Wednesday ORT: Spa, NASA Gets Freaky, Supporting Bike Theft, American Syd

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Brief commercial message: It’s once again my privilege to be in the finest owner-oriented automotive magazine — issue #129 of Turbo Diesel Register! Alright, let’s get to it.

The “OP” in “OP81” is for “over powered”

I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for rich kids or British F1 drivers but Lando Norris is really starting to test my resolve here. He’s just… so… decent about the fact that Oscar Piastri is going to be the WDC. He says nice things about Oscar to the press. He apologizes for being aggressive. After taking a moment to swallow his feelings and stuff them all the way down, he always steps out of his car and congratulates Oscar. It’s the precise opposite of how Lewis Hamilton behaved regarding Alonso, Button, or Rosberg.

(To be fair, Lewis is very nice about Charles, likely because Leclerc is beating him more consistently than Alonso beats Stroll. It’s not really a contest any more.)

If there was a Norris resurgence going on, and it kind of looked like there might be, consider it stopped.

Other notes:

• It was an awful weekend for Yuki Tsunoda fans such as your humble author. To be beaten by Lawson twice! Yuki drove some half-decent races but he got toasted on strategy. So did Max, actually. The extra lap that Max had to drive on the inters killed his race. Tsunoda had to do two extra laps.

• I’m now ready to eat all of my words about Carlos Sainz dominating Alex Albon in 2025, while at the same time thinking that Sainz would be in a better position than Sir Lewis were he still in Ferrari red.

• Aston Martin have just given up, haven’t they? Presumably Adrian Newey hasn’t done a single thing on this year’s car. Or — and this theory is perfectly supported by recent results — he’s lost his talent, both at Red Bull before the move and at Aston now.

• You know who kind of looks like he should still have a seat in a Red Bull? Pierre Gasly.

Meanwhile, in other “racing”

If you’ve been reading this Substack for any length of time, you know that I’m actively encouraging both would-be racers and current competitors to walk away from the for-profit sanctions like GridLife and NASA in favor of nonprofit club racing. There are simply too many drawbacks to the former, from “arbitrary decision-making” to “repeated cancellation of spec series after everyone builds their car to the rule set.” Now we have a new reason not to race NASA: the owner might create a burner account and start saying weird stuff to you online.

Meet Sayo Haraishi, a pace-challenged but generally harmless and cheerful young woman who is trying to make her mark in club racing. So far she’s been in the back half of the pack, which is fine. Not every female racer is going to distinguish her rookie season with a race where she goes from 16th to 1st in truly miserable weather conditions. Not that I have anyone in mind, of course.

As a woman who is far from difficult to look at, and someone with a bit of family money besides, Sayo has probably ruffled some feathers in SoCal… but the primary bird-brain having said feathers ruffled is credibly rumored to be Jerry Kunzman, the founder of NASA itself, posting and messaging Sayo via a goofy-ass burner account:

For the record, I think the “sleazy lingerie” here was a Stand21 Nomex racing bra, which is also favored by two of my housemates, but that’s besides the point. You just can’t say stuff like that to your own customers, especially not your own female customers, and especially when you look like this:

i have a list of burritos that have not been provided to me

NASA has announced that they will investigate themselves thoroughly to determine if they’ve done anything wrong. I’ll hold my breath. The fellow running NASA’s national operations now is Jeremy Croiset. He’s generally well-respected, and if memory serves he’s also the person who coined the famous phrase “Learn how to race, AUTOCROSSER!” during some reality-TV racing show 20 or so years ago. I have no idea how he’s going to handle this, however. As far as I know, Kunzman still owns NASA.

At the risk of belaboring the point — nobody owns the SCCA, and the SCCA is free to discipline each and every one of its members if such an action is warranted.

Miss Haraishi is going to be racing with SCCA from now on. I suggest you do the same.

He really just put a stolen motorcycle into his employer’s van, didn’t he?

Between the rain showers at Mid-Ohio this past Saturday, noted ACF reader gt and I were wandering through the swap meet desperately hoping to not find a perfect FJ1200 ABS. Well, that was my hope, anyway. gt had his antennae up for various KZ1000s and whatnot.

At some point we rounded a corner and found two solid Honda Ruckus scooters for a grand each. “NO TITLE” was prominently written on the sale signs.

“If anybody has the right setup for these obviously stolen motorcycles,” I noted, “it’s me. Not only do I have a dozen acres to ride them around, the local cops don’t even make me run a plate on the Roxor. But.. I hate to add to the ‘demand’ side of the stolen-motorcycle supply-and-demand equation.” Without turning his head all the way, gt nodded a contemptuous assent. Which I more or less expected. He’s dead serious about Christianity and morality in general. Last week he refused to sell a motorcycle to someone because he didn’t think the buyer was competent to tune the carbs and get it running correctly.

