoring and/or playing with ethnicity. James Caan, a Jew, played an Italian in “Godfather”, next to Robert De Niro who then turned around and played a Jew in “Casino”. Charleton Heston played the Jewish Moses and Yul Brynner played Ramses. If you are looking for strict adherence to ethnicity in movies or theater, you will never find it.

Similarly, I can make an argument for the other much-criticized casting of biological woman Eliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon. In Shakespeare’s time, they had boys play the female roles to avoid societal upset. So now we have girls playing boys to avoid societal upset, or something like that. The Elizabethans were moral degenerates, too, just like modern Americans. It was just expressed differently. It was also played for laughs: part of the hilarity in As You Like It comes from when Rosalind pretends to be a boy. Historically, that part was a double blind of sorts, with a young boy playing a woman pretending to be a young boy, and even the less sophisticated members of the audience could enjoy it.

Make no mistake, if you were to show any movie based on classical literature to, say, an Englishman of the seventeenth century, he would be horrified at all the intra-European miscasting. “Why is that German playing a Frenchman?” and so on. Two hundred years from now, maybe our descendants won’t blink at a remake of “Boyz n The Hood” with a white Tre and a Doughboy played by a six-armed alien from Acturus. “Either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood,” the three-foot tall green creature will intone through a quantum translator box strung around its second neck, and some woman in the audience will start crying.

In 2025, however, this sort of casting-for-shock-value should be taken for what it is: a deliberate attempt to shock the normies and piss in the faces of the people who pay for tickets. It does not deserve support nor approval. Perhaps it was meant to draw attention away from the rest of the casting, which is just incompetent.

A 55-year-old Matt Damon playing Odysseus? This is bad comedy. Odysseus is supposed to be an intellectual, a trickster of sorts, who is in his twenties when he is called to the Trojan War. (Which he initially tries to draft-dodge, by the way, something that is ignored in the film.) Matt Damon is such a stupid-and-bland-looking person that he became famous in “Good Will Hunting” for playing a character who couldn’t possibly be smart because he looks so dull. It is anti-casting. For the record, I’d argue the most convincing Odysseus ever is George Clooney in “O Brother, Where Are Thou?” That’s the man depicted in the poem: an amoral braggart on the road to redemption.

The immensely dislikable Jon Bernthal, a fellow who looks so unpleasant that you can kind of forgive his co-workers in “Wind River” for beating him to death, shaves his head and plays Menelaus as a sort of wisdom-infused Andrew Tate:

This is presumably meant to be an in-joke — the biggest cuck in Greek literature looks like Tate! — but the unexpected effect is that you kind of feel sorry for the guy even if he did decide to cut up his wife’s face after the war.

Then you have Agamemnon, who in the source document is an arrogant and overly driven man who nevertheless engages fairly with his people, even recognizing a mistake he made with his finest warrior, Achilles. In the movie, on the other hand, he is basically Darth Vader, especially in this, the most evocative scene in the entire film:

You never really see his face, which doesn’t make sense in the film but makes sense once you realize he’s played by this guy:

Why? Why not! Why not have a vaguely fey Jewish guy play the King of The Greeks? As for Achilles, he is essentially written out of the film. Which would make sense were “The Odyssey” restricted to the events of the original poem, but it is not; we get parts of the Iliad and Aeneid as well in the film.

Eurylochus, who is a coward and saboteur in the poem, is played as a heroic moral touchstone by Himesh Patel, because of course you can’t have the leading Indian be a piece of shit in a film that you want to sell to 1.4 billion English-language viewers. The goddess Athena is played by Zendaya, which is just silly.

On the other hand, you have Ryan Hurst as Mentor — excellent choice — and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, which is pretty good.

We could forgive all of this casting drama were the core film as well done as “Inception” or “The Dark Knight” or “The Prestige”, but what Nolan gives us is an “Odyssey” without a plot.

If you’ve never read the original Odyssey, it’s worth your time. It is not equal to the Iliad, not close, but it has a sort of majesty in its own right. At its heart, the Odyssey is a story of how the gods humbled a bad man and taught him to be a good one. It details how a “trickster” became a righteous king and reunites with both his son and his father. Which is why “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is such a deft piece of filmmaking; it tells exactly the moral that Homer intended.

What Christopher Nolan gives us, instead, is a story of how a war criminal comes to regret his war crimes through a complicated program of letting his friends die and also getting high all the time with a really fine-looking broad. The political thorniness of Odysseus killing most of his most prominent, which in the poem is hand-waved by having Athena intervene, is dealt with via a ridiculous subplot of his son not participating in his revenge, at which point the son becomes king and banishes his dad.

