Sunday, April 2, 2023

Physiology


You do not want to hear a clunk from your left front when tagging a small bump while going around a corner, especially if you've just poured mid-four figures into chassis maintenance and upgrades. So Momoko has been a guest at the dealer for the last week, first getting a new transmission mount and now waiting for turnaround on a warranty claim for a possibly defective front strut.

And I've been driving a new CX-30 AWD Turbo with the Premium Plus package, the service loaner cheerfully provided while we sort this out (apparently pouring mid-four figures into chassis maintenance and upgrades earns you a bit of goodwill from the dealer), and I have not been enjoying myself.

It's taken a few days to understand exactly why I have not been enjoying myself, though.

Dear reader: Before you dismiss this as another tired anti-crossover whingefest and go do your taxes or something, be advised that isn't one of those. Nor is it a cranky rant railing against a full battery of modern safety/convenience sensors and warnings, which could certainly be written and which makes driving this thing feel like you're sitting next to a neurotic shoulder-tapping droid (speed limit 55! something's next to you! here, let me turn the headlights on! something's in front of you! here, let me project how fast you're going so you can't miss it, and it's still speed limit 55!) but again, not now.

I think I've figured out something that concerns myself specifically, but I wonder if it's a subliminal but still present concern for a fair number of people.

Historical background: I have a very, occasionally annoyingly sensitive inner ear. I was always the kid that got carsick in our big Buick station wagon. The enjoyment of an otherwise fantastic whale-watching trip off Cape Cod a few years back was mitigated by my distress when the boat started to pivot all over the place and my stomach did much the same. This may have been part of the issue with the motorcycle, especially with the way the rear tire wavered over pavement seams.

And it did not, and does not, take long in the CX-30 for some sense of uneasiness and a mild headache to settle in place.

I seriously wonder if being up that much higher than usual for me, and especially the way my head waves around when turning and going over rough pavement, is giving my sense of equilibrium a pretty meaningful and unappreciated workout.

More history: When official family car duties shifted from the Buick to a first-generation Ford Taurus with its vastly better body control, my motion-sickness issues simply stopped. I've never owned anything taller or more upright than either my dear departed Mercedes W123 or maybe the Jetta, and neither of those were what anyone would call high-riding. I have been a passenger in any number of taller vehicles, though, and few if any have been memorably endearing.

Much more recently, one of the thrilling upsides to the new suspension on the 3 - Racing Beat springs, about 20% firmer and a half-inch lower than stock, and Koni Special Active dampers - is the firmer ride motions and subsequent reduced roll. (Seriously, the package is an absolute home run. Better steering feel, much better turn-in, reduced impact harshness (!), it is exactly what I wanted and expected and I don't get to say that often enough in this life.)

Go from that into the CX-30 and its fairly lumpy ride and the way that I'm getting wobbled around at a very unusual-for-me amplitude, and I think a good part of my dislike for crossovers is about a very innate sense of motion and how I simply do not correlate with their very design.

https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=120357

Expand this a bit. Maybe it's me, but I don't think it's only me: does the popular preference for a higher seating position that drives so many crossover sales have a quiet downside in subtle but real occupant discomfort, at least for a fair part of the population?

The nuances of tuning - powertrain, chassis, seats, all of it - and perception of same do not get a lot of attention or respect in a very spec-sheet-heavy culture like ours, despite their outsize effect on our actual appreciation for a vehicle. The plight of so many owners of really good cars is convincing their peers that it's all the intangibles of driving and using that make something so gratifying.

It's a game of subtleties and understandings, and also a fair number of judgement calls and personal preferences. Not everyone is going to be fully in alignment with the feel of, oh, random example: a 1995 BMW M3. There's actually grounds for some to prefer the additional layer of isolation and padding and tranquility in something like a Volvo sedan, especially over long distances if that's someone's reality.

But it sometimes takes time to fully perceive an issue or preference, and even more to understand why that exists if that can be done at all. And modern vehicle sales are specifically not designed to allow customers to get a really through sense of a vehicle, because a developed personal preference is usually the enemy of a quickly closed deal.

