Wednesday ORT: Young Neons, UK Twitter Arrests, Bscher Wept, Vanagon Carat Tested

All readers welcome

Good afternoon, friends. We have a little bit of everything today, from silly club racing and even sillier road posturing to what I hope will be a thoughtful discussion on an overseas situation that is out of control.

There’s a reason they pronounce “WHRRI” as “weary”

I am so heartily sick of racing at Waterford Hills. Intellectually, I understand that the beleaguered little track is fighting for its life against a neighborhood association that wants it gone. It’s basically a karting course with about half the parking they need. And there are some real risks involved with racing there that the volunteers are trying to mitigate. All of that is true. But:

MDG and I went racing without her mother, who despises WHRRI and wouldn’t cross the street to compete there, let alone haul a 7 hour round trip. She had ignition issues all Saturday and got a total of like 5 laps in. I skipped qualifying Sat morning and started from the back Sat afternoon… but was promptly black-flagged for going over the white line on the left side of the track on the start. I wasn’t the only person who did that, but I was the only person who isn’t in the WHRRI club who did it, so… Then I got black-flagged again because I hadn’t waited to be waved back on track. Then a young driver in another Neon came up to complain that I had forced him two-wheels off at the end of the back straight. The reason he thought that was because I had, in fact, deliberately forced him off. Well, I forced him to choose between holding his position, which would have made it impossible for me to close the door on him, and putting two wheels off to avoid me, at which point I knew for certain I could abuse his cowardice until the end of time.

He did not enjoy the conversation where I explained that to him. I can’t blame him for not wanting to take advice from a sad, tired old man. But it was good advice. In the end we shook hands and parted friends.

Sunday morning I watched MDG’s qualfying race, met her at our paddock spot, had a brief chat, then got into my car to head for grid. Unfortunately, they blew the 5-minute whistle while I was still waiting to be waved onto grid. Which meant I had to start from the pitlane, instead of from 8th place.

Cue the above video, which was great fun to make. I enjoyed the race about as much as I’ve enjoyed any WHRRI race. I can find a lot of fault with how I’m driving the Neon — 36 hours before I’d been driving a Ginetta GTP8, so I had to recalibrate a bit — but it was fun.

Sunday afternoon MDG made five places at the start but was black-flagged for being the only Spec Racer Ford that was both:

• Two wheels over the line at the start;

• Not a member of the WHRRI club.

Absolutely pathetic. The car ahead of her also went over the line — but he’s local. So she got to drive around alone, 30 seconds behind the pack, until her ignition issues returned. At that point I just decided to pack up and go home rather than spend the third race of the weekend being penalized on some kind of two-tier system.

If nothing else, the event reminded me just how lucky I am to live near Mid-Ohio and Nelson Ledges instead of WHRRI, which sucks, and Grattan, which is iffy. I have one track record at Waterford, and MDG has one overall win. That’s probably enough. We maybe don’t need to ever return.

In other four-cylinder excitement

which colors do i want to wear today? all of them

Behold, the mighty Kiamaster Bongo 9, the vintage Korean forward-control van with the mostest. I’d like to tell you that I had a chance to drive it, but sadly this one’s a museum piece. Instead, I drove this:

Let’s talk for a minute about convergent evolution. That’s the term for what happens when environmental necessities force some very different genetic lineages to assume the same basic shapes. Think sharks, icthyosaurs, and dolphins. Or consider the fact that the “anteater” body shape and design has evolved from 12 different animal genotypes in the past 66 million years.

The “boxy van” makes so much sense it’s “evolved” from several different layouts. The Kiamaster Bongo 9, like the Toyota HiAce, has the engine under the passenger seat. The original Ford Econoline had the engine between the driver and passenger seats, taking a page from the mid-Fifties Willys “Forward Control” trucks. But the grandfather of boxy vans was the Volkswagen Type 2, which had the engine and transmission in a unit under the rear cargo floor. When Volkswagen grudgingly updated it for 1979, it didn’t get the same modern-as-tomorrow layout as the Golf. It stayed a rear-engined, air-cooled throwback. The air-cooled engine proved unhappy in the larger body, so eventually VW bowed to the inevitable and created the “Wasserboxer” variant, which is always distinguished by a second grille beneath the first.

