Wednesday O/R/C:A-Fo' No Mo', Reshoring, Marriage Market

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always a bad sign when they make the car small in the press photos

Classified ad, in a good cause

We have a friend of ACF who has become medically unable to ride his Triumph T100 Steve McQueen, serial #425. “Serviced annually (regularly waxed chain every 200 mi), recent brake fluid flush, caliper service, and new brake pads. Always garaged. 7,100 mi and runs like the day I got it. Comes with a numbered certificate of authenticity matching the bike and the owner's portfolio w/ manuals.” There are some reversible upgrades, with original parts included. A similar bike with less mileage, but additional ownership history and no upgrades, fetched $10,250 on BaT last year. This is listed at $10,500. Inquire via the comments, and I’ll put you in touch.

Au revoir to the prime mover

inspired by the byd seagull, and you

Oh, this is personally difficult for me to accept. Back in 1999, very much in love with my Royal Green Passat 1.8t stick shift, I convinced my father to buy a new basic-black A4 1.8t Quattro Sport 5-speed. I’d actually wanted him to buy the same-color 2.8 V6 front-drive stick-shift sitting next to it, but he thought his wife would benefit more from AWD than from additional power. Back then, the A4 really mattered. It saved Audi, at least in the United States. Somehow it looked just right, went just right, was just right. Remember the “Cool Shades” paint colors?

Then the S4 arrived… well, we don’t need to go all the way down Memory Lane, but suffice it to say that for the past thirty years, owning an A4 or S4 has often been the mark of a quiet and thoughtful automotive enthusiast. The addition of the RS4 and S5 —I commissioned a Lime Green S5 V-8 6-speed and loved it more than life itself — spiced up, but did not render irrelevant, the original concept.

Now, to quote Gregor in Ronin, it’s all you-know-whatted into a cocked hat. The new A4 will be a golf cart ground-breaking electric vehicle. All the equity built by that name will be forgotten. Gone as well: the wagon, the real two-door coupe, the be-trunked proper sedan. Now you get a five-door hatch, which is the least-admired body style of the previous generation.

Audi’s CEO bleated that “We will need these vehicles to bridge to the all-electric future,” an utterance oddly reminiscent of the constant and completely insincere “Inshallahs” peppered into public statements by various C-suite lizards for Qatar Airways or Santander Halal Banking. Well, if you need them, why are they so bad?

The A5 has 268-hp from the default two-liter turbo-four, and the S5 has an underwhelming 362-hp 3.0 turbo six. 7-speed DSG is the only transmission choice. Quattro is mandatory. You get all the same screens, and all the same forcing of everyday functions into those screens, that would come standard in a Hyundai Sonata.

This new A5 five-door is about the same size as a 1999 A6, but of course it’s gonna weigh more. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but it had better be a bargain compared to whatever BMW has in this segment now. The nicest thing I can say about the A5 and S5 right now is this: given the absolutely 5-degree-Kelvin reception traditionally accorded five-door mid-sized sedans in the United States, at least you won’t see yourself coming and going. Anybody who buys this instead of an IS500 has been watching too much Ronin.

The friendshoring era

Another friend of ACF at the TOM agency sent me some interesting data on “reshoring” and “friendshoring” in the United States. A few tidbits:

• 69% of American manufacturers have begun reshoring supply chains. So far 94% report success.

• Mentions of nearshoring, onshoring, and reshoring hit a new high* on company earnings calls.

• 400,000 jobs were reshored in 2023; 51% of those are said to have come from China.

• “Friendshoring”, as seen above, is replacing “offshoring”. Note how Canada is the only country in the graph to show a net decline from 2010, however.

This last point matches up well with something I was told by my pimps technical consulting representatives at lunch a few weeks ago: right now, lizard people are very interested in sending tech work to Mexico rather than India. You’d think there would be a language barrier, but let’s face it: I spent an hour on the phone with a software vendor’s offshore support today, and they might as well be speaking a different language, too. I would rather have used my broken Spanish, truth be told. “El certificado… no es aqui, es muerto.”

Can “reshoring” fix our dismal blue-collar jobs market in America? No, but we could at least stop the bleeding. This country is now at the point that you could probably be elected Dictator For Life just by convincing everyone that you won’t let things get any worse.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, find me a similar SAT

Rob Henderson is talking this week about the idea that our college-selection process serves as a de facto arranged-marriage service.