And then back to crossovers. Not the numb handling, not the excess fuel consumption, not the projected image of rugged yet refined individualism as a reflection of manifold social anxieties, but simply the higher seating position that so many people say is the great benefit of the genre and its effect on one's sense of equilibrium.

So: Given the overwhelming popularity of these creations, I wonder if a subtle epidemic of mild motion sickness is a small but real part of why we as a society are so grumpy and irritated lately.

There are any number of other elements of daily life that combine popular surface appeal with quiet but real liabilities (looking at you next to me here, iPhone) but most of them aren't as physical. Fewer still are as hard to accept when you're trying to remind yourself that the cause of the problem is actually supposed to be an advantage.

So as I wait for Momoko to be restored to full health and uneasily consider what's available as a future consideration that works for me, here's to hoping that properly low cars maintain a meaningful place in the market. We need more balanced and harmonious options out there.

Thursday, February 16, 2023

When the shadow goes away

So the last report from the AirTag that was tucked in the toolkit shows it - and, presumably, my bike - near the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel at a quarter after three in the morning of December 11th. I remain curious about whether the thieves found it and destroyed it at that point or if they managed to somehow shield it from detection by the iPhone phalanxes in Brooklyn or what exactly happened, as well as how they coped with the intensely loud and annoying alarmed disc lock on the front wheel.

Both of these concerns, as well as the eventual fate of one 2022 Honda CB500FA, are academic now. At least this time around I got to ride it, dialing up almost five thousand miles over the course of about seven months of riding. But such is life in Manhattan; as one of the cops said, you just can't have nice things here.

There's a dark humor in seeing how the considerations that went into buying and keeping it while I did turned out to aid in its undoing: sure, let's get the inexpensive naked roadster that doesn't have a ton of easy-to-fence plastic (but which is built on a platform shared with a whole line of Honda middleweights at a time when spare parts are impossible to acquire) in a neighborhood full of rich-folks apartments and UN missions (all of whom are loathe to share footage from security cameras for various reasons) and where plenty of other motorcycles park (some beat, some weird, few which stay in one place for more than a day). I'll happily give lots of credit to my agent at Progressive's Suffolk office this time around for being as empathetic and supportive as he was efficient, which was a huge improvement over my experience from three years ago.

It's different on a personal level this time around too, less of a shock and more of a sense of disgust and odd humiliation and a sort of fatalistic shrug. Fine, whatever. It's not the end of the world, I didn't get physically injured, and yeah, crime is and will always be a thing and this gets added to the statistics regarding the current wave of vehicle thefts, which has to be one of the less obvious effects wrought by the pandemic. (Not long before my bike got nicked, someone managed to jack a brand-new Wagoneer in the same posh neighborhood. That one's actually kinda impressive.) Such is history, such is life. It still hurts, though.

-

And yet...

I suppose the cops and the insurance company are on to other cases at this point, so I can finally say this without things getting extremely awkward: I wasn't going to keep it anyway.

And it's not even about that specific bike. This is about motorcycling in general, this decades-long unfulfilled fascination that was finally made real and turned out to be a bundle of concern and ill vibes and disappointment.

When people talk about bikes and riding, everything seems to revolve around some grand sense of liberation and the intensity of the experience and the joy of being swept along. No one really talks about how it feels to actually ride the silly thing.

Important note: I would eventually discover that my first few weeks on the bike were done on seriously underinflated tires. The book said 36 psi front and 42 rear; off the showroom floor in late April they were both in the twenties. Objective handling was fine - it did about what I told it to do and was perfectly accurate - but it just felt incredibly eerie and unpleasant. (Thanks and much love again to Sam Smith for reminding me to check that regardless of my fondness for a usually good dealer.)

I don't know the degree to which those first few weeks ruined the rest of the experience, but that uneasiness tended to persist in my thoughts as I was riding. I just never felt secure and stable, or at least secure and stable enough.

A lot of it was about cornering. The act of turning a motorcycle is a phenomenally complex physics problem involving steering inputs and lean angles and roll centers and multiple gyroscopic effects and the way the tire contact patches change as you bank over and God knows what else - and I felt every bit of it being processed and kept waiting to see if something wasn't going to work as it should. Successfully negotiating a good sweeping bend tended to give rise not to a sense of Oh, that was wonderful and gratifying but rather Whew, I sort of did that right and didn't end up in the trees or grinding along the median barrier or something. I eventually grew tired of the idea that riding was a (hopefully) continuing sequence of good-that-didn't-go-wrongs instead of something innately enjoyable.

