Wednesday ORT: Lando’s Coke, Crash and Coffee, $80Kayman, 9/11 Laughter, Glashutte’s Tweed Nostalgia

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Good afternoon, friends.

Your tires cannot degrade without your consent

The current rumor is that Fernando Alonso sat down with the organizers of the newly-laid-out “Madring” and told them — hey, this is gonna be an awful race, you need to change something — but there wasn’t enough time to incorporate any changes. Which gives them plenty to work on for next year, because this “fast Monaco” was painfully processional. Oddly enough for a race with basically no passing, there were four people who could have won. Lando Norris was the class of the field all weekend, opening up a lead so dominant that he missed the flippin’ Virtual Safety Car. McLaren’s decision to pit him anyway made no sense, and turned his assured victory into a hard-fought third place. Charles Leclerc proved to be a master at taking care of his tires; with one more VSC he would have been the winner. Max Verstappen was instructed to give a position back to Lewis Hamilton, but doing so meant that he had to let Kimi Antonelli by. Max had equal pace to Kimi in the actual race, so that perhaps-hasty decision on the pitwall gave away the win.

I still don’t know how this catastrophic track design made it all the way to race day. Someone should have their hand slapped. F1 can’t survive if the product always looks like this. Other notes:

• Lando’s coke habit: Apparently McLaren’s deal with Coca-Cola is up for renewal. Cue an almost certainly staged incident where Lando cracks open a can in the cooldown room, is confronted by F1 personnel, then responds, “I just did a race, so I’m allowed to drink whatever I like. Thank you so much.” I highly doubt that Lando’s first choice of drink after a race is Coca-Cola — that might fly in SCCA Prototype X, but unlike your humble author, Lando is a racer-athlete. I think this was probably as pre-arranged as Lloyd Bentsen’s famous put down of Dan Quayle, which was treated by the compliant media as authentic live-action genius but in fact had been rehearsed to perfection before the debate.

• Spanish injustice for Yuki! After flopping in qualifying, Yuki Tsunoda found himself starting in the scrappy section of the grid. Carlos Sainz bashed him hard enough to cripple the Racing Bulls car, and that was that.; his P14 finish didn’t compare well to Lindblad’s P9.

• Unlucky Lewis: At Monaco, Charles Leclerc was betrayed by the brakes in his Ferrari, which were supplied by traditional Ferrari partners Brembo. The team has suffered various issues due to Lewis Hamilton’s insistence on using Carbon Industries discs and pads in the Brembo calipers and the consequent changes to brake tune. Eventually, Charles had to give in and use the same friction materials as Lewis, which has compromised his racing to some extent. Now we had Lewis with a brake failure at the Madring. The team’s official statement is that the failure was related to the rear brakes; the sole purpose of telling people this is apparently to convey that Hamilton’s major crash in free practice didn’t have anything to do with it. Nothing is ever the fault of Sir Lewis.

• Princess George continues to collapse: Kimi Antonelli now has eight wins from 38 starts; his teammate, George Russell, has seven wins from 166 starts. I have a lot of respect for George Russell as a driver, but he is clearly failing to deliver. Something similar has happened to Oscar Piastri, who went from being the likely WDC halfway through last year to “In other news, McLaren’s second driver Oscar Piastri finished behind an Alpine, again.”

Tragedy strikes the hard-parking community

Fortunate son, third-tier influencer, parking-lot-event organizer, and unsuccessful adulterer James Wehr was lost to the Orange County car-parking community when he decided to full-throttle rip down a wet section of a surface street after midnight in his dad’s McLaren 720S. Caution: this video shows the death of an innocent woman.

Wow, the way it immediately explodes is remarkable and if it were any other car but a McLaren I’d say the CIA pulled a Michael Hastings on him. This had to have been the most avoidable Hollywood explosion in history and you really get a sense for how far down the road Wehr was looking — which is to say, not at all.

This death is being treated like a tragic loss to “the car community” by outlets as respected as the Post and as marginal as the current iteration of Road&Track. While I try not to be in the business of disrespecting the dead, let’s be honest here: this dude’s primary achievements in life were getting a tribal tattoo sleeve and convincing a Hooters waitress that he was about to divorce his wife.

“Getting the opportunity to love you will always be the greatest blessing in my life,” the aforementioned wife posted on Instagram, before the identity of the passenger was revealed. “Like I said in my vows, I’m so grateful to have gotten the chance to live my life at the same time that you lived yours,” James’s wife added. “Whether it’s in this lifetime or the next, my heart will always find its way to you. Rest easy, my love.” After she discovered that her husband’s victim was a Hooters girl, she went ahead and got rid of all of that.

Your humble author lives in a glass house when pretty much all aspects of Christian morality are concerned, but I will say that Wehr’s acknowledged status as a pillar of the Orange County auto-enthusiast scene speaks ill of automotive enthusiasm in general. He became famous just for standing next to his dad’s car, but to quote failed threesome participant Edwin, also known as Ja Rule: “It’s not how you stand by your car, it’s how you race your car. You better learn that.”

