Thursday ORT: Suzuka, "Dire Wolves", Prelude, Wes Siler As Hipster Batman, Wings For The Commander

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i guess you had to be there, or at least i did

As I tell everyone who asks, having a successful Substack means being consistent and time-reliable. Sure enough, being late with this “Wednesday” post has already cost me one un-subscription this morning! As you’ll see below, however, I had at least one good reason

“I made a lot of things happen for myself.”

there were better planes available, but they cost more

Last October my son, colloquially known on these pages as “The Commander”, came to me with a plan. He wanted to fly solo for the first time before he drove a car solo for the first time, but he also wanted to do both of these things as soon as legally possible, which meant the day of his sixteenth birthday.

I had my doubts. Not because The Commander ever fails at his tasks, but because Ohio in April is not necessarily a great time for flying or driving weather. I offered to take him to Vegas for two weeks before his birthday so he could do all the final training and the flight itself in reliable weather, using a brand-new carbon-fiber Cirrus SR22 Turbo with a parachute.

He countered with “I’ll do it with my favorite 1975 Piper Archer at the local airport, and I’ll work around the weather. I want to do it here, and you’ll save money.”

“For God’s sake, John,” I replied, “saving money is something I’ve spent my whole life avoiding, and this isn’t the time to start.”

Well, to cut a long story (that I also intend to write here) short, he did it yesterday, almost exactly the way he’d planned. John passed his driver’s test in the morning but elected to be a passenger, rather than a driver, to KVTA airport in Newark, Ohio. We had to cancel the first solo attempt of the day due to some significant crosswinds that made his practice landings pretty nausea-inducing. (For me, watching, not for him or his instructor.) Three hours later the conditions were better and he flew two flawless solo patterns before taxiing over and indicating that the wind was picking up again and he didn’t see any point in extending the day. Then he got in his mother’s CR-V, largely because he didn’t want to risk stalling the Accord in front of all the Civil Air Patrol cadets who had come to watch “The Old Man” fly, and drove home by himself.

I’d like to extend my thanks to the paid subscribers of Avoidable Contact Forever, who made it possible for my son to get all the necessary instructed flight hours in the month prior to this successful solo flight, and I’d like to thank myself for not vomiting on the runway during said event, but mostly I’m proud that I have a son who can plan and execute something like this. At his age I’d accomplished nothing but a string of local BMX podiums and an in-school suspension for snap-kicking a classmate in the chin during shop class. (It all turned out just fine for that kid, who inherited millions of dollars and is about to realize $3.5M of appreciation on the extra house he is selling, but let the record show I dropped his unconscious ass to the concrete like a sack of raw meat.) It’s nice to see The Commander’s apple land a comfortable distance away from my tree.

Alright, on with the show!

Whose house? Yuki’s House!

as the imaginary dragons sing, it’s time

Your humble author hasn’t been to an F1 race since the final USGP at Indy. Let me tell you, F1 at Suzuka in 2025 is different. The whole country appeared to be in the grip of Tsunoda-mania. Everything he did received sustained bursts of applause, including every time they played the F1 opening reel on the trackside Jumbotrons and showed Yuki in the Red Bull uniform.

It wasn’t an exciting race if you weren’t sitting among 10,000 Yuki-and-Max fans, but here are my usual observations:

• Yuki’s debut in the RB has to be considered at least a qualified success. He didn’t bend the car and with a better qualifying strategy he could have finished in the top five. He looked comfortable in the car and easily dusted Lawson, which was all he had to do.

• The other Racing Bull, Hadjar, had some issues with his nuts and the “sub strap” in the car during qualifying, leading him to cry on camera for the second time in three races, but his performance in the race was nothing about which anyone should sob. Not only was he fast, he was smart. Assuming Yuki goes with Honda for 2026, Hadjar looks like a pretty sure bet for the second Red Bull seat. He’s earning it.

• Nobody at Suzuka expected that Verstappen pole lap. I’m not sure anyone in the world expected it. Prediction: in fifty years F1 fans will talk about how Senna and Verstappen were generational talents who bracketed two statistically impressive but often unexciting champions in Schumacher and Hamilton.

• Leclerc toasting Hamilton from start to finish is starting to look like the normal order of things.

• Jack Doohan should find a LeMans seat before he’s too radioactive for even that. He is too obviously the worst of an otherwise decent rookie class.

• Kimi Antonelli continues to look like the real thing, but Princess George still has his measure, and almost everyone else’s.

• Piastri > Norris and we all know it.

• How about Ollie Bearman in the Haas?

• Is Albon just that good now, or is Carlos Sainz somehow out of his depth?

We’re on a quick turnaround to this weekend’s race. I’m expecting it will be more interesting than last weekend’s race — but I enjoyed Suzuka so much I’m already shopping for next year’s ticket. And now I have all the Yuki merch I could fit into a Red Oxx rucksack. God, I’ve seen what you’ve done for others, and now you’ve done it for me.

The new Quaalude

I hate to admit it, but I liked everything about the new Prelude, which made a public debut at Suzuka in the Honda tent. It looks right, both inside and out. The proportions are good. It’s properly small, too, at least by today’s relaxed standards. Building it from the Civic bits, rather than the Accord bits, keeps it from being 196 inches long or something ridiculous like that.

