Wednesday ORT: 392 Durango!, Storyteller Wes, Tyler Reddick The Creator, Let's Enlist, Max Defeat

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Before we get to all the fabulous and interesting news of the week, let’s pour out the proverbial 40-ounce for Afeela, the Sony/Honda project that was taking deposits in California last year with an expected retail price of $89,900. Left unsaid was the fact that even at ninety grand this piece of shit would have required some nontrivial taxpayer involvement to (slowly) move the metal. This is also the end of the road for AC Schnitzer, the long-serving BMW tuner. I thought they made some neat stuff at the tail end of the E30 era, for sure. The problem with being a BMW tuner, or any kind of tuner right now, is that every new performance car is unreasonably fast in a straight line. What’s missing from most of them — steering feedback, a sense of playfulness, charming or desirable looks — can’t be added in the aftermarket. Which is why Alpina and AMG are now just brand extensions of the OEMs. As you’re about to see, however, automotive enthusiasm at said OEMs isn’t totally dead.

NOW how much would you pay?

The madmen at Stellantis actually did it. They brought back the 392-cubic-inch, 485-horsepower Durango — but instead of making it the “Durango 392” at seventy or eighty grand, like it was before…

…they’re just putting the big engine in the R/T, and starting it at $49,995 without destination.

Remember the Audi Q3 we tested 24 hours ago? Remember how it was forty-one grand and I was like, uh yeah, for a few bucks more you could get a Palisade or Telluride? Well, friend, forget all of that because there is now just one vehicle that every family man or woman needs to purchase, and it is the Durango R/T 392. These trucks are great fun on road courses — I drove a 392 around Carolina Motorsports Park a few years ago and did about four times as many laps as anyone else — and they are great fun in daily life. With every option you’d possibly want, this will be a $60,000 truck.

At that price, it’s basically Anton Chigurh: “I have no enemies. I don’t permit such a thing.” You’ll be able to tow 8,900 pounds with your new Durango R/T. It comes in actual colors. Everyone knows how to fix it, because it has been the same vehicle since 2011. Once upon a time, it was a bad thing to have an old platform. Today? Look at all the stuff you don’t have to deal with. It barely weighs more than a Hurricane Charger.

Have we discussed the fact that it’s fifty thousand dollars? To run mid twelves? With seven seats? This is the motherflippin’ Costco hot dog deal of performance cars. It’s also what you get when your company actually cares about enthusiasts. God bless you, Stellantis. And to every ACFer shopping for a car right now, even if they’d previously been considering a Cullinan or a Civic: you know what to do.

Four tires over the line, sweet Jesus

Did anyone think it would go any other way? Max Verstappen put on a clinic at the four-hour Nurburgring NLS race, toasting the competition and beating his co-drivers by five or six seconds a lap before finishing the race more than a minute ahead of anyone else. Then he was disqualified because the team used an extra set of tires during pitstop practices in qualifying.

Max is 2 for 2 in (provisional) GT3 wins at the Ring, having won in his 2025 outing behind the wheel of a Ferrari 296. What stands out to me from his in-car video:

• How little he steers the car, compared to everyone else;

• How often he manages to retain just a little bit more momentum than the cars around him in traffic situations.

Both of these salutary qualities, in my opinion, are a function of vision. Max sees better than anyone else. Whether it’s genetic, acquired, or trained, he is simply a superior physiological racing machine. It doesn’t hurt that his reflexes and visual patterns are trained on cars that are dramatically faster than these GT3-class sleds; on tracks without long straights, the AMG GT3 et al often run dead even with Platinum-class Radicals and SCCA P1/P2 cars. I wish I could put Max into my SR8 and just have a camera watch his eyes during a lap. It would teach me more than fifty data sessions.

Mark my words: if he wants to, Max can render every LeMans prototype record irrelevant after he retires from F1. Or every GT3 record. Or every GT2 record. Or every GridLife record — except for the one the GLTC crew set when the three “best drivers” in the series all ran into each other during a warmup lap.

In which a clown says clown stuff, clownishly

what was the professor’s name, and how big were his balls?

Alright, enough of you sent me this drivel for it to warrant a response on the Wednesday thread. I’m on record (I hope) as thinking that Wes Siler is the biggest phony and coward to ever lie on his back and hump-force himself into his 28-waist skinny jeans like a Tri Delt pledge with a bad case of pubic lice. When I met him, I thought he was a bus-station rent-boy twink, but in the years since I have come to believe that he wouldn’t survive two hours by himself in a bus station, let alone make a living in one. The distance between his curated Hemingway-on-Ozempic magazine persona and who he actually is would require the use of AUs to express in a 32-bit register.

The word-vomit above is his “cover letter” for some brand-pimping job. Deconstructing it in its entirety would take more room than we have in a Substack piece, but here are a few of my favorite idiocies:

• There’s a name missing from this narrative: journalist/entrepreneur/bon-vivant Jon Alain Guzik. Some people think Guzik is a human grease trap with a stronger aroma, while other people really dislike him, but I think it’s fair to say that every “accomplishment” Wes lists in the first half of his screed would be far more honestly described as “Guzik did (the thing), and I watched.”

• The “I took ayahuasca and learned my true calling” thing is stolen from Josh Tillman, who is an actual creative person and artist and also someone whose wife doesn’t pay all his bills while he pretends to be a bi-flexible Peter Hathaway Capstick.

• Siler calling himself Outside’s “flagship writer” is bad comedy. Jon Krakauer was still occasionally popping in during Siler’s tenure. Note that Siler was not one of the 36 authors who asked for their name to be taken off Outside’s masthead after the oh-so-awful acquisition. He kept writing puff pieces about polyester puffer jackets until they ran out of space for his advertorial-ish “content”.

