Wednesday Open Thread: The Loserman Gives Investment Advice, Risk As A Parent
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Three months and two days after my son was born, when he was still locked day and night in a transparent plastic box at the Neonatal ICU, I almost put someone else in a box of their own. A pine one. And there might have been a bed for me, as well — in the same hospital where a three-pound boy was struggling to breathe.
It was May of 2009. Most club racers were running video by then, but I steadfastly avoided it, for the same reason that Ogie Oglethorpe didn’t wear a helmet cam; no sense incriminating myself when I was pushing my way to the front by any means necessary. I’d already been formally sanctioned for contact by NASA in both 2007 (demoted from 2nd to 3rd in the national championship due to contact) and 2008 (demoted from 1st to 2nd in the regional championship due to contact). Happily for posterity, there was a photographer right there at the turn to capture the moment when…
…the Thunder Roadster in front of me spun at the entrance to Turn Five just after I’d set my Neon in its characteristic “tricycle” cornering position, seen here:
I did a lot of thinking in the half-second or so it took the car ahead of me to rotate 180 degrees and present a terrified face to the faces he would meet. I knew that I had to come out of the tricycle, but if I did it by turning away from the spinning car, I would probably oscillate my way off the track and towards a guardrail at 70-ish miles per hour, because when you slam the back of a Neon on the ground without warning the flimsy stamped-steel control arms wander around in their bushings and you get a considerable amount of “rear steer” that is utterly unpredictable as to direction. End of race. End of season.
On the other hand, hitting the Thunder Roadster driver dead on would likely kill him. They were never meant to share the track with 2650-pound Neons; that’s typical NASA silliness that SCCA would never let happen. The year before, we’d had one of the tiny Legends roadsters in our race group as well — until he turned sideways and collected a Miata at 80mph, immediately “winning” a ride in a helicopter all the way to the nearest Level 1 trauma facility.
With no time left to deliberate the issue, I reverted to character and made the most narcissistic choice possible: relaxed my hands until only my fingertips touched the wheel, very carefully did not look at the Thunder Roadster or into the eyes of its driver, unwound my steering with the delicacy you’d need to rub a razor over the surface of a balloon, and touched the Neon’s rear wheel to earth as I just… slipped by.
Behind me, the field locked up and went sailing off track in both directions… but I still had to get the Neon turned before I ran out of pavement. Which I did, with whole luxurious inches to spare. I’d made it. Nobody died. And I went on to finish a disrespectable third of five in class, largely because in all the fuss surrounding my son’s premature and difficult birth I’d simply neglected to shop for new tires.
(Adding insult to injury, the fourth-place driver would go on to start the successful IMSA GT4 race team Thaze Competition, campaigning the AMG GTR, which means that in retrospect he won the race.)
A few hours later, I went to the NICU for some time with my son. Gave some thought, as I held him and watched his bird-like chest tremble, about the alternate history in which I’d hit the Thunder Roadster, ramped into the air like the Dukes of Hazard, flipped over in flight, and crushed my spine on the landing. And in that alternate history, my wife would have been caretaker for a cripple as well as for a child who looked like he was headed for a life of real physical challenges.
None of that happened, of course. I never got hurt in a race. My son shrugged off the mantle of prematurity and went on to do everything from clearing the 40-foot final jump of Trestle’s “36 Chambers”, 12,100 feet above sea level, to flying an Extra 330 two-seater through an unassisted loop at a lesser elevation a few months ago. A year after the crash-that-wasn’t, I was very much out of my wife’s hair and no longer her problem, which is probably the kindest thing I ever did for her, even nicer than getting her a Phaeton.
In the fourteen years since I’ve probably ignored more than my share of risk, much of it motorized and triple-digit-traveling but some of it in more prosaic matters like not putting two jackstands under a truck during a quick oil change or failing to adequately save for a retirement that seems increasingly unlikely to happen. Doesn’t bug me at all. I’m not afraid to die and if it happened tomorrow I’d feel like I got more out of life than almost anyone else but maybe Robert Plant, who as we all know absolutely tapped the soul out of Alison Kraus despite a 23 year age difference, plus he released Walking into Clarksdale around the same time.