All of this rings false. We are meant to believe that Odysseus is emotionally undone by watching the Greeks ravage Troy — but only the biggest of fools couldn’t have predicted this would happen, and in any event Odysseus is far from a naive kid when it happens. He has already been at war for ten years. Nevertheless, seeing the sack of a city makes him secretly not want to go home. His subsequent behaviors get everyone around him killed. Then one day he wakes up and goes home, in quite excellent physical shape by the way.

This is nothing that the ancients would recognize as a story. There’s nothing human about it. Instead of a redemptive tale, we get a mopey violence addict surrounded by special effects. His wife is devoted to him, but we can’t help but wonder why. His son doesn’t know him. His eventual triumph just comes from being a better archer than his opponents; that’s the sort of detail on which nothing more serious than a Hong Kong action flick should hang.

Nolan had the choice here between making a historically faithful film and making one that would resonate more strongly with modern audiences. Somehow, he chose neither. Damon is not one percent more sympathetic in this film than he was in “The Departed” — you know, the one where Marky Mark kills him and the audience cheers. At most, it’s a parable about medicinal marijuana: it will help you forget war crimes and also have sex with hot women but it will somewhat delay the day where you become a homeowner.

If you haven’t seen “The Odyssey”, there is no need to. I would recommend the Wolfgang Petersen “Troy” instead. That film is superbly cast and although it is not “great cinema” it tells the story pretty well.

Just try to forget the part with the rubber helmet, and you’ll be fine.

Oh, and if you’re a devoted Christopher Nolan fan who wants to witness a redemptive arc of an amoral “trickster” who winds up facing his own flaws, good news: he already made that film. It’s called “Inception”. Watch it again, and thank me later.

The meaning of “luxury car” is hardly any less controversial than the meaning of “sports car”. Maybe more so, because once upon a time there really was an accepted definition of “sports car”, and it boiled down to “MG TD”.

“Luxury car”, by contrast, is a phrase that just sort of oozed into regular use. Biddle and Cunningham mentioned the phrase in post-…

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Good evening, friends. If you haven’t seen it, and you have the requisite subscription, please take a look at my Free Press article on Chinese cars. It was written for a general-interest audience so naturally I’ve saved the best stuff for ACF subscribers; tune in tomorrow for a full review of the 1,156-horsepower Denza…

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Everyone, please give a warm welcome to Adam 12 who is here to give us a look into what the pop stars call “island lyfe, yo” — jb

Travel gives us the opportunity to see how others live, work, play, adapt, and adopt products for their needs. When diving in Cayman Brac with my son we took the last day before leaving to look around the island. When inquirin…

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Good afternoon, friends. A brief non-sponsored message: If you’re in the Midwest, consider attending Motor Vice this Friday. It’s a great “youngtimer” event without a any insurance company cringe, weird grifter management, or fraudulent PPP loans that were misspent on jumbo-sized ice cream bars and other chunky-boy delights.

I also want to make you all aware of this charming article defending the indefensible:

Andrew is dead right, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. What I do have to do: get the intake and throttle body situation sorted out on my V-Strom, once and for all.

Brief race update: MDG should have won both of her races at Mid-Ohio this weekend. She was certainly the fastest and at one point was leading the field by seven full seconds. Unfortunately there was some significant interference by the same out-of-class driver both days. I don’t know if this driver was desperately unskilled or if he was trying to help out a couple personal friends from his hometown. Either way, I’m deeply disappointed in my fellow SCCA members at the moment. I suppose some people will go a long way to not lose a race to a woman. We’ll return to this topic later.

Beautiful at any size, employed and loved at smaller sizes

One in eight American adults is currently using a GLP-1 drug. One in six has tried it. The recent introduction of FDA-approved pill versions is sure to drastically increase that already robust cohort. If you aren’t needle-shy, there is almost no reason for anyone over the age of 40 to not at least try it. Various studies have shown that Ozempic and its competitors slow the advent of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, reduce the risk of kidney disease, and essentially nuke the chances of going from the “prediabetes” condition to full on Type 2 diabetes. Keep in mind that you don’t have to lose a single pound to get all of the above benefits.

If you are worried about cost, some autist in Europe just figured out how to do it for 22 Euros a month, although I would take a deep breath and update my will before I followed his example.

The arguments against GLP-1 usage generally fall into the two camps of “we don’t know what will happen in the long term” and “it’s CHEATING!” The former isn’t as worrisome as you might think, because these drugs have been in use for a while now. The latter… well, I always appreciate seeing Christian morality pop back up wearing a different hat. We might not have pentitents scourging themselves in the town square any more, but we are overwhelmed with people who post their fitness and nutrition miseries in the expectation that society will call them good and moral for eating salads and doing ultramarathons.

