Wednesday ORT: Hemi Returns,The Greatest Budget Watch, Waymos Under Attack, Rush Peaks?

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Racing stuff, don’t forget to add yours

If you’ve ever wanted to watch me lead most of an open-wheel race… here it is! And I even managed to stay (mostly) dry while doing it! I really enjoyed working with USF Juniors over the weekend, and it was a reminder to me that there really is a bit of a gap between the best open-wheel kids and our “pro drivers” in the various pay-to-drive series out there. You have to be a bit of a muppet to not be fast in a GT4 car; every time I’ve sat in one, however briefly, I’ve posted times very similar to team drivers. That’s not the case for these Tatuus open-wheelers, which are fairly tricky devices at speed. In the wet? Doubly so.

Way to ‘mo

i’m livin’ for givin’ the devil his due

I’m not eager to discuss the Los Angeles situation here, because I doubt that most of us have an exactly rational response to it. The same people who rightly decried the targeted Federal murder of Vicki Weaver in Idaho are openly eager for the Marines to lob white phosphorus shells into the California crowd this weekend. On the other hand, you have folks whose entire personality is based on “Jan 6 attacked The Our Democracy” acting like these LA riots are basically just youth picnics in progress.

Regarding the riots themselves, I will only say that the below image is an astounding gift to the Trump/Vance campaign:

What’s more interesting to me than that is the way in which so much anger and violent action seems to be focused on… driverless vehicles. Waymo has had several cars burned to the ground and, I understand it, is in the middle of a service suspension across Los Angeles. Which, in and of itself, should give the advocates of “mobility” pause, because it points out how easy it is to turn the mobility off whenever it suits the government, or the corporations, or the rioters themselves. Right now, very few people actually rely on Waymo. Perhaps that won’t be the case in a decade, at which point a service suspension will be a Very Big Deal.

The smashing-and-burning of driverless cars probably strikes many of you as Luddite in nature but I’ll suggest that it’s actually Marxist in nature. A driverless car is capital incarnate. It represents a world in which you can’t even have your own car. You are made deliberately reliant on someone else’s capital investment. Their profits are assured, because your participation is mandatory. Worse yet, the table is rigged by the government. The money will always flow from you to the Waymo owners. There’s no other way for it to happen. You won’t be able to compete with Waymo, because the barriers to entry will be deliberately stratospheric.

When you go to work, you will use Waymo. You might not be able to balance your books at the end of the month — you may have no profit, no capital, left over — but Waymo is guaranteed to thrive and profit from your involvement. It’s the worst sort of public-private partnership. And if the rioters are choosing to burn Waymos over private automobiles, that suggests they’re aware of that on some level. Which is another way of saying that these riots, which are designed to protect our God-given (to the corporations) right to cheap labor no matter what, might end up biting the hands that encourage them.

You could have a V-8

“Everyone makes mistakes, but how you handle it defines you. Ram screwed up when we dropped the HEMI — we own it and we fixed it,” Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis said at a press preview earlier this week. “We’re not just bringing back a legendary V8 engine, we’re igniting an assertive product plan and expanding the freedom of choice in powertrain for our customers.”

“Ram will continue to offer the more powerful and more efficient HURRICANE [engines], but we heard loud and clear from consumers: there is no replacement for the iconic HEMI V8,” Kuniskis stated. “At the end of each month, we count sales to customers, not statisticians or ideologues. Data be damned — we raise our flag and let the HEMI ring free again!”

MoparInsiders has the details: the 5.7-liter Hemi will return to Ram trucks for 2026. It will be the eTorque mild hybrid, because that was the easiest powertrain to integrate with the new architecture, which is called “Atlantis” for some reason. It’s coming to every trim level except the top-line “RHO” and “Tungsten” this summer thanks to a 6 month crash program. HEMI Rams will bear the “Symbol Of Protest” logo seen above, and they will come with an extra-enthusiastic cat-back exhaust as standard.

Orders are open. Stellantis should be congratulated for this turnaround. It’s good for business and it’s the right thing to do. Now… bring on the 392 Chargers!

You can get a worse GMT, but you’ll pay more

Earlier this week, an ACF reader messaged me that my casual advocacy of the Seiko SSK035 had convinced him to buy one for himself… and that he really liked wearing it at his day job, which we’ll discuss below. In the meantime, I’d bought another one of these things, the SSK021 that was originally meant as a USA-market exclusive but is now everywhere. I paid $259 for it on Greentoe, which is just silly money.

Let’s recap. These are Japan-made steel watches with reasonable timekeeping accuracy and a legitimate, usable GMT function. They’re lightweight and quite comfortable to wear. The “Jubilee” style bracelet is comfortable and adjusts to three intermediate positions so you can re-size it without getting out a watch sizing kit. They can track time in three different timezones. If the forums are any guide, they’re pretty durable. There are at least a dozen different color schemes available, many of which call various Rolexes to mind but also include Seiko-only stuff like the black-and-chrome-bezel SSK021 and the yellow-dial SSK017.