My first wife’s parents took European delivery of a four-speed manual 1984 “Vanagon” and kept it for six years, at which point I borrowed it to provide trackside service for my mail-order bike shop. I have a lot of Vanagon miles in my logbook. So it was a true joy to get back into one after… uh… thirty-four years away. Oh, that’s sad to write. But from the moment I turned the flimsy VW key in the even flimsier chromed ignition cylinder, it was like I had never left.

Autopian contributor Adrian Clarke joined me and MDG for a McDonald’s trip in this Transporter T3 Carat, which is powered by a 2.1-liter water-cooled flat-four developing a mighty 112 horsepower in European trim, pushing about 3200 pounds (!!) through a three-speed slushbox. As a “Carat”, it has all the options, including rear air conditioning, luxury seats, and very nice interior trim.

How fast is the Carat? Fast enough for non-Autobahn traffic. Legend has it that my former in-laws were permanently traumatized running the US-emissions four-speed van, which made all its power beneath 4000 rpm and just got breathless above that, on the unlimited-speed highways of 1984’s West Germany. In my hands, their Vanagon proved unable to get much above 81 or 82 miles per hour. This Carat would, I think, be faster, but there was no solid opportunity to exceed 70mph on our drive.

Allow me to share a secret with you, something known by relatively few people nowadays: these are great to drive. Visibility is absolute. The seating position will put you eye-to-eye with anything short of an F-250, but you can see so much better than those fascist bro-dozer Platinum 7.3-liter villains ever could. The driving position could not be improved upon if you took a million years to do it. Every control is easy to reach. You sit La-Z-Boy style with infinite room for your legs to sprawl in every direction and a pair of first-rate armrests beneath your elbows. The wheel is in your lap and requires no effort.

Most of the weight in these is placed low, at least compared to a modern van or SUV, so it’s both hilarious and surprising how much pace you can make in a Vanagon. I drove the shit out of my old one at all times, with the rear end often taking completely unpredictable exit lines based on rear camber and whatnot. I never spun it, which when I look back seems proof to me of the saying that angels protect fools among men.

Brakes are good, and the tires are fair by modern standards. There isn’t any way in which the Vanagon/Transporter T3 of 1979-1992 isn’t massively superior to a modern minivan. You get more room, you get better access, you can see more, it’s more comfortable. Some people put Subaru WRX engines in to address the power deficiency.

Let’s be real, however. In a crash… you’d rather not. And while your humble but idiotic author never rolled a Vanagon back in the day, this is not a vehicle that would flatter or ever protect today’s wheel-jerking, phone-distracted fools.

So what. In many ways, this represents the best of German engineering. They took a terrible idea and made it brilliant to drive. It really does satisfy. Which is probably why prices for used ones are… well, check them out. You can get a new Odyssey cheaper. But I wouldn’t have a single bad word to say about someone who dropped thirty or forty grand to do a maximum of 81mph. Today’s minivans and SUVs have converged to something far less charming than this very neatly trimmed box.

Oi, mate! Got a loicense for that Tweet?

The Times of London has released their investigation into speech- and social-media-related arrests:

Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023, the equivalent of about 33 per day. This marks an almost 58 per cent rise in arrests since before the pandemic. In 2019, forces logged 7,734 detentions.

Analysis of government data shows that the number of convictions and sentencings for communications offences has dramatically decreased over the past decade.

According to Ministry of Justice figures, there were 1,119 sentencings for Section 127 and Section 1 offences in 2023, down by almost half since 2015 when 1,995 people were found guilty of the crimes.

The total arrest figures are likely to be far higher because eight forces failed to respond to freedom of information requests or provided inadequate data, including Police Scotland, the second largest force in the UK. Some forces also included arrests for “threatening” messages, though these do not fall under the specified sections.

People are being arrested for everything from criticizing transgender ideology to, in one rather hilarious if uncool case, responding to a Tweet showing street violence with an image of the letter “N”. And while the UK police are absolutely relentless about prosecuting social media offenses, when it comes to the real thing they are less than useful:

Nearly 1.9m violent or sexual crimes in England and Wales were closed without a suspect being caught or charged in the year to June 2024 – about 89% of all offences given an outcome, official figures show.

Fewer than one in 10 cases were resolved in 611 neighbourhoods with the highest levels of these offences, according to a Guardian analysis, as growing numbers of victims withdraw from investigations after losing faith in securing justice.

Only 6.9% of violent or sexual crimes were solved in the West Midlands in the year ending in June, and just 7% were solved in the Metropolitan police area, according to Home Office figures. That compares with 19.2% in Lancashire and 18% in Cumbria.