Some people are really angry that you can lose weight without devoting your life to performative fitness. They shouldn’t be. GLP-1s cannot make you fit. They cannot put a pound on your bench press or build a single tenth of an inch in your flexed bicep measurement. In fact, most GLP-1 users lose muscle mass. So if you want to be strong, flexible, and healthy in the long run, you probably need to exercise as if those drugs did not exist.

(Side quest: Why is it that when I spend money on a comprehensive basement gym with a functional trainer and multiple aerobic machines and two squat/bench racks, that isn’t “cheating”, but using a GLP-1 is cheating? Shouldn’t we agree to describe any and all exercise strategies not available to Rocky Balboa during the “Training Montage” as cheating?)

Anyway. The average GLP-1 user isn’t a physical fitness enthusiast. She (statistically it is she) is a normal person trying to lose a little weight while still going dealing with the requirements of normal life. Most users lose enough weight to positively impact their lives. And a new study shows that the benefits for women are almost unbelievable:

The estimates show that GLP-1 weight loss changes outcomes on precisely the margins where visible body weight should affect first impressions. Single women form new partner ships. Among women who are single when they start, the probability of being married or living with a partner rises 18 percentage points overall and 29 percentage points after six or more quarters. The gain builds gradually as weight comes off. Women not employed at baseline also move into work. Their employment rate rises 13 percentage points overall and 27 percentage points after six or more quarters, and their weekly hours rise by nearly ten hours at the longer horizon. Much of the employment gain is movement out of unemployment rather than out of retirement or disability.

Just as interesting: what doesn’t change.

Among women already partnered at initiation, partnership status and separation or divorce are essentially unchanged. Nor do I find evidence of upward job mobility among incumbent workers. Already-employed women do not increase hours, income per household member, or job-to-job moves… Self-rated health does not improve, and life satisfaction, loneliness, and depression are largely flat or move in the wrong direction over the same horizon.

Andrew Tate would probably paraphase this as “When you meet a fat bird, you ain’t got no interest. But when the bird you have gets thin, it dinna matter.”

The primary thing I take away from it is: Fat women have fewer opportunities in life. Therefore, GLP-1s are an active help to them. It therefore follows that the “body positivity” movement is an active harm to women. When we tell women “You’re beautiful at any size” or “All bodies can be healthy”, we are essentially sabotaging them.

It should not escape your notice that the biggest proponents of “BoPo” are either women who are slightly overweight or women who are not overweight at all and who just consider themselves “allies”. Instagram is filled with 23-year-old women who are showing themselves off in swimsuits despite being 20-50 pounds overweight. I have been extensively studying these images for research purpose and I can report that they rarely have anything to do with the reality for obese women, which is that you can’t wear anything but Wal-Mart pajamas or caftans and also people hate you the minute they see you.

In other words, “body positivity” is an example of women being inhumane to each other for competitive purposes. Men treat each other differently, of course:

Never wanted an automatic-transmission car more, really

For the price of a base 911 Carrera, you can now have a sports car. 335 horsepower, 2600 pounds, 12-second quarter-mile. The Morgan Supersport is now certified for USA sale. I try not to be self-pitying about my current financial situation, but My God — of all the times in my life not to be able to afford a $130k car, why now?

My second problem is that I can’t afford a new $75k car right now, which prevents me from buying the currently-available Z4 M40i stick-shift! I had the pleasure of driving the automatic-transmission variant on-track a few years ago. It is a delightful, communicative, driver-focused automobile that, honestly, is light-years ahead of its turn-of-the-century predecessors, S54 or no S54.

The pragmatic among you will note that a new C8 Stingray will eviscerate both of these cars anywhere a paved road can be found, and you’re right — but the Z4 offers a clutch-pedal, long-hood, effortlessly-chic driving experience, while the Morgan is simply special in a way that nothing from Bowling Green or Spartanburg will ever manage.

Would you be interested in either of these cars? Both of them?

Can America survive without 1,300,000 extra Haitians and Venezuelans?

Maybe it’s a desperate attempt to deflect attention from disastrous foreign policy, or maybe it’s an attempt to lift up the Americans who have the least among us, but either way, it’s potentially about to happen: the Supreme Court has ruled that Temporary Protected Status for immigrants can be revoked by DHS officials. The fact that this was ever up for debate is incomprehensible to me, but then again I’m the kind of literal-minded moron who interpreted the “Temporary” in “Temporary Protected Status” to mean “you are here temporarily” as opposed to “You will only temporarily be denied full citizenship”.

Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, told PBS that

What I’m seeing specifically in Springfield and in Ohio, you talked about a number of Haitians who have come in. You’re seeing in Springfield a city that is coming back. It’s been coming back for the last few years. And, frankly, one of the reasons it’s come back is because of the Haitians who have been there to fill jobs that were simply not being filled at all.

And that’s what the employers will tell you. That’s what the mayor -- the mayor issued another statement yesterday, and he’s consistently said that these Haitians are buying homes, they’re opening businesses, they’re working, and they’re trying to -- some of them raised raise their family there. They’re contributing to the community.

Incidentally, this is a good demonstration of the difference between “right-wing” and “conservative”, for those of you who are on the other side of the fence. Governor DeWine is a conservative. If a factory owner in Springfield wants to pay eight dollars an hour, and only Haitians are willing to work for eight dollars an hour, Governor DeWine is committed to protecting that factory owner’s right to cheap labor.

A true right-wing candidate would say something along the lines of “Pay a fair wage and hire Americans”. And if this sounds to you like something a left-wing person would say… you’re right! If the left-wing person in question is a labor left-winger, as opposed to a cultural left-winger.

In addition to working jobs that Ohioans won’t do (for poverty wages, of course), the Haitians in Springfield are also famous for another economic impact:

For the record, I’m sure that such incidents are isolated.

The debate about TPS exposes another fundamental difference between American viewpoints. Some people think that any “progress” that happens in this country is automatically ensrhined and untouchable. So if you manage to get an extra 1.3 million cheap laborers into the country as “temporary”, that is progress and it cannot be undone. It doesn’t matter that you called the program “temporary”, that’s just for the rubes in the voting booths. The income tax was supposed to be temporary, you know.

It’s not too late for many TPS migrants to change their applications status and try a different way to stay in the country. Those options were always open to them — but in general, the various highly-funded NGOs that shepherd them into the United States told them there was no need to worry, and that “temporary” was just a word. Well, they were right — but this time, it was a word with meaning.

Never wanted an automatic transmission car more, part two

I defy you to get tired of hearing the new Toyota GR GT3 driving around the ‘Ring. This isn’t a “GT3” like Porsche’s GT3 street-car line, which now includes a convertible and has basically become nothing more than the Malibu Beach version of the Celebrity Eurosport. This is a car that you buy to race in FIA’s GT3 class, competing against the Porsche GT3 Cup.

Will the GR be faster than the Porsche? It would probably be drastically faster, were it not for the Balance of Performance rules on which Porsche relies to keep its strong-selling customer race car competitive with inherently superior machinery. A front-mid-engined car will, all else being equal, always have a significant advantage over a rear-engined car.

If I ever become unaccountably wealthy, I’m going to buy one of these and race it in SVRA, where I will lap the field.

There’s all sort of agitation currently happening about the prospects of the roadgoing Toyota GR GT, which will also have about 650 horsepower from a twin-turbo V-8. Will it cost $180,000 or $300,000? Will it be comfortably outpaced by the equivalently priced Porsches (prolly not) and Corvettes (almost certainly)? How much dealer markup will there be? Every car collector with a functioning frontal lobe now regrets not buying an LF-A when they had the chance. (At the time, the auto press mocked the LF-A for not being as quick around a track as a Nissan GT-R, by the way.) Each and every one of those collectors will now be trying to get in line for a GR GT.

Any ACFer who manages to buy one — I’ll meet you anywhere in the country and coach you for free, in exchange for one session behind the wheel. I have not been this excited about a new car since the GenV Viper TA.

Speaking of spectators and Japanese stuff

Six months ago, I talked about the Kurono Tokyo “INSEKI” meteorite-dial watch. At the time, I didn’t feel good about spending $1,850 on an extra watch… but I probably should have tried to buy one, because they’re just showing up in resale inventory now for between four and five thousand dollars. That’s a better return than cryptocurrency in 2026, for sure.

I didn’t make the same mistake when Kurono Tokyo introduced the Malachite dial. By having everything prepared and watching the NIST atomic clock, I was able to secure my watch in the under four seconds on May 28th it took for the global allocation of (reportedly) 250 examples to sell out.

It will likely arrive in November. In the meantime, I was kind of itching to see what these watches were like in person, so I did some horse-trading and bargain shopping. Eventually I found a Chinese guy in NYC who had smuggled an example of the “5th Anniversary Reiwa” out of Japan without the box in order to avoid paying customs. I also agreed to not re-register the watch to me, because doing so would alert Kurono to his watch-flipping ways, rendering him permanently ineligible to buy again. In theory, he was past the six month penalty period, but he didn’t want to test it.

