Wednesday ORT: Land Ho, S5 Sucks, Waymo Kills KitKat, Diesel Pardon, Selling The Rope, Special GS, Teen Vogue

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there will *also* be no politics staffers at “muscle mustangs and fast fords”

So much to talk about, and so little time! Actually, we have unlimited time. Or at least I have unlimited time.

The very good, and the very best

Yeah, he’s both inconsistent and probably the most self-deprecating, confidence-lacking generational nine-figure-wealthy person in British history, but when Lando Norris has his emotions together he is a remarkable driver. As he proved to be this weekend. Saying that he’s capable of winning in the best car feels like damning with faint praise — but lately he’s been a lot more “Sir Lewis at Mercedes” and less “Jacques Villeneuve at Williams”, which is precisely the improvement he needs to carry this title home.

Let’s be forthright about the situation, however; had Red Bull left Max out on the medium for the rest of the race, then we’d have seen history made. Only Michael Schumacher has won from the pitlane. Max could have done it. As it was, he turned in yet another legendary drive to snatch a podium from the jaws of defeat. It would take something like a miracle for Verstappen to win the championship now… but I rate his chances equal to those of Oscar Piastri. There has never been a finer F1 driver. We are lucky to see him at work.

Other notes:

• Gabriel Bortoleto’s weekend was simply heartbreaking. It kept getting worse. His crash would have been fatal in most of the F1 tubs made from 1975 to about 2005, I suspect. The good news is that he’ll return to Brazil with full VW Group financial support next year.

• Liam Lawson took good care of his tires, for which he should be commended, but it was the pitwall that put him ahead of Hadjar.

• A moment for Toto, please: not only is his young prodigy publicly toasting his former employee, he is about to sell some of his Mercedes F1 stake at a remarkable increase in value. He bought 33% of the team when it was valued at $165 million; it’s now valued at $6 billion. By most estimations, Toto is worth north of two billion dollars, which is very close to the amount of money his wife would need for a pay drive in F2.

• Oscar needs to get his head right, and were I him I would approach the last three races like I never needed to drive in F1 again. Otherwise he will be carrying Lando’s gym bag for the next five years.

• John Elkann spoke out about Leclerc and Hamilton: “Ferrari needs drivers who think less about themselves and more about the team.” This is massively disrespectful to Leclerc, who has dragged a tractor to the front of qualifying about three times as often as any non-Verstappen could have. Charles should call Red Bull.

• Every time Haas finishes in the top ten with a fraction of the budget that the other teams use, it’s a reminder that Jalopnik people don’t know anything about racing, or cars, or life. Expect them to pass Aston Martin before the end of the year.

Audi puts the Ozempic needle in backwards

Seventeen years ago, I took delivery of the world’s only lime green Audi S5. It had the 40-valve 4.2L V-8, a six-speed manual transmission, and virtually all available options. It wasn’t a dynamically perfect automobile, but it made everyone who rode it feel like a million bucks.

This month, Audi released the newest S5 for testing, and it’s like a PowerPoint highlight slide of how to make a car suck:

0. The powerplant was long ago degraded to a V-6, but now it’s a mild-hybrid turbo three-liter making just 362 horsepower against the 354 horses of my old car.

1. Mandatory 7-speed DCT.

2. The coupe is gone, leaving the sole body style of 2020 Honda Accord Sportback.

3. It was 4,306 pounds as tested by Edmunds, nearly 400 pounds more than its predecessor and a full 450 pounds above my car. Consequently, it was unable to out-accelerate or out-handle its predecessor.

4. It has a full suite of infotainment options, a 40-something-inch widescreen LCD, and endless driver-assistance features.

On the other hand, it’s significantly cheaper, expected to come in at $62k against the $58k of my 2009 model, which is ninety grand in today’s money.

Here’s a suggestion: if they brought the spec back up to what my car was, maybe they could get ninety grand out of it. As it stands, however, the 2026 Audi S5 is something between an unfortunate product and a bad joke. This is what happens when you devote your entire engineering and research efforts to golf carts for the better part of ten years: you can’t even make the new gas-powered cars as good as the ones they’re replacing.

I could be catty and say that the S5’s target market in the USA, which is 100% made up of foreign-born university students and Millennial scrum masters, can’t tell the difference between a bad Audi and a good one — but the truth is that the average 2009 S5 owner was probably a dork with zero wheel skill as well. He just got a better car for his money. Let’s reverse this trend before it’s too late.

A murder on 16th Street

There are countless reasons to keep tech-jerkoff, late-stage-capitalist, explicitly anti-human trash like Waymo “autonmous vehicles” off the street — but the beginning of the end for this unwanted tech could come courtesy of a little tiger cat.

For the last six years, “Kitkat” was the official bodega animal at Randa’s Market in San Francisco. The handsome dark-headed mackerel tabby, who looked a lot like Attack Kitty and his siblings, was struck and killed by a Waymo last week. The community is angry, and they are making various anti-Waymo materials. There’s now a call for additional oversight of Waymo in San Francisco. Let’s face it: when the tech corridor won’t even let you murder a few animals in the cause of immanentizing the eschaton, the pendulum is definitely swinging the other way.