“I’m not gonna sell him a bike he can’t use,” was the verdict. So the idea of knowingly purchasing stolen property is infra dig to him, even as a brief thought to entertain between swap-meet tables. It should also be beneath AMA to permit, if you ask me. Motorcycle theft, especially in the superbike world, is a big part of why young men don’t ride any more. It’s why new sportbikes often cost 30-40% of their MSRP to insure on an annual basis. It’s why my ZX-14R has two thousand miles on it after a decade; I don’t take it anywhere I can’t absolutely monitor and control, because those bikes disappear. To me, the people who buy stolen motorcycles are trash, inferior even to the people who steal the bikes, because at least there’s some risk involved in stealing a motorcycle.

Not everyone feels that way.

Fat Brad bought himself a bike he knows is likely stolen, and now he’s bragging about it on Jalopnik. Keep in mind that you can more or less instantly check a bike’s VIN on NICB, and he could have done that at any time during the 36-hour lowball-negotiation process he so lovingly describes. I find it hard to believe he doesn’t know this. One of his readers has already reminded him:

“If someone comes to claim it with the title…” What a cowardly and morally bankrupt position to take. The person who has the title is dead, or old. It would have been the person who bought it back in 1992 and rode it until it was stolen in… 2003? Then some thief stole it and the bike got passed around in his “community” until it didn’t run any more. Two decades later, it fell into the hands of someone who was willing to sell it for $500.

Readers, it costs $310 just to trailer a bike through the gates at AMA, pay your admission, and set up the smallest possible table. This wasn’t a sale; it was a disposal. And to make things even more despicable, Brad wasn’t attending the show on his own dime. He was using the van, and the money, and the name, of his current employer, electric-motorcycle assembler LAND.

For those of you who aren’t criminal attorneys or the kind of people who hire criminal attorneys… generally, employers are not super-hot on using company assets to transport stolen goods. There’s a name for it, actually: “smuggling”.

I have zero snitch in me so it’s not like I’m gonna call LAND and say, “Can I also use your Sprinter to transport stolen goods around Ohio and beyond?” In fact, I kind of admire the brazenness of it.

1. Buy stolen motorcycle

2. Admit that you know it’s probably stolen

3. Put it in your employer’s van

4. Write a story about it for a national publication

5. Go racing on it!

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the last part to happen. Brad says the FZR600 “fits him like a glove.” Readers, I was just six foot two and 188 pounds the last time I rode an FZR600, and it led me to immediately buy a new YZF600R because the Fizzer was way too small. I’m gonna put the Watch Me Race An FZR600R at Mid-Ohio next to other great Brad kayfabe fantasy stories like My Wife And I Are Gonna Live In A Scamp Camper and I’m Giving Up Gas Powered Cars For The Rest Of My Life and If I Ever See Jack Baruth Anywhere, I’ll Be Leaving In Handcuffs.

Well, now that he’s in the stolen-motorcycle biz, maybe the last one is true after all.

It’s about power, not sex appeal

crying all the way to the bank

My colleague — I won’t call her a friend, because in a recent conversation she openly disrespected my green-suede-with-black-Swarovski-crystals Golden Goose “Ballstar” sneakers — Kara Kennedy has a great piece in The Free Press about the Sydney Sweeney controversy.

But lately the American public has grown used to a very different kind of ad, which tried to convince us beauty is whatever they say it is this week. You know the ones: the sagging swimsuit campaigns, the big-and-proud lingerie shoots, the breathless press releases declaring that representation is the new hotness. For roughly a decade, brands insisted on telling us what we should find sexy—stretch marks, back rolls, visible panic disorders—whether we liked it or not.

The body positivity movement told us, loudly and constantly, that everyone is beautiful, that all bodies are worthy of the spotlight, that a triple chin was not only normal, but empowering. Obesity wasn’t a health crisis, it was an identity. That era wasn’t really about celebrating women. It was about neutralizing beauty. Sanding down the sharp edges of desirability until no one felt left out, and no one stood out.