If we compare it to, say, my Grand Seiko SBGJ239, there are minor quibbles. The “quickset” feature moves the GMT hand, not the “regular” hand. That’s not quite right. GMT should be adjusted via the normal adjustment, and the local hour hand should be quickset. I suspect it’s mechanically easier to quickset GMT, which is why the cheaper Seikos do it this way. The front and back are “Hardlex” mineral glass instead of sapphire. The rotating bezel has no “clicks” or detents to it. It doesn’t claim chronometer status and you might well get one that loses ten seconds a day.

Last but not least, this isn’t a “luxury” watch and doesn’t pretend to be. I like that, actually. I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing a Rolex GMT-Master, it feels too much like a statement of wealth rather than a statement of enthusiasm. These Seikos, on the other hand, are absolutely statements of enthusiasm, and they have tremendous credibility among people who know and love watches. Which brings me to my reader and his day job:

That’s right — the next tractor-trailer you see might be driven by a fellow who knows a great watch when he sees it. And if pilots deserve a GMT watch because they cross multiple time zones, doesn’t a long-haul trucker also deserve one? Damn right he does.

The opposite of Ladies’ Night

In one of life’s supreme ironies, there are two mainstream albums called “A Show Of Hands”, and they’re both focused on four-string guitars. The newer one is Victor Wooten’s 1996 solo effort. The older one is from 1989, and it showcases Canadian prog-rockers Rush right at the end of rock-and-roll.

I should explain that a bit. I can’t help but think of music, art, and much culture as having been stuck in The Long Now for quite some time. Rock music, in particular, had a sort of Pre-Cambrian explosion from 1960 to 1990 that stuttered and stopped shortly afterwards. The bands that debuted from 1965 to 1985 can still tour and make money. Everyone after that has to play in festivals or appear at county fairs. When people think about “new rock” they tend to think about bands whose lead singers died years ago, like Alice in Chains. Name a new rock band. You can’t. Even if you’re young. And the old bands have little left to say. Rock has become jazz, basically. Which doesn’t mean it got harder to play — although that’s true, as well.

So return with me to 1989, when the core Rush trio of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neal Peart were all thirty-six years old. They were eight years past touring on the only Rush album that means anything to most people, Moving Pictures, and they were twenty-six years away from having to tour on it again. They had not yet released the awful Presto and even more awful Roll The Bones, which had a rap section. They were touring with material from three fair-to-middling, synthesizer-heavy albums: Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, and Hold Your Fire. The songs from A Show Of Hands are drawn from those three, with the exception of “Witch Hunt”, a deep cut from Moving Pictures, and “Closer To The Heart” from 1977’s A Farewell To Kings, which ends the album.

Songs like “Marathon” and “Turn The Page”, which on the studio albums come off like nerds singing about math, feel genuinely vital and memorable on A Show Of Hands. The musicianship is essentially flawless. At the time, Geddy was considered to be the rock bassist. In 2025, both my son and I can easily cover anything he ever played — but we can’t sing at the same time, or play keyboards at the same time, or do all three at the same time (!!!), using our feet. For reasons I don’t fully understand, but likely have something to do with the digital and anlog recording processes of 1989, the A Show Of Hands album was not recorded at the same show as the VHS/DVD of the same name. The latter is quite a bit more ragged, while the album almost sounds like a studio effort in its perfect timing and untroubled vocals. It’s obvious that Lifeson’s backing vocals were cut from the album. Listening to the DVD, which keeps them, makes it obvious why.

Rolling Stone was merciless:

Rush’s prodigious chops are proven crowd pleasers, but this collection is a morass of muscle-bound technique, quasi-profound lyrics and bassist-key-boardist Geddy Lee’s shrill screech… In spite of (or perhaps because of) all the pyrotechnics, the music has the emotional emptiness of bad jazz fusion. “Nothing can survive in a vacuum,” as Lee squeals in “Turn the Page.”

They gave it 1.5 stars. (This week, they gave Miley Cyrus four stars.)

I’ll be far kinder to Rush than Rolling Stone was. This album is from an era where rock bands wrote and recorded new music at a breakneck pace. After the languid, studio-obsessed Steely Dan Seventies, audiences wanted more and faster than they’d gotten from the Yacht Rockers. It’s very fashionable nowadays, and was even fashionable in 1989, to caustically contrast the sci-fi approach of Rush or even Iron Maiden to the “real authentic roots music” of, I don’t know, Muddy Waters. That’s ridiculous. All music is performance. Nothing is perfectly “authentic”. You wouldn’t want to listen to anything that was 100% authentic or emotional.

Speaking of emotion; if nothing else, A Show Of Hands is valuable to young men because it’s music about something besides love. It covers atomic energy, artistic compromise, intercontinental bombers, athletic contests… pretty much everything but love. We need more songs that have nothing to do with love. Men in particular need songs that avoid the subject. So I’ll close for this Wednesday with the pompous and ponderous, but absolutely brilliant, “Marathon”:

It’s about running, as you’d expect. It’s also about one’s whole life, with these last words in a prechorus:

You can do a lot in a lifetime
If you don't burn out too fast
You can make the most of the distance
First you need endurance
First you've got to last

Readers, let me say for the record: if, for whatever reason, I don’t personally last much longer than I already have, I want to thank all of you for a great run.