I still haven’t figured out how to properly photograph the Reiwa. It gleams in any light, but that same gleam makes it very hard to capture without reflections of the camera, the window, my own unpleasant face, and so on.

Kurono Tokyo is not a “high horology” brand, and the owner, Hajime Aosaka, is not interested in making the most accurate watch possible. So while I have multiple watches with an error rate of one second a day or less, the Reiwa is very far from that:

This is the watch collector’s equivalent of a dyno sheet from a 1.6-liter Miata. It can be somewhat better-regulated, and I’ll get around to doing that, but it will never be eligible for “master chronometer” or “Grand Seiko spec” or anything like that. I have sixty-year-old high-end Seikos that have one-tenth the error rate of this brand new Miyota 90S5 movement watch.

Yet I do love the Reiwa. I might go a lifetime without seeing another one. Obviously, if you can afford a new Rolex you can more than afford to pay the elevated resale of most Kuronos, but it is not a watch that appeals to most Rolex people. It is physically small, painfully delicate. There is no brashness to it. You’d struggle to identify it at a distance, although the same won’t be true of the Malachite when it arrives.

Oh, and “5th Anniversary Reiwa” has nothing to do with Kurono’s or Aosaka’s history. It was meant to celebrate the fifth year of Emperor Naruhito. This is the sort of weeaboo stuff regarding which no true American should even be aware, much less interested. Oh well. Every man needs at least one hobby that won’t stand public inspection, I suppose, and I’d feel claustrophobic in a fursuit!

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“And the crowd goes mild”

“Comments on this post have been limited.” That is Instagram’s way of letting someone avoid a complete roasting online by prohibiting all but highly positive comments by accounts with establ…

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I come to praise the IONIQ 6 N, not to bury it. There is not a single field of human endeavor that is not improved when creative people strike out in a new direction, even if that new direction proves to bear no useful fruit. Okay, I suppose maybe the field of “nuclear reactor safety” shouldn’t uplift its rules-breakers and iconoclasts too, but everywh…

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Good afternoon, friends. Thank you for being patient with me as I catch up from eight days spent out of the house. The good news is I have six reviews to bring you in the next couple of weeks. As is usually the case, they’ll be for paid subscribers only. It’s never been a better time to give me some of your money — and Trackday Club members will receive the exclusive hardcover of the upcoming Rodney Redux and other Dealership Yarns before the fall, so definitely consider that as well.

You gotta slow down to go faster

The Gen Z phrase “you’re doing too much” is not one of my favorites, but in the case of Charles Leclerc’s recent misfortune, it precisely applies. As Ferrari continued to adjust their car towards the preferences of Sir Lewis Hamilton, including switching his brake pads and discs to Carbon Industries from Brembo and re-optimizing the rest of the system accordingly, Leclerc responded by simply driving harder and pushing the limits more often. That has led to multiple crashes and a laptime deficit. So this weekend, Leclerc pushed the panic button. He started by turning off his phone. He switched to Hamilton’s brakes. And after a Sprint race where he was ten seconds adrift of his teammate, he reduced his throttle application in the final corners of Silverstone.

Side-by-side traces of Leclerc and Hamilton showed that Leclerc was consistently using more throttle and more aggressive steering. Last year’s Ferrari responded positively to this, but the current one is rebalanced for the way Lewis drives, which is less deliberately on-the-limit. So Leclerc decided to drive the same way, but with greater delicacy of touch. The result: he shaded Lewis and won his first race since 2024 thanks to Kimi Antonelli’s brake-duct issues.

Meanwhile, Sir Lewis had his first bad luck in years when Ferrari’s end-of-race strategy was undone by a lack of time to restart the race and give him one lap to pass George on new tires — a reverse Abu Dhabi, if you will. So he finished behind a rather confused-looking George Russell, who now leads him in the championship once more. In postrace interviews, he was explicit about the fact that Leclerc is now mirroring his approach to the car. This is probably bad news for Lewis’s hopes of beating his teammate over the course of the entire year, but let’s face it: the only hope anyone seems to have of being anything besides a footnote to this season is if Kimi Antonelli’s car continues to malfunction. Without that brake duct issue he would be fifty points away from second place. Other notes:

• Betcha everyone at Red Bull wishes Christian Horny were back in charge. This multiple failure of the “macarena” wing is the sort of thing that simply didn’t happen under his watch. Imagine if Adrian Newey hadn’t been such a baby about things; we would have a Horner-led team with (supposedly) the strongest engine and first-rate aero. Max would have five championships now and would be in the running for a sixth. Instead, people are fleeing Red Bull like the proverbial maritime rats while Verstappen’s management meets with… McLaren, of all teams.