About one in 10 of such offences resulted in a charge, summons, intervention or in another out-of-court outcome in Greater Manchester and Merseyside in the year to June, compared with around one in six in Cheshire, Durham and Humberside.

For comparison, the United States solves about 45% of its violent crime, and Japan solves 95.9% of theirs. On the downside, the Chicago Sun-Times found that only six percent of shooting incidents in the city lead to an arrest.

There are two obvious theories about the fact that the UK arrests 33 people per day for social media statements while solving a throwaway percentage of their ever-growing violent crime. The first is that it’s frankly a lot easier to arrest people for Tweets than it is to solve murders and capture murderers. The police are simply gravitating towards the easy work, the same way I rarely miss a Wednesday Open Thread but have so far failed to complete or deliver my erotic novel about an innocent professional BMX rider who becomes enmeshed in a torrid and thoroughly transgressive relationship with a European “curvemodel” and her two sisters.

The other, less reassuring, theory is that selective enforcement is the gateway drug for anarcho-tyranny. In the Western world of the future, you will witness people being murdered and robbed in plain daylight before returning home to find the police waiting to question you about a Friendster post you made in 2005. There is no contradiction in this. The purpose is to keep the middle class terrified and passive; it matters little whether you sit down and shut up because you’re terrified of “teens” or because you’re terrified of selective law enforcement. Either way you’ll do what you’re told while the aristocrats and proles frolic in complete freedom around you.

Anarcho-tyranny is the most effective method yet devised for preventing political change. It always serves the existing power. A government that can permit Rotherham to happen, then turn around and arrest the people who complain about Rotherham on social media, is demonstrating the rawest and most terrifying form of power a government can possess. Namely, the power to be flexible.

Nickelback plays Zeppelin

About a half-dozen of you messaged me with the news that Ed Bolian was driving the Revs Institute McLaren F1 at the Tail of the Dragon, in company with various other but more modern high-buck McLarens. All of you expected such an occasion would set me off, and you were right — but I want to discuss the reasons why I find it to be so lamentable.

Start with this: there is a massive supply/demand problem in… the cool market. Which we will, for this purpose, define as “the reservoir of available items and experiences that are associated with being ‘cool’.” The demand for cool stuff is near-infinite, and as wealth has migrated to the top of the global population it has fueled a hockey-stick explosion of would be buyers for cool.

A “cool” item can have three trajectories. I’m not being deadly serious here, but there’s a serious message behind the examples:

0. It can move from one cool owner to another, retaining or even augmenting its status. Peter Green used his unusual Gibson Les Paul to make the early Fleetwood Mac recordings, which was cool. He sold to Gary Moore, who then played the shit out of it on completely different music.

1. It can move from a cool owner to a normie who benefits from association with the item but does not necessarily drain the item of cool. An example would be the fact that Friedhelm Loh owns both Michael Schumacher’s most successful F1 car and Mika Hakkinen’s most successful F1 car. Dr. Loh is not equal to either of those men in the motoring pantheon, but he is an appropriate curator for these items. Should he sell those cars, they would be no less valuable for having been in his possession.

2. It can move from a cool owner to an uncool owner who infects it with uncoolness. Let’s say, for example, that there was a Lamborghini Countach that was originally owned by some coke dealer or other unsavory character but which eventually ended up in the garage of some nerd who uses it to try to make friends at Cars and Coffee. If you were to buy that car, you’d want to change it just enough so people didn’t think it was that uncool owner.

For the moment, let’s stipulate that an item can be cool because of its essential characteristics — any privately owned F-22 would be cool, for example, regardless of its service record — or because of its individual associations — Paul Newman’s Rolex is worth a lot more than the Rolexes ahead of and behind it on the production line.

McLaren F1 chassis 022 was originally owned by Thomas Bscher, a banker and GT-class racer who, according to the rather sycophantic and occasionally fabrication-prone media of the era, “used it daily to travel between his home in Cologne and the stock exchange in Frankfurt, frequently hitting 200mph along the way.” Let me state for the record that I am highly suspicious of this claim. I am sure that Bscher occasionally ripped the car past the 200 mark, but I am equally sure that he didn’t regularly commute at 200mph for 110 miles in each direction every day. There is a speed at which the need to refuel cancels out your extra pace. In an F-250, for example, it is 86mph; although my truck will pull my enclosed hauler at 95mph, I get 4mpg doing that, whereas I get 10mpg at 85mph and 14mpg at 70mph. I’m thinking Bscher probably averaged 100-ish mph on his trip, making it an hour commute instead of a 90-minute commute. Which, when you’re compensated like he was, makes the expense of owning a McLaren F1 almost reasonable.