But that’s not the whole equation, is it? My father never tires of reminding me that I am ultimately responsible for my son and that my many ignorant feats, up to and including beating a ticket where I literally outran a State Highway Patrol Cessna on my ZX-14R, amount to little besides monstrous selfishness that will lead to another man raising my child into manhood. That admonition, and others like it, sat heavy on my mind when I heard from a long-time reader the other day.
This fellow — I won’t name him, he can step up if he likes — was a mainstay of TTAC and early Riverside Green commentary. I got the impression he was young, angry, and depressed. Via Instagram, however, I saw that he was changing his life. Learned to ride a motorcycle. Did some cool stuff. Met this ethereal and pretty young woman from another culture who was herself a thoughtful and interesting person. Settled down. Made plans to start a family.
In other words, he’s winning at the game of life. As a thoughtful young man, however, he is wondering if perhaps the arrival of his child wouldn’t be a good time to stop riding a motorcycle. To make this a broader conversation: How much risk should a father be willing to take? Because when you’re a dad, you’re not just putting your own life in jeopardy. You’re courting the chance of a situation where your son — I’m not saying that daughters don’t need their fathers, because they do, but sons need their fathers — grows up angry at the world and winds up either with a needle in his arm (for heroin) or his ass (for estrogen).
I’m not sure what to tell my friend. Because he’s right, and so is my father. It’s irresponsible to ride motorcycles, or race cars, or God forbid, race motorcycles, when you have a child. Probability is like gravity, as Sonny Crockett says in the movie. The correct and sane thing for this fellow to do is to hang up his helmet and just be a father, which is the greatest thing a man can do and eclipses everything from winning races to other stuff that we can’t say here because ACF is something close to a family site but it kind of rhymes with “ingesting chugs and wrestling with two beautiful young earls all night when you’re completely baked.” Okay, try to hear that as “bake-ed” rather than “baked” because if you hear it as “baked” then I’m not actually obscuring the situation but rather describing it. Also I’m worried that you’ll read “earls” and think I mean Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey and a similar peer instead of what I’m trying to put across here, which is a threesome with chicks. But by chicks I mean… forget it.
Anyway, I think my friend should quit riding motorcycles and, as the billboards remind us, just take time to be a dad.
And yet.
The Last Psychiatrist used to say that children get their sense of possibility from their parents. If a young man sees his father beaten by circumstance, henpecked by his wife, or endlessly sorrowful, he will think that’s likely to happen to him — but the same is true if you see your dad making a 7-figure payday and touring with Alison Kraus, which two of Planty’s three sons lived to see. My own son has repeatedly asked him, “How is it that you win almost every race I come to see?” and rather than answering him honestly by
“I only invite you to races in which I have a staggering horsepower or tire advantage over the competition,”
I just wink at him and say, “You’ll win, too. You’ll be better than I am.” Which I think he will be. If not as a racer, then certainly as a pilot, a musician, a husband, a father, a servant of God, a decent man in this corrupted and fallen world. You have to give your son a sense of possibility. Daughters, too — and that means treating their mother with visible and unfeigned respect.
Was this in my mind when I returned to Mid-Ohio just a few months after missing that Thunder Roadster? Probably not. But I was excited. My son was out of the box. Almost up to the weight of a normal infant, though he was half a year old at that point. Still didn’t have any new tires, so Friday night I borrowed my friend Faisal’s Civic for the ninety-minute two-driver NASA race. Did both stints myself, sitting for five minuets in the pits to simulate a driver change and make it fair. Won my class. The class above mine. And the class above that, despite being basically out of gas on the last two laps and using just fifth gear. Probably the best race I’d ever driven up to that point, and a clear victory in the first time my son had ever seen me compete, though he didn’t know it.
At the time, I thought of us as a team. I still do. But it’s almost time for him to take the lead role. And maybe that’s when I’ll stop taking risks. Not because I want to extend my life. Because I don’t want to miss a single moment of his.
You can lose part, or all, of what you invest
I’ve been asked by readers to comment on two industry happenings this week. The first one: that weird criticism/bro-hug/podcast-promotion moment between Matt Farah and Jason Cammisa regarding the Cybertruck. Apparently Matt criticized Jason without calling him first to get permission, or something like that. And he needs to make that right, so they are doing a podcast together.
From my perspective, it’s a tempest in a teapot between two decent but relatively fragile people who, had they made different choices, could be powerful voices of consumer advocacy in the automotive media world. I can’t personally imagine a world in which I call another grown man to get his permission to talk about his publicly rendered “professional” opinion, unless the person in question was Chuck Norris, but who gives a shit. Or maybe the whole thing was set up in advance.