• Princess George continues to look absolutely miserable in the Mercedes, despite two race wins. At least he is more willing to race hard than he was at the beginning of his career, and is no longer a free pass for anyone coming up to his rear wing.

• Speaking of Adrian Newey — a few wags have pointed out that Aston Martin does worse on tracks where engine performance is less important. So maybe this continual throwing-Honda-under-the-bus is a distraction from the core issue of Newey designing a bad car. And it truly is a bad car; I just read someone on Instagram saying “The Cadillac catches on fire, loses wheels, spins for no reason, and can’t always leave the garage. The Aston is worse than that.”

Meanwhile, in Spec Vintage Dallara

I will admit that I didn’t bother to walk 1100 feet to watch the IndyCar race at MidO — instead, I sent Roving Reporter Rodney to check it out. He reported a hot day and an enthusiastic crowd. Pato O’Ward took the lead over his Arrow McLaren teammate via a move in the esses that would be highly familiar to any Spec Miata racer with any time here at MidO; just stay to the left through Madness until you can take advantage of the longer, straighter run to the final right.

Truthfully, I wish I’d gone, but I had a few tasks to accomplish ahead of what will be multiple race weekends in a row for my wife and daughter. The good news is that the famous MidOhio rain waited until after the race. And Rodney? Some nice white folks gave them a ride back to the house in their Sierra HD Denali. He can be charming when he wants to be, ya know.

Top(olino) of the Pops

How much would you pay to do 19mph on private roads? If the answer if “At least fourteen grand” then the new FIAT Topolino, in closed-top or rollback-top-with-ropes-in-place-of-doors form is for you. It’s intended to be the most stylish way possible for Boomers to terrorize their retirement communities; right now the main player in this space is Club Car, which charges $12,099 for a two-seat golf car with lithium-ion batteries. In street-legal form, with the speed bumped from 19mph to 26mph, the Club Car is $16,699. FIAT will offer an LSV kit to match that capability, but no one yet knows the pricing.

This is not how I’d choose to spend that kind of money, at least not in a world where the Kawasaki Ninja 1100SX continues to offer a 130mph trap speed for $13,699, but let’s face it, we would all feel better if our eighty-something parents bought one of these Topolinos and gave us their bright-red ES350 with white interior so we could drive to the diner in style. Or maybe that’s just me. Realistically, however, I don’t see my father ever deciding to downgrade from a Lexus to a FIAT of any sort. Not between now and the end of the second Mamdani presidency, anyway1.

It was all a scam

Of all the addictions to which a man can become a slave, including the one that bothered poor Wade Boggs all the way through his career, gambling is perhaps the most pernicious, because it offers the most hope. If you’re a drug addict, you intrinsically know that the next high won’t solve your issues, but for the gambling addict there is always the promise of a payday that makes all the problems disappear. All you have to do is be smarter than everyone else, about just one thing.

Gambling was a big enough problem when you had to fly somewhere to do it but now you can bankrupt yourself from the casino in your phone. This is an overwhelmingly popular thing for our young men, by the way. You can bet on anything now, thanks to apps like Polymarket. Plenty of young men are essentially addicted to Polymarket. Seventy percent of users are net losers, and over 100,000 of them have lost more than a thousand dollars to the app.

And now it turns out that Polymarket used a network of influencers and faked results to set the hook even deeper. In a rare digression from publishing social-media porn for the proverbial childless cat ladies, the WSJ investigated Polymarket and its influencer army. What they found was horrifying:

Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company.

On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

Well. It’s obvious that everyone involved — everyone — should go directly to jail. Will that happen? Of course not. But this would be a good time to take a checkpoint with the under-30 fellows in your life and remind them that online “prediction” is, generally speaking, a sucker’s bet.

The end of the affair

Pour one out for Cycle World. I will miss the magazine, and not just because I did a few articles for them half a decade ago. During the reign of EIC Mark Hoyer and an ever-tightening circle of part-time contributors, CW continued to provide decent, ethical information on motorcycles. They were like a Csaba-era Car and Driver. Nothing flashy, and no oxen gored for reader amusement or edification, but you could generally rely on what you read to be both true and straightforward.

What’s next for motorcycle journalism? Not much. Which is worrisome, because unlike new cars, motorcycles are difficult to test drive/ride and evaluate fairly on one’s own. I suppose we have the Revzilla “Common Tread” site, which has the business model of “let’s tell the truth about new vehicles because we make our money in a slightly different part of the business.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because I wasted four years of my life trying to do something along those lines, only to find out that even rich people are cowards if they’re truly afraid of being disliked.