The regular physical discomfort got old, too. Even here in the Anthropocene - maybe more because of it? - weather and conditions here in the Northeast militate against a consistent sense of good times in open air. May morning temps would still be in the forties up through Westchester County, which resulted in some deep-ache wind chill. The flip was humid heat while paddling through yet another backup on the Deegan wearing a heavy leather jacket. As much as I was willing to masochistically endure it and put up a brave face, every once in a while something in the back of my mind would suggest that, y'know, right now you could be in a Volvo. With a heater. And a cupholder for coffee. And Bach on the stereo. Kinda nice and civilized, no?

That sense of exposure obviously carried over to other parts of the experience. As much as I rationalized it and stayed as conscientious as possible and planed routes with risks in mind and internalized the specifics of the Hurt Report saying how I was not part of the blatant problem groups, I simply could not get past the sense that I was doing something that eventually would not end well. Departure in early mornings always included a longing look at the sleeping forms of Anna and Tom and thoughts of what might happen. A whisper of doom always accompanied me checking the fasteners of my jacket and taking my helmet off the shelf. 

By about October I was having serious misgivings about this whole thing. The proportion of enjoyable to not-enjoyable was getting desperately out of line; the very occasional blissful stretches of pavement framed by sun-dappled trees did not counterbalance everything else that was either immediately unpleasant or could get that way very quickly. The rear end would squirm over pavement seams. The tendency for people to change into my lane while I was next to them grew gratingly normal. I would have to debate the multiple stresses of lanesplitting versus the stifling tedium of waiting in a jam, and as the weather was changing the opportunity to get on the bike was gradually being reduced to switching parking places ahead of alternate-side days.

I finally cracked - really, something in my brain went "pop" - after seeing one too many death notices on Instagram. Great friend and wonderful human and the rest, accompanied by a photo of a fully geared-up person leaning on an adventure bike, they'd just gone down the road for a minute and it happened. 

Enough. Enough with the cloud of dread, enough with the sense of playing into a scene from some awful maudlin Lifetime movie, enough with worrying about what would happen with Anna and Tom - and, news item by the way, our next one due in June - if something happened to me. Enough with beating myself up in the name of some vague ego complex and rapidly-deteriorating ambition.

The night after that conclusion, I slept better than I had in months.

And then not too long after that it goes and gets stolen, and if that's not God and fate telling me to just get on with being irrevocably done with this whole line of reality then I don't know. It's over, now and forever.

Regrets? Only that it took so goddamn long for me to get to this realization. All those years of stopping in at dealers and poring over road tests and dropping semi-informed comments online and endlessly wishing, being a total wannabe without ever getting far enough into the reality of it, grind on me just a bit. Lots of circumstances involved in that wait, and I'll never second-guess doing this like I did, but just to have it work out this way is depressing.

Would it have been different if I'd been able to start twenty-five years ago? Maybe. Would my mentality have a different alignment if I didn't have a family at home? Probably not by that much. Would a different bike (or properly inflated tires from the go) have produced a different result? I doubt it, although it might have taken longer. And none of this navel-gazing matters anyway; life is what it is and as it is.

It's been surprisingly easy to cleanse most of the motorcycle content from my life, although I still have to figure out what to do with two near-new jackets and a helmet approaching its recognized end of life. I suppose the jackets can go on eBay; I've been resisting the urge to just throw the helmet in the East River as some sort of statement. But the ready ability to release this has been a pleasant surprise.

-

That does't mean that the greater situation is completely at peace, though.

The bike wasn't just about motorcycling in its specific sense; it was supposed to be a solution to personal desires and interests within the constraints of life where and how I live. This was my sports car replacement or analogue, the more vivacious and ebullient complement to the good-natured everyday functionality of the Mazda - and one that didn't require another parking space. The Honda and the Mazda were a near-ideal two-vehicle garage, sans garage.

A brief togetherness.

Well, so much for that, and now there's a conceptual hole in that conceptual garage that I'm spending entirely too much time trying to parse and resolve.