I don’t use the word “murder” lightly, by the way. When a human driver strikes a cat without meaning to, we call it an accident. When a human driver sees a cat and does nothing to avoid killing it, that’s murder. Waymo has raised over $11 billion in funding without doing anything to address the matter of animals in the path of their cars. It’s not an oversight. They just don’t care.

I think that Kitkat’s mourners are going to make them care. While I’m very far away from both San Francisco and the sort of moral positions that define the city, I can say that if a Waymo killed one of my cats on the road in front of my house, that road would become very difficult for Waymos to traverse after said death. This is worse for the techno-feudalists than the Uber pedestrian death, because frankly speaking neither of the human participants in that deal seemed terribly sympathetic and the media tended to portray it as “Morbidly obese ex-con Chicana allows car to run over white woman without changing facial expression”.

This is different. Kitkat was innocent before God, as all animals are, but especially bodega cats. Waymo is a company with no real reason to exist. The world is not short on taxi drivers. And if your product can’t do 25mph down a San Francisco street without catching a body, it needs to go.

This diesel dude will be whistlin’ Dixie

Troy Lake developed a series of sophisticated repair procedures for diesel engines that didn’t run correctly. Some of his customers were lifted-truck morons, but most were livestock haulers who were tired of their trucks entering “regen mode” during long cross-country pulls. One hauler in the above-linked story details having to arrange an emergency haul of 120 head of baby cattle off the side of a road in Wyoming.

Lake was raided in 2020 then finally arrested and sentenced in 2024. He did seven months in prison before being released earlier this year. Trump’s pardon restores his firearms rights and other civil rights.

The morality of this is fascinating, at least to me. I’m not sure it should be legal to operate diesel engines for non-commercial purposes. The science on the harm they do is too clear-cut. The UK has been very open about their estimate of 16,000 additional deaths from “Dieselgate” Volkswagens, while being less chatty about the fact that the UK fleet-car rules that made diesel almost mandatory for the better part of a decade killed many more people than that. There is no level of diesel particulate emissions that is not harmful to the surrounding humans.

On the other hand, it is plain as day, and likely provable via manufacturer statistics, that emissions controls have made modern diesel engines far more difficult to own and operate. So if you rely on a diesel vehicle for work, what’s more ethical: defeating the emissions compliance, or dealing with the fallout of running a compliant engine?

Just for rhetorical fun, I would note that if California or even the Feds really cared about diesel trucks killing people, it wouldn’t be possible to have a CDL with “No Name Given” in the name field. But that’s a distraction from this topic.

My opinion is that Jeff Lake should have been fined and had his equipment confiscated. It’s a civil offense, really, not a criminal one. We are apparently pleading murderers down to probation nowadays. Cracking an ECU shouldn’t send you to jail. I also think that President Trump’s action was reasonable. The man did his time. He was over-prosecuted. A pardon prevents him from suffering further harm as a result of this over-prosecution. If President Biden can pardon thousands of people for selling weed, President Trump can pardon a dude for for coal-rolling. Plain and simple.

Their ancestors used to lower the drawbridges for invaders, too

One of the most fascinating things about Clown World is how we encourage people to make open statements of betrayal — as long as the betrayal is of normal Westerners, and on the behalf of the global-homogenized caste. Which is how you get this statement by the world’s largest car shipper, Wallenius Wilhelmsen:

Wallenius Wilhelmsen has historically benefited from western carmakers shipping their products to China. But the Norwegian group, which sells space on its ships to carmakers, is now trying to capture more revenue by helping newer Chinese brands to expand overseas…

Kristoffersen said he did not see BYD or other customers emerging as rivals to Wallenius Wilhelmsen, but did expect competition from Chinese shipping groups such as Cosco. “When we speak to our Chinese customers, they bought vessels and built vessels because they were afraid of not getting access to capacity. That fear is easing . . . so there will be Chinese players, but it’s not the most likely scenario that our customers will become our competitors.”

It’s a perfect metaphor: a Western company that was built on Norwegian exports is going to turn around and flood Europe with Chinese EV trash. I’m reminded here of “IBM Global Services”, which once delivered US-engineered-and-built mainframes around the world but in the space of a few short years became nothing but a funnel for H1-Bs into the United States.

All of this may be in the interests of the shareholders, but it also amounts to waging war against one’s own country. We have basically reached the point in Catch-22 where Milo Minderbinder arranges the bombing of his own airbase to benefit “the syndicate, where everyone has a share.” This was considered to be very sharp parody sixty years ago. Today I don’t think the average MBA drone would even see the humor. “Well, yeah, of course Milo needs to kill his own countrymen, the syndicate is short on revenue.”

If we had a functioning left wing in Europe or America, rather than a coalition of Redditors, degenerates, wine aunts, and fat people using the ideology of perversion to whitewash a chainsaw murder of working-class wages via unlimited import of neo-slave-labor, someone would sink those boats in the harbor. If we had a functioning right wing in Europe or America, rather than quasi-actors using country music and verging-on-butch para-military imagery to sell a chainsaw murder of working-class wages via unlimited import of neo-slave-labor, someone would sink those boats in the open ocean. Since what we actually have is government-via-multinational-corporate-whim, expect this business of carpet-bombing Europe with BYDs to be big business indeed.

