Wednesday Open Thread: Senna, Smithology, King-Slutzky

Open to all subscribers

How’s your week going so far? Your humble author failed to stay up until 4am last night and was therefore outbid on probably the last decent set of maroon XS1100 side covers on the planet. The auction was in the UK and I figured there was no way someone would pay more than 75 “quid” for them. Well, that was a mistake. So now I get to spend $225 on a plastic welder to restore the cracked side cover I have now. On a more positive note, I realized the cover was bad in the first place because I removed it while successfully getting the headlight on the XS to work. I now have five, count ‘em, five working street motorcycles with headlights and brakes (kinda) and errthang! Absolutely spoiled for choice.

Commercial messages!

Perhaps you’ve heard that Smithology, the anthology book by my former colleague Sam Smith, has finally escaped the asylum of his head. It appears to be selling astoundingly well, which is good. The sheer length and scope of the thing makes it more than just a modern version of Peter Egan’s Side Glances or Leanings anthologies. If you buy just one book from an autowriter in 2024, let it be this one, because I don’t think I’ll have the time to write a whole novel this year and if I do a wrap-up book with no new stuff I’ll just provide it free to subscribers. You shouldn’t have to pay me twice for the same thing.

If you find yourself unexpectedly flush with cash even after the purchase of Smithology, you’ve invited to participate in my “Fix My Radical SR8 Sale”, which right now has just two items listed but there will be more:

• an absolutely untouched, as-new Thurston Moore Jazzmaster from my vault. ACF readers can contact me for a $500 discount. Don’t cry for me because I’m selling this; in addition to my one-owner 1965 Jazzmaster, I also have a Dale Wilson Masterbuilt version from the Fender Custom Shop. (Maybe I should sell the latter and just buy a whole new set of bodywork.)

• My son’s 2021 Trailcraft Maxwell 26, as seen in Bicycling. Nothing in the world could tell your 10-13-year-old you love them more than this cost-no-object bike. ACF readers get free shipping, which on a bike like this is a $250 value. Don’t cry for him because I’m selling this; he has a brand new Commencal Absolut RS that he doesn’t ride because he’s too busy doing pushups and running for Civil Air Patrol. But this Maxwell is like, you know, the McLaren Senna of kids’ bikes.

Speaking of…

in happier times

Six days ago, Youtuber and professional dipshit (but I repeat myself) Edmond Barseghian posted an exuberant video about buying “Project Kilo”, a fairly well-optioned McLaren Senna and the only one in a certain shade of Porsche green. He then promptly went and crashed it into the corner of a Lexus Beverly Hills while trying to do some street-takeover donut/dorifto stupidity.

Boiled down to its basics, this story — “rich kid crashes expensive sports car” — isn’t exactly rare or newsworthy. Yet everyone’s talking about it, likely because

• there’s great footage of it, from multiple angles

• there were about 500 Sennas built, each of them special and delightful

• this idiot is trying to do Hellcat stuff with a twin-clutch carbon-fiber-bodied track rat

I’ll tell you why I am personally offended by Edmond “Mondi” the YouTuber: Back in September of 2018 I was fortunate enough to drive a Senna a couple hundred miles through all sorts of different weather and road conditions, including a stop at a “Sonic” in rural Kentucky.

i’ll let you know when i’m old enough to prefer the car over the girl

Long-time readers of ACF know that I prefer McLarens to the other “hypercars” because they behave more like proper race cars. (Except for their GT4 cars, which act like street cars, but what are you gonna do?) The Senna was the apex, pun intended, of that mindset. It had the things that really make for a great track car, like millimeter-accurate steering, great front-to-rear balance, and a hyperspace powertrain. Yet it was also secure enough in its tracksculinity to eschew the OMG WE ARE SO HARDCORE stupidity that marred, as an example, the Porsche GT2RS I was also driving that week. The Senna rides well. I recall it being a little quieter and more pothole-friendly than its 675LT junior cousin, and about along the lines of a 765LT.

(Fun 675LT fact; The cabin is so poorly insulated/isolated that I called McLaren ten miles into the drive to tell them the transmission was broken. Which it wasn’t. It was just conducting fork noise directly into the cabin.)

The Senna was made to cover ground as quickly as possible. You could trust it at really unreasonable speeds over unfamiliar roads. The visibility is pretty good — to the front, anyway. Every single part of it bore the stamp of having been endlessly sweated by someone who understood what a fast car should be, especially when you don’t need to worry about price.

Compared to my Radical SR8, it’s a Continental Mark V with one flat tire… but I would no sooner take my SR8 to Sonic than I would put it back in a NASA Super Unlimited race. There aren’t five thousand people in America who have ever driven anything more committed and focused than a McLaren Senna.