Realize one thing, and I think this relates to a lot of the above: as much as personal transportation means a lot to me, it's not the most important part of my life. Anything that I do has to fit into the parameters that are defined by one very deep and long-lived and continuously wonderful relationship and its various derivatives (that would be the kids), and that most immediately involves our current address and its various built-in limits. I'll happily put up with the inability to easily fulfill my own selfish wants for the sake of our togetherness. I mean, I did just this for a long time when that situation wasn't a concern, so it's not a huge drag.

That said, I do still want something fun to drive and enjoyable to own. That understanding has never been challenged, even as I get older and the car world goes in directions I do not necessarily appreciate.

Yes, I could go find a different car, but there's two parts there: first, I have to find something else that works, and second, do I really want to be rid of something that works so ridiculously well?

If I'm looking for a new set of wheels, there's a few essentially mandatory considerations: It has to hold four adults (read: two adults and two baby seats). It has to have some modicum of safety equipment, which means three-point belts and probably ABS. It has to get minimum something like 20 miles per gallon on the highway. And it has to conceivably survive living on the street in Gotham.

Past that, the usual subjective stuff. I want something that drives well, sure, but also has an aura of dignity and elegance to it. I'm trying to bring my life around to a bit more of a sense of bourgeois respectability, and this would naturally be a good part of that.

What works here? I've been batting around a few ideas. I keep coming back to BMW E24s - not the M6, with it voracious thirst and harshness and unusable excess, but just the standard 635CSi. I did spent a few days entertaining the idea of a Maserati Granturismo until I found out that insurance wouldn't be much fun. I still have an image from a year and a half ago of a black Mercedes E-Class Cabrio on the Cross County being driven by a very model-looking guy and carrying three very, very model-looking girls, so that's not a bad association. Always wanted a convertible anyway. 

But the hard part is replacing the Mazda. Momoko is just such a perfect fit for everything right now; good size inside and out, terrific fuel economy, doesn't attract much attention from the wrong people, and just an excellent all-rounder. It's extremely hard to justify going in on the expense and unknowns of getting new wheels into the current situation when the status quo is so agreeable.

So I'm more into trying to have some fun with what I've got. I'm pretty sure that after nine years and 130,000 miles the suspension bushings are shot - directional stability and turn-in are both kinda blah lately -  so this seems like a fine time to indulge in some upgrades: Racing Beat springs and maybe exhaust, Koni Special Actives, 17-inch Enkei EV5s wearing Michelins, a better stereo amplifier and considerations on speakers, some attention to the scuffs in the paint. Not so much boy-racer as aspirations to a more upscale experience.

Is that going to be the Complete Solution? I don't know. But completeness is a weird idea now, and maybe it's more about being complete in the moment than grasping after some ideal that ultimately doesn't match this reality.

I think I've done exactly that quite enough lately.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

The Agreement


    The designs came in dreams; not as words, not as images, but as pure thought patterns. The latticework of abstract concept shifted and warped and folded and resolved into understandings, and those understandings were later made real. The true origin of those forms was never discovered by a multitude of observers, although a subliminal signature was always included in the design somewhere. That was part of the agreement.

-

    Days during the design process were a ritual. Alistair awoke at six-thirty, did some basic exercises, washed his face and shaved. He dressed in a white button-down shirt and dark trousers, selected a pair of shoes and buckled on the overweight wristwatch that the sponsor provided to senior members of the team. He made his tea to precise measurements, toasted bread purchased from the same bakery he had favored for ten years, and read through the BBC News on his smartphone while spreading orange marmalade or raspberry jam on the toast. After quietly eating his toast and drinking his tea, he took a bottle of mineral water and sat at his computer. At exactly eight he picked up his stylus.

    He closed his eyes.

    For hours his hand interpreted the concepts in his dreams. His body was motionless during his trance while the stylus traced along the tablet surface, translating those mental currents into pixels and code that were sent over an encrypted gigabit connection to engineers and technicians who ran machines in workshops which sculpted titanium and tailored carbon fiber into elegant shapes.

    When assembled, those pieces – airfoils, suspension joints, inlets sized according to certain rules, a precisely shaped and positioned engine bay and cockpit – formed a car. That car won races, won races as a function of destiny, won races as his designs had done for years.