Four months younger than I am, in much better shape

The hi-beat is on / it's on the streets

I have a hard-and-fast rule that has served me well over the past 27 years of contract and itinerant employment: Don’t buy stuff when you aren’t working. Since I never know when I’m going to be funemployed, however, I occasionally buy stuff right before I’m idled.

Such was the case in September when I bought a Seiko Astron SAST005 from a fellow in Vietnam. The early-2010s Astrons are astounding devices; made from the Grand Seiko spec “High-Intensity Titanium” that is a bit above grade 5, built with painstaking care, and capable of instantly setting the correct time anywhere in the world you can get a GPS signal. Because each generation of Astron is thinner and better than the last, the originals don’t hold value; I paid $420 for a mint example with box and papers against an 2013 MSRP of $2,350.

(The primary reason I bought an Astron at all was because one of the other drivers in this household owns the mighty, and totally sold-out, “cherry blossom under night skies” SSH171 chronograph, and I occasionally try to matchy-matchy with her.)

My Vietnamese homeboy is very good at getting stuff like exotic-leather straps and capacitor-battery watches past customs¹, but he whiffed this time and the Astron got yanked between Singapore and Alaska. It will be months before he can lay hands on it and try sending by another route. So I’ll be wearing it in the spring.

In the meantime, we cut a deal on another cheap old watch: this March 1972 Grand Seiko 61GS Special, built in the Suwa Seikosha facility. These are early “hi-beat” 36000vph watches. The “Special” logo indicates that they received extra finishing and fettling to achieve +3/-3 second daily accuracy, compared to the +10/-10 Rolex standard of the era. (Forty years after Seiko did this, Rolex finally got some variants of their $18k watches to +2/-2, which matches the 1969 Seiko “VFA” standard.) The “Special” came in three variants; this day-date with faceted crystal was the most expensive.

Good examples of this watch fetch three or four grand. This one looks like it spent some time at the bottom of the Mekong River. We call that “character”, and it also reduces the value of the item to the point where I was able to cut a deal to take this for now instead of the Astron. Largely because I think Our Man In Hanoi is professionally embarrassed by the situation.

I am very fond of Japanese watches from this era, owning good examples of a 1975 Lord Marvel 36000vph, a 1973 King Seiko “hi-beat” 28800vph, and a 1967 Seiko 5 “DX”. If you like being impressed by what’s inside a watch more than you want to impress the person next to you on the airplane, all of these models are available for the price of an Apple Corpo-Property Dongle or less.

There’s a fellow out there who zaratsu-polishes these old Grand Seikos back to like-new condition. Should I have that done, or should I live with the “patina”? I think the latter. It’s already survived the decades in better condition than I have. The smart thing to do is to put in another night of push-ups every week, and try to catch up to the existing state of the Grand Seiko rather than let it get further ahead!

Alas, Teen Vogue, the teens weren’t interested

If you’re bored and feeling sassy, this Free Press article about the end of “Teen Vogue” is worth reading:

The Death of ‘Teen Vogue’ Was Inevitable

I don’t know any other way to describe the saga besides bizarre: this shot of an early print issue next to the last one make it plain.

Ah yes, Hillary Rodham Clinton, noted expert on what it means to be a teenager. The entire history of “woke” Teen Vogue turned out to be an awkward effort in projection:

Gen Z quite famously doesn’t consume written media, and already in 2018, a review of the site’s demographics had showed that its readership included virtually no teens. Conspicuous wokeness, as it turned out, was the exclusive passion of the aging millennial population who Teen Vogue’s readers and writers alike comprised; the teens it claimed to represent, meanwhile, had long since been getting their news from TikTok…

In the end, Teen Vogue was a lot like the ultra-diverse, politically pious young-adult novels that were so ubiquitous in bookstores after 2016: a product created by older people for an imagined audience of youths—whose politics, values, and media diet conveniently happened to be just like theirs, only purer…

What we may understand now is that the army of youth activists the magazine claimed to be leading was not just greatly exaggerated; it’s that, outside the fantasies of a bunch of increasingly middle-aged people, it never existed at all.

History will see the Teen Vogue arc as uniquely emblematic of a period in time where the people in power were so obsessed with rewriting reality that they could insist on publishing a guide to anal sex that divided people not into “men” and “women” but “people who have a prostate” and “people who do not”. If the diagrams are correct, the day I have my prostate removed to fight cancer I will then also somehow come into possession of a vagina. Which is odd, because normally you don’t get a vagina until the day you start benching with a Smith machine.

But that’s a topic for another time. See you in the comments, friends!

1. I hasten to add that this is not “smuggling” in the conventional, super-cool sense of the phrase. He is simply very good at understanding the ins and outs of Customs paperwork. Sometimes, however, he is literally better at it than the Customs officials, and we have drama that results. Other times, I have a top-end Grand Seiko arrive with zero tariff charges. You never know. Gotta play to win.