I have wondered if, on some level, parents who stress about getting their kids into a good college are motivated as much by romantic reasons as professional ones. In other words, they want their son or daughter to attain educational and occupational prestige, of course, but they also want (perhaps unconsciously) to put them in an exclusive environment full of attractive prospects, which would increase the likelihood of a stable marriage and healthy grandchildren…

Two of the strongest predictors of long-term romantic stability are intelligence and conscientiousness. Those are also the two strongest predictors of long-term educational and career success. So when colleges screen for those traits, they are also screening for good spouses.  

I met my son’s mother a week into my freshman year of university, and married her a year and a half after leaving school. In the thirty years since, I’ve met many women who were prettier, more compelling, more interesting, or more delightfully dramatic — but when it came down to the actual purpose of marriage, which is to have valuable children, I was well served by the Miami machine, which gave me a conscientious, fiscally disciplined, hard-working, and entirely sane baby momma. Never have I endured a moment’s worth of worry about entrusting my son to her for a minute or a month.

From her perspective, and from the perspective of her parents, the process failed, because instead of a nice Jewish business major they got an ill-mannered and psychologically unstable man whose raps displayed nothing but ridiculous jargon, shocking sexual audacity, and repulsive images of the ghetto. Well, no system is perfect.

Race report, Cincinnati SCCA “IT-Spectacular”

On the numbers, this wasn’t a bad weekend; I was about one second off my personal best times on both Club and Pro configurations of Mid-Ohio, which accurately reflected a track that was rain-washed and frequently oiled on both days. The frustrating thing was that I didn’t have good engagement of 4th or 5th gear as oil temperature rose. Even more frustrating; my 6-heat-cycle Hoosiers had sidewall cracks for God Knows Why Reason, and had to be prematurely discarded. So my lap times were largely due to me getting frustrated enough to toss the PR6 into Turns One and Eleven at imprudent velocities on hockey pucks from 2023. As a consequence, we learned a little bit more about how to set up the small Radical during what was its 13th racing weekend in my ownership.

Also, I was alone in class thanks to mechanicals from my two most likely competitors, making me the official winner (of nothing). Yay?

Unless I want to restrict the PR6 to Waterford Hills this year, I need to get the transmission shafts and gears remanufactured. That’s not super-expensive. The hassle is pulling the engine, cracking the case, then reassembling the whole mess afterwards with “Suzuki-Bond”.

My crew chief thinks we should move to the next-gen K8 Hayabusa engine and transmission. This gives us a fiercer 1340cc in place of the mild current 1299, plus stronger gears. It also means we can use the factory fuel injection system. Doing that correctly would drastically reduce lap times and increase uptime — but I can’t see it being cheap.

It would be much more sensible to go back and race my Neon instead, but here’s the problem: with four of six functioning gears and tires that were showing the ghost of cords behind the rubber, I went out and ran three 1:30.7 laps in a row. Go compare that to the IMSA classes that charge $30,000 or more for a weekend’s worth of racing — and this is twice as exhilarating as driving an Aston GT4 or Mustang Challenge car, because I’m 30mph slower on the back straight. You make the lap happen by keeping your right foot on the gas, where it belongs, and flinging where the “sports cars” brake.

If God made anything better, as Burroughs said, he kept it for Himself. Well, He did make something better: the Stohr WF-1. I just don’t know how to get my hands on one.

Housekeeping and shameless advertising

Amazon has Prime Days; I have Renewal Month, when about 60% of my readers are billed for their annual subscriptions, starting about now. The smart thing to do would be to incentivize that beforehand, but I’m not very smart so instead I’m planning a blockbuster August, including the first-ever detailed review of Sebeco’s new SPX race car.

If you’re about to renew, may I suggest you consider upgrading to the Trackday Club? It gets you a $35 shirt (my cost, sadly), which isn’t a great deal — but you also get your choice of racetrack coaching or attendance of a street drive in the Midwest where I cover your meals. Last year’s street drive was excellent fun, and I’m expecting the same from this year. More benefits as I can imagine and execute them.

Still to come this week, for all paid readers: Ask Jack, a Harambe, another episode in The Story Of TTAC, and possibly that fiction story if I can get my time apportioned correctly. As always, I appreciate each and every one of my subscribers, so thank you for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow evening!