    When the church bell in his small village outside Milton Keynes tolled noon he slipped out of the trance. Lunch was always a small sandwich and a simple salad, taken looking out a window over the fields; at one PM he resumed. The stylus was laid down again at five PM. He went for a walk, picked up some groceries if necessary, often stopped for dinner at the same pub he had favored for ten years. He returned home, listened to music – Mahler symphonies, Brahms chamber pieces, live recordings of the second Miles Davis quintet or Thelonious Monk – or read books on philosophy, then went to sleep.

    The designs came in dreams: ethereal, transcendent, perfect.

-

    He spoke on the phone with the engineers and technicians several times a week. He occasionally made the trip to the works in Milton Keynes to meet with team members in person and see the cars come together, abstract pieces slowly assembled in a space that was part operating room and part starship hangar. When the power unit specialists reported on developments that suggested chassis updates or the simulation specialists highlighted a particular quirk in their predictions, he nodded and asked for notes to be forwarded, mostly for show; he knew that these changes will be fully coordinated and developed without his input over the next few nights.

    The engineers had enough respect for the results to not ask exactly how he worked. 

    They never learned about the agreement.

-

    Alistair had started as a prodigy, a designer with an extraordinary ability to balance forces and translate human intention into car movement. He had interned with McLaren, worked in the Weissach wind tunnels, been engineer in charge of suspension tuning at Williams, sat as apprentice and assistant to the greats of that era.

    The first and second cars he created as chief designer moved a midpack team into regular contention for podiums. The third, after he was acquired by a team somewhat further up the grid, came within two points of winning the constructor’s championship. The fourth had that accolade in hand by mid-September. His designs dominated.

    But after a few years he lost his feel for the balances. The aerodynamics got to be too intense, the tires became unpredictable under new rules and ever more radical power curves, the drivers always cried for something to be more precise one day and more gradual the next.

    His formerly genial demeanor became ragged as he pushed his genius to its limits. He became hypersensitive to flaw, once berating a helpless machinist when he witnessed a poorly-treated piece of aluminum crack on a milling machine. His college-sweetheart wife, already sick of the long hours and endless travel to one concrete monstrosity of a race facility after another, couldn’t abide his increasingly unpredictable moods; she filed for divorce and later took up with a wellness guru in Copenhagen.

    Eventually even his towering talent and skill faltered and he faced the truth: he needed help. And he understood that the help he desired could only be arranged a certain way, and he knew that the price would be very high.

-

    The address appeared to him in a dream. The next day he loaded it into his nav computer and aimed his tuned Porsche 911 toward southern Wales.

    It was near sunset when Alistair arrived at the ancient house. He rang the small bell by the door. He suddenly realized that he has no clue what to say.

    The door was opened by an old man, vaguely familiar to Alistair although he couldn’t place him. The man looked at him and said, “Come back tomorrow morning,” and closed the door.

    Alistair spent a restless night at a local inn. The next morning he returned to the old man’s house and rang the bell. The old man opened the door, looked at him again, and said, simply, “Late August. The rest will follow," and again closed the door.

    That meant exactly one thing to Alistair.

-

    They did not meet at the crossroads, but rather in the garden of the Manoir de Lébioles hotel to the west of of Spa-Francorchamps, on the Monday morning after the Belgian Grand Prix. That was a condition of the Prince.

    His steps were soundless. He wore an impeccably fitted navy blue suit with a dark crimson tie. “Alistair,” he said, in a soft voice that sounded of millennia of such conversations in many languages.

    Alistair looked up into the Prince’s eyes. Scarlet glowed behind the irises. A breeze carried the scent of a particularly fine strain of ozone. “I suppose I was expecting something more sulfuric,” Alistair said as the lump in his throat subsided.

    The Prince smiled. “Preconceptions are such awful things. I prefer to be a bit more current. Sulfur is so very steam era.”

    The negotiations were short and to the point, as both expected. In exchange for a life that to any observer would appear isolated and morose, and then the standard payment – an anguished, deprived soul – at that life’s end, Alistair would receive the ability to create magnificent, endlessly successful racing cars.