And this failson, this attention whore, this fool… he ruins the car by doing something that any 1994 Z/28 could do as well or better. Because his deeply set, weak, and womanish need to be seen and adored by other men led him to do something for which neither he nor the car were designed, nor appropriate. There will not be any more McLaren Sennas. The business, environmental, and regulatory cases no longer exist to permit them.

What’s interesting is that he was the fourth owner of “Project Kilo”. The Sennas trade hands a lot. People don’t enjoy them. I kind of understand that. You have to be deeply schooled in racecraft for them to feel like anything other than Ferraris with loose dashboard fittings. They’ve become nothing more than clanking bibelots for the #Blessed crowd. I’ll never be in a position to own one. Which is probably a good thing. Because I’d eventually crash it. Just like this idiot. The only difference would be the speed at which the event occurred. I’m thinking something like “147mph in a 146mph corner”.

We were told there would be snacks

more rules than the ‘world’ racing league, really

The cops have cleared out the Columbia University “occupation”, arresting dozens of people and removing all evidence that there were ever a bunch of dirty, ugly, performative millionaire one-percenter hippie “protesters” on the site. There is a coordinated effort underway to identify and permanently brand anyone who participated as an anti-Semite and Jew-hater. (I’m using both phrases to save Ronnie Schreiber the effort of commenting on the subject.)

Happily for all of us, however, the cops didn’t crack down until after Joannah King-Slutzky, which is her actual name, demanded some Doordash for the occupation:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1785689449273122985

She pointed out, correctly, that Columbia has a meal plan for its students, while glossing over the fact that those students had smashed windows and forcibly occupied a campus building. In the end, Columbia sent the strongest message possible by… delivering food. I mean, who wants to sit around all day without even a little snack?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the ACF community in the past six months, it’s that we are deeply divided on the issues surrounding Gaza and Israel at the moment. I don’t want to re-stir that pot. However, I do have a few thoughts on the situation as it applies to the United States. You’re free to disagree with me in the most unpleasant and insulting terms possible — but be nice to each other today, please. We’re all in the same encampment:

• These students are learning in real time that there is a big difference between protesting the actions of “Whites” and the actions of “Zionists”. The former is protected, affirmed, and orthodox speech in the university environment. The latter will get you “unhoused” and put on a Do Not Hire list. Is that right? Is it fair? I’d suggest that universities should punish tactics, not alignment. In other words, Gaza peeps should be allowed to do everything BLM peeps did — or the reverse should be true, which would require a time machine.

• I’d like to take a moment to blame Boomers. Not really! But the fact remains that our pop culture has elevated and venerated the protests of the Woodstock generation to the point that every college student feels entitled to do a little protestin’ for one cause or another. If you don’t occupy a building, did you even go to college? Yeah, it’s funny, but it’s also dangerous, because it trivializes the subject of the protests and instead favors the experience of protesting. These protests are cargo culture. They use the methods of 1969, which were designed to influence American policy, against an overseas war that might be funded by America but doesn’t need America in order to happen.

• I see these “Gaza” protests as less about Gaza and more about being an outlet for the astounding amount of anger that is animating young people in America. Many of these people couldn’t find Israel on a map. They have no idea of the history behind the current situation. This is what they do know: they are facing a future that has been largely looted and crapsacked by the generations before them. Their justified and righteous anger about this has been co-opted by the same forces that created the situation in the first place. Can’t you imagine a happier world where Joannah King-Slutzky is a cheerful college girl thinking about Spring Break instead of trying to destroy the world with her “Marxist lens”? What happened has been deliberate. Powerful people have chosen to take that Spring Break away from her and to warp her mind.

• Regardless of the merits of the Gaza or Israel sides of the conflict over there where it’s actually happening, I have become heartily sick of both players in our domestic kayfabe protest scene. I despise the spoiled brat millionaire kids who think they can defeat Tel Aviv from a comfy seat on campus, and I have utter contempt for the ultra-well-positioned people in positions of power who have utterly weaponized our society to make sure those idiot millionaire kids won’t be able to get a job at Wal-Mart in the year 2042. Everybody involved here, and I mean everybody, should pick up a rifle and get on a boat. Otherwise you’re just pretending.

I would encourage those of you who believe in a just God/Allah/et al to join with me in prayer to end this murderous and hateful conflict that spares neither women nor children and which is creating yet another generation of broken young people who will spend their lives trying to re-adjudicate this conflict by other means. But if He chooses to let it continue, may it at least not be the spark by which our own country is set aflame, Amen.