Hey, maybe I’ll win ten million bucks on Polymarket somehow and I’ll set up my own motorcycle magazine: The Journal Of ZX-14R Stupidity And Overloaded Rear Shocks.

You’ll want to rest them all gently in bleach for up to twelve years before reading

From time to time, ACF readers chastise me about being too mean to people like Wes Senator and Fat Brad. What they don’t see are all the times that those people are mean to me! Why, just last week Wes ran a truly hurtful Instagram story that implied I was ugly. This came as a tremendous surprise to me, because the only people who have ever called me ugly before were my mom, my classmates, my first wife, various co-workers, thousands of randos on the Internet, and an ad-hoc committee of blind people who were provided, to their considerable dismay after the fact, with a bas-relief 3-D printing of my face with which to make the judgment.

Let the record state that Wes Siler is much better-looking than I am, which is a characteristic he shares with 97.5 percent of the population. However, let the record also state that if I ever need lunch money I’m 100% confident I can take it from Wes without so much as mussing my bewildering, Metheny-esque halo of unconditioned hair.

Anyway. Let’s do something nice and promote the commercial endeavors of my distinguished colleague Bradley, who is selling books on eBay. He sure seems to have a lot of books for someone who, frankly, doesn’t come off as someone who has ever read a book of any sort cover to cover. It also worries me that he was fired from an automotive museum a while ago and now he seems to have a lot of automotive-museum-style books to sell. A remarkable percentage of the books list as “signed”, too. I’ve been collecting books for thirty-five years, I have literally thousands of them, many of which are first editions or other rarities, and somehow I don’t have as many signed books in total as Brad is offering for sale right now. Oh well. If you’re an emptor, you should caveat. I’ve ranked the top five items for sale below; tell him Jack sent you.

#5: 2022 Audrain Concours Bonhams Auction Catalog Featuring BMW 507, $18.99 plus $6.68 shipping. If you were not at the 2022 Audrain Concours Bonhams Auction, you missed out. Relive those magic moments now by paying $25 for something that was handed out free at the time. Contains photos of a 1994 Diablo VT.

#4: Porsche Belt Buckle Made In USA Solid Pewter, $80 plus $5.70 shipping. Strictly speaking, this is not a book. But a book probably should be written about this belt buckle. Consider, if you will, the AustriAlpin COBRA Pro buckle, which is rated for 2,000 pounds of tensile strength. Now think about what Brad’s belt buckle has had to deal with. Impressive, right? You’re damned right. Short of a General Products hull by Larry Niven’s “Puppeteers”, this might be the most indestructible material in Known Space. You could probably use it to recover a Subaru Wilderness.

#3: The Official Ford Mustang 5.0: Technical Reference & Performance Handbook, 1979-1993, Signed. $100 plus $4.47 shipping. Now, you might say to yourself, “This book is $23 on AbeBooks and probably less in every flea market from Cleveland to Cincinnati. What makes it worth $100?” Well, dummy, it’s signed by Al Kirschenbaum. Who is Al Kirschenbaum? Google tells me that he is mostly notable for writing “The Official Ford Mustang 5.0: Technical Reference & Performance Handbook, 1979-1993.”

#2: Porsche Rennsport, 1949-2004, $700 plus $5.22 shipping. This book is available for $100 pretty much everywhere, but Brad’s copy has been signed by the late Jeff Zwart. “Late” in the sense that he got to the top of Pikes Peak about twenty seconds after JR Hildebrand. He’s very much alive and, one suspects, quite willing to sign a book for less than $600.

#1: Animorphs Series, #1-54, price varies. Truthfully, dear friends, I don’t think Brad read most of the books he is selling. Especially not the Peter Egan ones or the ones about architecture or the ones about racing. The Animorphs books, on the other hand… well, the Gemini summary is “a popular science fiction book series by K.A. Applegate (Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant) about a group of teenagers who gain the power to morph into any animal they touch, allowing them to fight a secret alien invasion by parasitic Yeerks. The series, known for its dark themes of war, trauma, and morality, follows the "Animorphs" as they balance normal teenage life with a brutal, secret guerilla war for Earth, with each book narrated by a different main character.” Brad absolutely read these books. Everything about his public persona and his work product basically screams “I lie in bed at night and imagine that my soft-skinned, supple, female, newly-developing teen body can morph into any animal I touch.” Every single person I have ever seen who is deeply into this sort of thing looks exactly like Brad. If you pulled the fire alarm at the Animorphs convention you would immediately be overrun by a buffalo stampede of 350-pound beardos sobbing in terror. Most typical Animorphs cover:

If I owned any of this stuff I would deny its presence in a way that would make the Apostle Peter clench his fists in righteous anger. Brad’s selling it on eBay and promoting it on Twitter. This is shamelessness right up there with the people who sell used sex toys on Craigslist. “Fleshlight GT3RS Pro, used six times, still finger tight.”

