Weekly Roundup: The Son, Unleashed Edition

Oh, to be six years old and to have a race car of your very own! A combination of unpredictable Ohio weather and a certain father breaking a certain leg meant that John wasn't able to take his second test drive of his TopKart at the actual race track south of Columbus. Instead, it was back to the fairgrounds to drive around a cone course with a "leash" held by our kart dealer. Near the end of the remarkably frigid (42 degrees!) session, we dropped the leash and let John run it out. He likes the fact that the kart skids sideways when you lock the back wheels.

I signed the papers and paid the man and now John can say that he has something that his dad didn't have until he was thirty-six years old: his very own race car. It looks like it will be a long winter for me as I study up on how to blueprint the engine and make all the adjustments and so on. But I can't honestly tell you whether I'm more excited about the prospect of my first race in February or his first race in April. He'll have just one season in this kart and then it's off to "Junior Sportsman".

Let's hope that John's really terrible as a kid-kart racer, all evidence up to this point notwithstanding, because it's hard for me to imagine any financial future in which I concurrently operate a competitive Sportsman kart for John's national karting season and own a 2016 Viper TA 2.0.

At dinner afterwards, the kid used the back of his dinner menu to draw a picture of his first race. His kart was at least half a lap ahead of the other karts. We'll see how accurate that turns out to be. In the meantime, let's see what his father, and his uncle, managed to get written this week.

When Road&Track was rebooted a few years ago, one of the things that I heard repeated over and over again was that the new magazine would take some cues from Esquire and the other men's fashion rags. Bark's article this week about getting the best rental car possible would be a good fit for Esquire, assuming you could put a little more snark and a little more "I'm such a hoopy frood" writing style in there. For the moment, however, you'll just have to be satisfied with some expert advice that might make life much easier for occasional travelers.

Over at TTAC, Bark announced his decision to sell his Boss 302, blaming the overall excellence of his Fiesta ST for the creeping Mustang-ennui that he's been suffering. It's a great post but the comment section is notable for a story by our own VolandoBajo where he discloses that he chose a woman over a Harley XLCR back in 1977! Sir, consider yourself reprimanded.

As some of you will have noticed, I've been contributing a "PCOTY teaser" article to R&T about once a week for the past two months. This one, on the Cayman GT4, is probably the last one because PCOTY itself should be on newsstands in the next week or two. Speaking personally, and not as a contributor to R&T, the Cayman GT4 made me kind of sadly nostalgic for the 987 Caymans and Boxsters. This new car is just so wide. Clearly the thing to do is to buy the old Cayman R but most of them were turned into half-ass track rats.

My second contribution to R&T this week was about the Off-Road World Championships in Crandon, WI. I was originally scheduled to drive one of the TORC trucks myself, but that opportunity sort of mysteriously disappeared once I got up there and was replaced by some explicit requests to write an advertorial about some off-road wheels. On the positive side of things, the race itself was truly astounding to observe and I did go to the famous Allen-Edmonds Shoe Bank on the way there.

For TTAC, I wrote a counterpoint to an opinion piece by full-time staffer Aaron Cole. It's fascinating for me to watch TTAC evolve along its new direction and to see the site adopt kind of a unified editorial "voice" from Aaron and Mark Stevenson. The true challenge that those two are facing is to figure out what TTAC stands for. Is it the contrarian voice in the wilderness established by Farago? The aspirational-wonkette style of Niedermeyer? The Camrys-on-the-racetrack and threesomes-at-the-press-events blood-and-thunder era over which your humble author presided?

Looking back on it, Bertel (and, to a lesser extent, Ed) really did me a favor by sending TTAC so far down the Oriental-rope-bondage rabbit hole that virtually anything I did ended up having a positive result. By contrast, Derek's careful and generally well-focused stewardship of TTAC didn't leave Mark and Aaron much of a platform from which to jump. Derek neither abandoned all the successful precedents I'd set nor did he feel unable to chart his own course when it mattered. I continue to retain and cherish the emails Derek sent me after he took over where he sternly warned me that the "era of cashing out bitches is over". He had a point; there were more than a few times that I magically discovered a synergy between TTAC's available budget and my desired vacation plans with one young woman or another. But I think that the readers expected that to some degree. It's also fair to state that when I was Derek's age I was just as much of a stern moralist as he is now and I would have been personally disgusted to see my forty-year-old boss sneak Ukrainian girls into hotels for press events and whatnot.

Derek was really just hitting his stride and sorting out his own personal editorial identity for TTAC when he was plucked out of the site by a major manufacturer. By the time that happened, however, the B&B had mostly come to accept and even like him. So Mark has a tough row to hoe. The good news is that by publishing counterpoint articles, like my response to Aaron Cole and his own response to my brother's Nissan piece last week, Mark is both honoring the original irreverent spirit of the site and paying tribute to the principles laid down by the almighty Farago himself.

The other thing that I put up on the aforementioned website this week was an "Ask Jack" about a Toyota Matrix that has come to what Boyz II Men call the "end of the road". If you haven't already chimed in with your opinion as to what Chris should do, please feel free to do so... there, or here.

This upcoming week I'll be telling you the story of how watching a Steve McQueen movie will probably ensure that I don't walk without a cane ever again, and other fun stuff --- so check back!