Now to this “Jonny Lieberman shills for DRIFT CAPITAL” business. I’ve known Jonny long enough to know that he is absolutely authoritative on craft beer and other Reddit-simp stuff like that but that you should never listen to him on two topics in particular: investing, and cars. So I’m a little worried about his attempts to combine these Gemini incompetencies into a single fused idiocy. It’s almost literally the fabled moment of Joseph Kennedy getting investment tips from his shoeshine boy, at which point he departed the market with all available speed and thus missed Black Tuesday. When Jonny Lieberman teams up with people stupid enough to call their company “DRIFT CAPITAL”, a phrase that implies they will
crash the cars by drifting them;
let your capital drift away, as in the famous original song by Uncle Kracker,
then I think that’s probably the absolute last place you’d want to invest any money, not least because they are taking “portfolio” advice from someone who hasn’t bought any car but a Rivian cuck-truck in a very long time. But I’m not going to make that a formal recommendation on my part, because there exists an absolute Gorgon-headed body of no-fuckin’-around law about giving investment advice, and in my unschooled opinion Lieberman is sailing awfully close to that particular wind, particularly when he says you can “DM him” for investment advice.
I’m not surprised he feels free to ignore, or flout, that law. Perhaps the oddest thing about being on the autowriter gravy train is how the PR people behave like your mommy, doing everything from covering your speeding tickets to (allegedly) providing cash and legal assistance when you kill a family during a bit of overseas high-spirited driving in a manufacturer-provided car. This unstinting air cover for personal irresponsibility is habit-forming, and leads to things like shilling for an “investment company” without including any disclosures as to one’s stake in, or compensation from, said company.
Maybe I’m just too much of a hick to understand the subtleties of Lieberman’s lifestyle, what with the renting of the watches and the investing in the cars and whatnot. I’m troubled enough by “paper gold” and those various schemes where you don’t actually hold the keys to your own Bitcoin. You think I’m gonna give money to someone who says they have a Carrera GT in a warehouse somewhere? Are they putting my name on the title? Are they gonna let me come visit it? And if they do, what would happen if I accidentally sit on the frunk and dent it, which is a five-figure problem with six-figure implications for the value of the car?
For the record, I think automobiles are a lousy investment. Yes, I turned a $29,000 used PORSH into a $149,000 race car. Once. Once. The rest of the time I lost money, just like nearly everybody else. Cars, watches, clothes, even guns — not an investment. Not by my standards. But if you want to “invest”, then maybe you should actually, you know, have possession of the stuff in which you’re investing. Just a thought.
For those of you who find the “DRIFT CAPITAL” idea compelling, however, I want to introduce you to an even better investment: LITERBIKE AXE CAPITAL. This fund will use the genius of fictional Bobby “Axe” Axlerod to spend billions of dollars on Hayabusas with and without off-road conversion kits. I will be directing the fund and will personally evaluate each Hayabusa for investment potential. In the future we may diversify to the “Gixxer thou” as well. It’s well known that you can’t lose money on Suzukis, right? If you’re stupid enough to believe this, just mail me some cash, any amount really, and I’ll be sure to do whatever I want to with it. Give me the bread, boys, and free my soul!
Must be a typo … it’s GRIFT Capital!
Come on men, do you want to live forever? Well you can’t. And there are times and places where you feel truly alive because you’re aware of the possibility of death.
How much death you’re willing to dice with varies according to age, experience and genetics.
It is the latter that brings the “do I park the bike for my family?” conundrum into sharp focus. As you point out, a dead father isn’t much use except for leaving a legacy of trauma, self-doubt and self-destruction.
I stopped motorcycling when the girls were young - and still drove fast cars faster than I “should have.” I picked up biking again when I felt reasonably confident I’d done my job well enough not to fuck them up if I shuffled off this mortal coil.
But I understand those who can’t give up high risk activities for their children. Addiction is also an inheritance, both for us and our children. Showing our kids how to channel our urges and manage their risk is, as you point out, a valuable lesson.
As always, you pays your money, you take your chances. I always try to keep in mind the British aphorism “it’s the bus you don’t see that kills you.” And never take a bus if I can help it.