• He “co-starred with Bill Clinton”. Yeah, and I co-starred with Patrick Dempsey. (We both had Mazda factory rides for one Grand-Am race in 2011.) What a narcissist. (Wes, not Patrick. I think Patrick is a hoopy frood.)

• The “asymmetric warfare” paragraph is the single most embarrassing thing I’ve ever read by an ostensibly grown man. There are hundreds of thousands of combat veterans in this country; he is none of them. He’s always talking about killing stuff and being in fights but no one has seen any proof of this. The idea of Wes “training the neighbors” in warfare is… I admit it, I cannot generate a metaphor of the required pathos. I’d rather be “trained in warfare” by Harvey Fierstein, whom I suspect has actually been in at least one street fight.

• Again this business about “mentoring unhoused trans teenagers”, which comes across as The Derek Zoolander Center For Kids Who Tuck Their Dicks and, were it to ever be seriously investigated, would probably raise genuine concern among the “neighbors” who are currently being shaped into “Fox Force Five” by Siler and, one presumes, his wife.

• Somehow, there’s no mention about how he almost unalived himself trying to show off on a motorcycle, had his life saved by a five-foot seven, 140-pound kid who risked his own life in the process… then rewarded that kid by… well, maybe it’s obvious why that’s all been left out.

Ah, but maybe I’m being too hard on Wes. After all, he is applying for “storyteller” roles at “brands”. (You know, like Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Steve McQueen all did.) Isn’t the job of a “storyteller” to spin fantastic and poetic tales from a base and dismal reality? Don’t you want a storyteller who makes the quotidian seem heroic? Who would hire a “storyteller” if their cover letter looked like

“Hi, I’m Wes. I wrote about cars for a while, then I wrote about motorcycles for a while. Didn’t race them, didn’t write anything anyone remembers, but I did get paid. I followed some impresario scam-venture-capitalist around and licked his toe cheese out for him until he fired me for being boring. Then I tried to construct a persona as a liberal, woman-respecting nouveau Hemingway, but in the end the best I could do was write a whole bunch about how I loved gun control even though I owned a double-barrel shotgun. My ideal man is Tim Walz, and if you read what I wrote about him, you wouldn’t leave me alone near his dirty underwear. Right now, I kinda live off my wife. I mostly take a lot of pictures of myself in fancy outfits.”

??????

Not too late for Wes to do some real warfighting

Assuming Wes doesn’t get the storyteller job for which he is shilling — I assume the company in question is either Dude Wipes or Bad Dragon — he now has the option of enlisting in the 82nd Airborne, the Special Forces, or possibly even the Expendables. (They need a Chuck Norris replacement.) I can’t imagine Iran would wait a full 36 hours to surrender; Siler’s grasp of asymmetric warfare would have the ayatollahs begging for mercy almost immediately.

For the record, the Air Force raised its enlistment age to 42 in April of 2023 — but this hasn’t stopped social media from braying feverishly along the lines of

If Trump-itler and Goebbels Hegseth think they are going to draft me, my wife’s boyfriend, or anyone else in our queer fat bi-racial disabled polyclade, they will have to deal with one pissed-off pink-furred wolfkin and all the sass xe can muster!

Let me make a prediction: Rather than try to draft the Brad Brownells, Wes Silers, and Aaron Golds, presumably so Louis Gossett, Jr.’s grandchild can mold them into some kind of fighting force, the Armed Forces will go down to the border with Mexico and do this:

We already have a heavily Hispanic service, this would just make it more so. And they don’t even need to bring in Mexicans for front-line service. The country is crackling with young men who want to be at the tip of the spear; I know because I just got done walking around White Sands with thousands of them. What the Army does not necessarily have: support personnel, mechanics, technicians, and all the other people who make the job of the combat soldier possible.

Incidentally, that is why they are opening up enlistment to older people. Because they need some help in the non-combat roles. They are not gonna put Millennial baristas on a squad automatic weapon. They have a hundred other roles to which those older enlistees will be more suited.

Hey, if they raise it to 55 maybe I’ll go. Surely there is a logistics office or motor pool somewhere that needs a corporal. And the best part: I can finally start wearing those “Grunt Style” shirts after the fact.

Hot under the collar, put cool under pressure

If you thought Tyler Reddick’s victory sans a front fender was improbable, wait until you see him win at Darlington with a bad alternator, no cool suit, brake problems, and two sundial-speed pit stops. At one point, the 23XI crew actually got a larger battery and stuffed it in the #45 Camry, just in the hopes that it would keep the voltage up. In the end, nothing outside or inside the car could stop Reddick from winning again.

Oh, yeah, and Denny Hamlin managed to take his own employee out of the running when he long-braked the car ahead of him, which promptly collected Bubba Wallace.

A question I heard at dinner tonight: “Does Tyler just have a particularly good chassis? Or a strong engine? Or is it something else?” Given that surely both the chassis and engine have changed once or twice since the start of the season, I think it’s something else. I think that if you were to compare the amount of total steering angle used by Reddick over the course of a race compared to that of his competitors, you would see that Tyler is turning the wheel less. I think he is simply conserving more momentum in the corner entry phase. I don’t have data to support it. It is just what I think I’m seeing on television.

No matter what the reason, however, Tyler Reddick is having a season like none other. In a spec series. It’s worth watching.

Housekeeping: Tomorrow we will have another piece on Japanese music. On Friday we will have a great Reader Review. Thanks for hanging out with us tonight.