She can turn a lovely phrase, can’t she? And she’s right, but I want to say a little more, and take it a little bit beyond her cogent analysis into some outright crimethink. To wit: The “bopo” movement that carpet-bombed Americans with images of frankly disgusting people for years had absolutely nothing to do with democratizing beauty. Were that the case, I’d be for it, because I am obese and ugly myself, and such a movement would of course benefit me. The next time Danger Girl said,

“Do you really need to eat that entire second box of nonpareils?” I could respond with,

“Listen up, Eva Braun — I’m beautiful at any size.” To be honest, I think our society could have long stood to expand the definition of beauty a little bit. I see beautiful women, and handsome men, everywhere I go. They might not be ready for Hollywood, but they’re all better-looking than I am. My aesthetic awfulness often makes me feel like the late Janet Reno, whose unlovely appearance led to her having to fend off unwarranted charges of lesbianism with one of the saddest responses I’ve ever heard, to anyhing:

“I am a… great admirer… of men.”

Most people have a little beauty in them, if you can but take the time to find it. But the bopo ads weren’t about that. They were about power.

There’s really just one effective definition of power, and it’s this: making people do what they don’t want to do. That’s the only kind of power there is. And it is intoxicating.

Remember what The Last Psychiatrist always said: “If you’re seeing it, it’s for you.” So when the banner ads show me Sydney Sweeney with half of her chest out, that’s for me to enjoy, and maybe purchase something as a result. I don’t mind looking at Sydney Sweeney. I don’t think she’s the most attractive artist on TV at the moment — that would be Gracie Abrams— but I am happy to look at her. I’d rather look at her than look at a blank wall or a Ulysse Nardin watch or a Cadillac Lyriq. No power is being exercised over me in this instance.

On the other hand, when I’m in the city or observing a screen somewhere and I’m forced to look, however briefly, at physically disgusting or unpleasant people, often blown up to billboard size — that is power. Doubly so, because

a) I have to look at it, if only for a moment;

b) I’m forbidden from expressing my disgust.

That’s two exercises of power. Via your money, you make me see something I wouldn’t otherwise look at, then via your cultural power, you prevent me from taking action. I suspect that most of you have jobs that you would immediately lose if MSNBC were to release footage of you ripping down a “Lizzo” poster while yelling “NO MORE FUGGERNAUTS ON THE WALLS!” That’s power, and it is everywhere.

(By the way, I’m a bit of a Lizzo admirer in terms of her talent. I would probably go see a Lizzo concert. But I don’t want to look at her in a fashion layout, any more than I want to look at Ric Ocasek, whose music I also admire, in a fashion layout. There’s a reason the cover of “Candy-O” was a Vargas painting and not a close-up of Ocasek’s face.)

Don’t think for a minute that magazines and screens are filled with ugly and/or misshapen people because the powers behind those magazines and screens truly find 400-pound women and whatnot beautiful. They don’t, and I’ll tell you how you know: Go through the engagement pictures in any society-oriented publication and tell me how many “Dove Beauty” people you find in there. Go into any Nordstroms or Saks and tell me how many awful-looking salespeople there are. As Katt Williams says, “I’ll wait.”

There’s a real pleasure in forcing people to see or experience things they don’t like and don’t want. It’s the guiding principle, for example, behind “rolling coal” and street takeovers and a lot of the political street theatre we’ve witnessed since 2020. I think a lot of modern art has become an exercise in forcing rich people to look at unpleasant images. Like all of Tony Podesta’s garbage by Patricia Piccinini. The sole purpose of her “art” is to disgust you. If I can force you to nod at it and say, “How nice,” then I’m exercising power over you.

It’s worth noting that these drives and desires are far older than recorded history. In the civilized era, we have traditionally protected against them via something called manners. It’s a social contract. You don’t bring your God-damned Bluetooth speaker to the beach and I won’t rev my 300C outside your house when your kids are trying to sleep, and so on.

That social contract has largely been broken — and, for the record, I don’t think the poor, the downtrodden, the Bluetooth-speaker crowd… I don’t think they struck the first blow. Much of what has been in publicly-accessible media for the past sixty years amounts to a full-throated attack against normal, decent Americans. Rarely was it strident; wasn’t All In The Family funny? Wasn’t As Nasty As They Wanna Be a remarkably deft album? Didn’t we all enjoy reading Portnoy’s Complaint? But in the long run it was all corrosive. To our social contract, to the tenuous bonds of civility that keep us from drawing blood in the streets, to our willingness to meet each other on a human and individual level.

So while it’s nice to see Sydney Sweeney on a billboard, I’d rather see no billboards at all. I’d rather have our clothing made by small workshops in this country, instead of by massive overseas sweatshops that just put different faces on the same trash. I’d rather have no images plastered on walls and skyscrapers and city buses. It’s nothing but a war for our attention, and it should stop.