What it isn’t: fast. Supposedly it has the 204-horse Honda Civic Hybrid powertrain, which means no manual shift and considerably less than a V6 Accord’s worth of shove. This feels like a betrayal of the nameplate but some of us will recall that only the fourth and fifth Prelude variants were “quick”. Spiritually the new one feels like a successor to the first-gen car, derisively nicknamed the “Quaalude” by Car and Driver. It’s a comfortable and stylish coupe with no street racing potential. Which is just fine by me.

They’re dire wolves like AI is AI

put the wolf down and get your fat ass back to the typewriter, old man

Everyone’s talking about Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi, the three “dire wolves” currently roaming a secret wildlife compound somewhere out of the public eye. Make no mistake, their creation was a tremendous technical feat, but they’re lightly-edited everyday wolves, not ancient creatures resurrected.

Of course, the issue with genetic engineering is kind of like the issue with viral engineering, “AI”, or even Eric-Drexler-woo-nanotech: it’s massively easier to do awful, planet-killing things than it is to accomplish anything useful. Engineering the deadliest disease in human history would take less work than making wolves a little bigger and scarier-looking. Other than a Butlerian Jihad, I have no idea what to do about this.

Only one thing is for certain: when “dire wolves” are made available for public purchase, they will be bought en masse by single girlbosses, and many children will be bitten.

Speaking of girlboss pets

if you have to say you’re straight

My old friend Wes Siler and I are once again sharing a masthead of sorts; he’s doing his thing here on Substack. I will admit that I am perpetually fascinated by Wes. Although I often joke that I’m the modern Ernest Hemingway, that isn’t quite right. I was a car racer before I was a car writer and I was a bike racer before I was anything. Wes is more like the actual Hemingway; he’s this sensitive dude, kind of a simp (as Hemingway was) and no kind of tough guy, who portrays an outdoorsman in print.

Wes has a doctor wife who bought him a Land Cruiser and presumably covers his tab while he runs around doing these Zoolander-at-the-gas-station re-enactments of what he thinks Real Men do. It’s the equivalent of a rich guy marrying some goofy wannabe PR executive and encouraging her to run an authentic Vietnamese restaurant that is entirely supported by the expense accounts of the rich guy’s employees. Nothing real is happening.

Being unshackled and unburdened by reality means that Wes is free to write some really lurid stuff, and his latest post about trans people is filled with bangers:

Working from home as a writer… I used that to enforce a zero tolerance policy for crime on my block. During my my two or three-year career in vigilante justice, I stopped a rape, got into an actual sword fight like a freakin’ musketeer, tackled a guy who was high on PCP and had ripped a lamppost out of the ground in order to smash parked cars with it, then held him in a headlock for 45 minutes waiting on the LAPD to show up, and of course emptied an entire can of bear spray into a home invader’s face at point blank range... I threw one of my trash cans through the windshield of an Escalade, after the bro driving it littered in my driveway. I destroyed a homeless encampment set up outside my house, and threw all their camping gear over a razor wire fence into a post office parking lot, where it probably still sits. When they got new tents and tried to set up again, I trash talked one of the kids until he punched me in the face, made sure I had a witness, and pressed charges.

And I do mean kids. A lot of the homeless population in Hollywood at the time were teenagers.

Does anyone believe a single word of the above? I’ve met Wes Siler. He’s got this lovely, ethereal, feminine grace to him. I’m not being nasty — I’m envious, kinda. I’ve spent my whole life as this ugly shambling lump of a person. Wes positively glides along the ground in contrast to me. He’s so handsome that a girl bought him a Land Cruiser, and you know what those cost.

I’m no tough guy but the circumstances of my life have taught me a lot about what actual tough guys are and Wes is not one. I like how he’s careful to identify the “Escalade driver” as a “bro” so we know he didn’t commit any racist imaginary violence, but in his shoes I don’t know if I would have leaned so hard on the “I verbally attack children” thing. It’s not what Batman, another imaginary vigilante hero whose family paid his bills, would do.

No worries, however, the wildest stuff is yet to come.

Trans people face those risks every day, in any environment. Visiting a national park with my group [Wes apparently leads a group of trans children, like the Goonies but trans, the text isn’t totally clear], one park ranger got a little overwhelmed by something he obviously hadn’t experienced before, and addressed a teenager who had some innocent questions about foxes using the wrong pronouns several times, before I took him aside and corrected that…

After hiking into a hot spring out in the desert east of LA, we found two people already there, sitting in it naked. (As an adult leader of a youth group we all wore bathing suits.) Both were trans adults. Experiencing that moment through the kids’ eyes was one of the most positive experiences I’ve ever had outdoors… I felt better about myself in that moment than I’ve ever felt with someone else’s blood on my knuckles.

Emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. Now I’m no outdoorsman like Wes but when I think of “positive experience I’ve had outdoors”, I think about hiking to Delicate Arch or riding “36 Chambers” at Trestle Bike Park, not “taking a bunch of teenagers to check out dicks in a hot tub”. (It’s possible that would change if I understood the outdoors better, but I’m not sure.)

Should I try punching a bunch of homeless kids, then check out some trans adults in a hot tub, and compare the two experiences? Or should I leave that to the serious Substacks, like Mr. Siler’s?