Anyway. Go buy a book from the nice man, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

So recently your author was driving to a car show on a Saturday, in Eldridge, Iowa. It was faily mild for early summer, but by the time I’d seen all the cars, and wandered back to the XTS, it was a little warm so I decided to turn on the A/C.

And it blew warm air. But hey, it’s hot, it just started, it’ll be OK.

It wasn’t. Crap.

So I ran a couple errands. On the way home I turned it on again, just for the hell of it. And it blew cold! Oh gee, it must have been just a fluke it’s fine now.

It wasn’t.

That evening I went to my folks’ because Dad was cooking. And when I drove home that night about 10 PM, I turned on the A/C. And it blew warm air again.

OK. F this. I’m done. So I scheduled it at McLaughlin. Glad I got the extended warranty! And so Monday before last I dropped it off in the morning and got the keys to this brand new Optiq.

Funny thing, at first I thought it was a Lyriq. I’d sat in a Lyriq at the regional auto show last March, and just assumed. From the front it looks like one, and the overall shape is similar. And the interior seemed exactly the same.

It wasn’t til I got done at the office and walked out to the car at the end of the day that I noticed it said “Optiq” on the tailgate. Oops.

Anyway, it is VERY different than an XTS or final gen CTS. It’s really swoopy and futuristic. As I piloted it out of McLaughlin and onto John Deere Road, I felt like I was driving the time machine from Back to the Future.

And yep it’s electric. I have no interest in ever owning an electric vehicle, but I liked this car a lot more than I thought I would. It isn’t a big ponderous, ill-handling mess—though it is, at 5200 pounds, about 1200 lb fatter than my much roomier, much Broughamier 2019 XTS.

It’s not a big vehicle, and the handling was pretty nice. It is of course very quiet. And yes, I know that it’s an EV so duh it’s quiet.

But even beyond that, it seemed surprisingly silent. I suspect it has a crapload of sound insulation.

And the entire instument panel is a single touchscreen. So 8 years from now, if it decides to roll over and die, you’re screwed. No redundant controls, other than the HVAC buttons along the bottom of the dash. Only a couple other minor buttons are in evidence, off to the left of the steering wheel.

The stereo was nice. And though I don’t like it enough to subscribe myself, I enjoyed the XM radio too, mostly sticking to the 60s 70s and 80s channels. It’s kind of surreal driving this swoopy thing and listening to “A Little Bit Me” by the Monkees at the same time.

And despite being a smaller, narrower vehicle than my XTS, it seemed a little sluggish. Nothing terrible. Nothing like Paul Niedermeyer going up a 30% grade in a 1960s Microbus he insists has sufficient power. But a few times, yeah, I wished it had a little more oomph. I wonder what this thing would be like with the 3.6L V6? I bet they’d sell a hell of a lot more of them!

The interior, while super futuristic, also seemed, at least to me, to have a little bit of that 1950s Motorama “dream car” vibe. I liked the color combo too, black with a black and white “tuxedo” interior, with additional royal blue accents on the instrument panel and door panels.

One interesting thing: I later picked up an Optiq color chart and, believe it or not, a navy blue leather interior is available. It almost makes me want to get one. You know, if it was a sedan. And had a V6. Ha!

But it was a pleasant vehicle, seemed pretty well assembled, and the interior, while lacking the usual Caddy wood trim and chrome bits, still seemed sufficiently “Cadillacy” to me. It doesn’t have cheap vibes coming off of it. It did have an annoying lane departure nanny that would buzz your seat. I quickly hated it. It would sometimes even do it if I was totally in my lane, but the road was curving. Fortunately I figured out how to turn it off—it’s one of those 2-3 buttons to the left of the steering wheel.

At any rate, it was a pretty nice vehicle, and I enjoyed it.

I’m still not buying an EV though! And I got the XTS back this past Friday, all washed and detailed and 100% functional again. Smithers, another lime rickey!

Good morning friends; sorry I’m late. Let me start with a nakedly commercial message. Most years I send some sort of gift to my Trackday Club crew. (Last year was the exception, because my shirt-printing process went horribly wrong.) This year we will be doing a shirt to commemorate my unprecedented (no one el…

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