Now how much would you pay?

Portland, Oregon’s Grand Prix Motorcars has made a business out of sourcing excellent-condition Porsches, but their latest sale listing has people wondering if this is a market indicator or evidence of marijuana emesis: a low-mileage 2011 Cayman S for… $79,900. This gets you the combination of stick shift and the direct-injection boxer that replaced the troubled and underperforming M96. If we put it up against two other cars in their lineup we get a sense of what they think the clutch-pedal premium is:

All three of these cars are what a Porsche guy might call “bullshit colors”. A Cayman R shows best in green, the 2014 is No Extra Charge White, and the $80,000 2011 Cayman is Speed Yellow, which is also a free color and maybe my least favorite color on a Cayman, period. The dealership is basically charging $25,000 extra for having a stick shift. Which was in no way rare fifteen years ago when the car was new; it ain’t like this is a manual-transmission 599 Fiorano.

The 987 Cayman S is a lovely car to drive. I can kind of make a case for the valuation here. While it’s possible to get a much newer car for similar money:

That one’s a turbo-four, which not everyone likes. It also feels much bigger inside and out than a 987, which was the last Boxster to have a traditional close-coupled Porsche cockpit without the giant Panamera center console in there with you. So there’s a case to be made for buying the older car, and if you have the money what’s the difference between the $55k it’s “really worth” and the $80k they want? It’s an afternoon of market gains, maybe.

Just to put the current insanity of the Porsche market in perspective, however: In 2005 I bought a 2004 Boxster S 550 from the Ferrari dealership in Washington DC. It had 4,300 miles on it. MSRP was, I think, $61,570 or thereabouts. I paid $41,000 flat, which would be $70,000 today. It was essentially a new car, without a single crease in the leather. It was a good deal at the time, but not an all-time great deal. Porsches tended to lose a third of their value in year one.

By contrast, this car is a decade and a half old, and it will need things if it’s going to run well. You could spend $15k on just getting all the rubber replaced throughout the vehicle.

I’ll keep an eye on this one. If nothing else, it suggests that we might be seeing the beginning of a “nostalgia market” for Caymans. Perish the thought!

Well, maybe it was funny to them

evan loves worf@esjesjesj

So this is the entire video and holy shit this is nothing

1:18 AM · Sep 14, 2026 · 9.11M Views

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1.29K Replies · 8.21K Reposts · 193K Likes

Half of the internet is up in arms about a video of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughing and smiling while the names of the 9/11 dead were being read. The full video shows that it was a brief conversation between the two upon meeting, after which they both resumed their silence.

On first consideration, I wasn’t particularly annoyed or upset about their interaction. Zohran was a child who had just moved to New York on 9/11; AOC was eleven years old and living in Westchester. (No, Bob James didn’t write the song about her!) You can’t expect either of them to take 9/11 personally; it would be like asking me to get upset about the Iranian hostage crisis. (For the record, I was a little upset.)

After some thought, however, I’m less indifferent to their little moment together. What distinguishes Mamdani and AOC from most politicians is that they are explicitly actors. Both of them starred in music videos before they became politicians. Both of them are master manipulators of the media, particularly social media. They are experts in “the optics”, one might say.

Therefore, both of them were aware that the 9/11 Memorial is tantamount to an extended funeral. Everyone knows what the rules are for meeting someone inside the church or funeral home; you keep your voice down, you are positive but not ebullient, and so on. Mamdani and AOC weren’t laughing at the dead, they weren’t celebrating a win for “their side”. They were merely being lazy and disrespectful. Which is enough, I think, for both of them to sink in the American estimation. Not that it matters, really. For a significant, and increasing, percentage of America, 9/11 disrespect is a good look and good police. Mamdani isn’t American-born; he will never be President. But you’d be a fool to bet against the Westchester Lady in that regard.

Horological hiraeth

It’s not as bold a new-nostalgia tribute as the Pac-Man Krayon, but Glashutte Original’s new “Seventies” collection is an open overture to Gen-X collectors. Available in Vinyl Record (black), Tweed Amp (brown) and Stereo Panel (silvery-white), the Seventies watches use 21k gold hands and indices on dials meant to conjure up old hi-fi equipment or guitar amps. (Even the black hands on the Stereo Panel are gold.) I’m partial to the Tweed Amp myself:

The black-faced Vinyl Record is a limited edition, priced at $16,300 with both straps. The Tweed Amp and Stereo Panel are priced at $13,200 (rubber strap) to $14,500 (steel bracelet).

Serious money for what are basically nostalgia pieces — but, like the $79,900 Cayman, these can be seen as test balloons for what we will cherish and value in the near future. You certainly can’t criticize the tastefulness of the design.

Housekeeping

I’m traveling for much of the next twelve days. We’ll have regular service for the most part; I might be 12 hours late due to timezones and daily commitments. I’m hoping to bring a couple of nice guest pieces your way in the near future; one of them is already scheduled. Thank you, as always, for reading — and please continue to feel encouraged to mention topics in your comments!