The English car magazines loved Bscher’s story, and the Internet fell back in love with it 20 years after the fact, because it’s just so cool. Super-rich German guy who looks like a movie Nazi needs a McLaren F1 to close his high-powered deals! He’s a great race driver, too! So you have the right man, owning the right car, doing the right things! What’s cooler than that?

Bscher sold the car to Wyclef Jean, whom I consider to be one of the biggest clowns in pop music. Wyclef had it reupholstered, because why not? This sort of stuff was more common in the days when supercars were considered to be disposable. Mc Hammer and Vanilla Ice both had highly customized Gemballa 911s… that started out as used 930 Turbos before being fooled with by their new owners. If you’re a fan of the Fugees, or if you consider Wyclef’s part on “Hips Don’t Lie” to be something other than a bizarre joke, then you will consider the car to be more valuable because of this second owner.

In 2005, Miles Collier bought the car and had it reupholstered again, along with a color change, at a reported cost of $300,000. (Couldn’t do it for that much now!) Most sane people would consider this to be an improvement, at least in terms of the car’s ownership. Not only is Collier the inheritor of America’s first important sports-car racing family story, he is a champion driver in his own right with a stack of major amateur wins from the Sixties and Seventies to his credit.

Now we have Ed “Bedpan” Bolian, who has contrived to borrow the F1 so he can take it to Waffle House and drive it on the Tail of the Dragon. This is not cool. To begin with, there’s nothing cool about Ed Bolian. He faked a cross-country record (in my opinion) with the help of some outrageously credulous idiots, then he settled down for a long life of selling dorky exotics to dorky people and living off his wife’s family money.

There’s nothing cool about the Tail of the Dragon, and it pains me to say that because so many of us have enjoyed driving the road, but let’s face it: in 2025, you’d look cooler having your picture taken on a Harry Potter roller coaster than you do in the “Killboy” shots. Nobody makes pace there now. It’s become to outlaw driving what the “permanent socialist revolution” was to the socialist revolution, a double-headed Cars-and-Coffee with a human centipede connecting the two mouths.

Bscher’s F1 was cool because it was actually used for its intended purpose — or at least what the intended purpose was claimed to be. Selling it to a Haitian pimp-rapper made it less cool from a motoring perspective but I guess maybe cooler from a pimp-rapping perspective. Putting it in the “Revs Collection” at least made it available for future generations in a way that is more reliable, and more respectable, than stashing it away in some bedroom-community garage north of Manhattan or south of San Jose.

Having Ed Bolian bop the thing around North Carolina while taking a thousand selfies with his mouth submissively open to an extent best described as “Girthmaster” does not make the car cooler. It deflates the car. It turns it from the sword of King Arthur to the pot-metal fake used at jousting restaurants. Anyone who buys it now, not that Miles will sell it, has to associate it with Bscher and Bolian.

It would be one thing to trailer the F1 down there in the dead of night and take a crack at the unofficial Dragon record with it. It’s another to parade-lap it while also lappin’ up the adoration of every nerd at the Tail.

Here’s the unfortunate paradox that must be contemplated by every collector and everyone who has ever consciously bought something because they wanted the reflected glory associated with another man’s usage of such an item: the F1 can’t make Bolian cool, but Bolian can make the F1 uncool. Cool is fragile. It vanishes under direct sunlight. Disappears when you rub it too hard, or wave it around.

The late, great Leon Russell was once surprised by a music-magazine interviewer who arrived at his house well in advance of the appointed time. “Give me a minute,” Leon Russell told the man, “and let me get my Leon Russell outfit on.” He walked out of the room as a frail, declining 70-year-old man — and returned shortly as Leon Russell, the Master of Time and Space who for one fraught summer ran the baddest touring show in rock n’ roll. Because you can be Leon Russell all the time, but you can’t be Leon Russell all the time.

Every McLaren F1 is important. This one was doubly so. But it’s no better off for its latest public airing. To use the above analogy, it’s not wearing its Thomas Bscher outfit. It’s wearing the Ed Bolian outfit. And nobody really wants a supercar in panties, do they?