    The Prince extended his hand. Alistair slowly reached to grip it. He felt the flow of plasma under the Prince’s perfectly dry skin. The frustration of the last season was drawn away, replaced by a serene clarity tinted with a slight darkness.

    Alistair saw the Prince off. As the flawless silver BMW 3.0CS drove away, he turned and walked back to his Porsche. The short run back to the team’s transporters somehow felt both promising and ominous.

-

    The engineers in Milton Keynes didn’t usually grasp the depth of the designs or the interrelatedness of every part, but comprehension was not necessary; they only needed to heed the guidance and fit together everything in the physical world as perfectly as Alistair’s conceptual currents indicated.

    There were still variables outside even his control. Sometimes the powerplants – always just another component in Alistair’s mind – were excellent; occasionally they were peaky or soft; one season they were absolute monsters that tended to explode spectacularly every few races. The drivers, that rotating cast of prima donnas and eccentrics with reflexes bettered only by their egos, were often less than perfect. Race tactics sometimes gave away what should have been wins. But the series of designs that came from Alistair’s hand were beyond improvement; the cars were wonderfully wieldy, dynamically maximized precision instruments that took what would normally be compromises and turned them into collaborative forces.

    Those designs could be approached, almost matched; the squad from Stuttgart in particular, with banks of supercomputers and divisions of well-schooled engineers working in motivated coordination, were worthy rivals for a few solid years. But eventually a minor misfiguring would find its way into the design and they would slide back, and the navy and crimson racers would reassert their singular dominance.

-

    When his cars scored one of their regular victories the yammering media hordes fell over themselves to praise the drivers, who responded with feigned modesty and an eye-rolling tendency to dedicate their triumphs to various people.

    Alistair politely tolerated this, but always knew that those victories were his. When the driver won, it was his win. His car, his work, had won. Any of the top ten drivers on the grid could have taken one of his designs to victory on a random weekend, finding success that would have required far more talent and luck in any other machine.

    His salary was boosted to titanic proportions, although he lived what that media consistently described as a monastic existence. He attended races partially as a job obligation but more simply to admire the result of those days at the tablet with his eyes closed.

    He was a cordial but private presence around town and at the pub. On free weekends he would go for long bicycle rides in the countryside; it helped clear his thoughts.

    His cognitive mind was quite able to modulate and configure the nighttime floods of raw information. His sense of ethics quietly accepted the agreement and its implementation as a personal decision. His idea of self lived with the idea that he was a very capable conduit for something so otherworldly.

    Most of the time, at least.

-

    Alistair awoke with a scream. The pulsating kaleidoscopic flow in his head dropped out. It was a little more than two years after the day with the Prince, two fantastically successful seasons later, early days working on the AF11, two forty-five in the morning.

    He was gripping the sides of his mattress. The sheets were kicked to the floor. His eyes stared out into space. Eventually he composed himself, rolled out of bed, went to the kitchen. He reached to the back of the freezer for a bottle of Tanqueray, unscrewed the cap, knocked back a slug of the ice-cold fluid. He leaned back against the countertop.

    For lack of a better way to communicate at that moment, he started yelling at the ceiling. “ENOUGH! ENOUGH! I AM DONE WITH YOU, YOU MONSTER! I WILL RECLAIM MY INDEPENDENT SOUL! I AM MY OWN MASTER! I RENOUNCE!”

    The next morning he sat and started scribbling, eyes open, Aphex Twin on in the background. He worked for two weeks, barely breaking for food or sleep. He reached back into himself to grasp at his old talents and tie them to the unholy inspirations of the past few years. The gigabit connection to Milton Keynes glowed with information.

    The car was a disaster. The suspension geometry fought against itself at certain loads; it was skittish in low-speed corners and trucklike when the wings and venturis started to work. When the front wheels were turned past a certain angle the radiators would be starved for air. Top-speed runs down straights would occasionally induce a resonance in the frame which encouraged the crank to blow out the bottom of the block. The drivers barely maintained their diplomatic façade in front of the media, and sensitive ears heard them howling about its hopeless drivability in the garages. The race engineers were between baffled and panicked. Communications from sponsors took on a sour tone.

    By Silverstone Alistair was waiting at the edge of a muddy British parking lot as the silver BMW arrived. The Prince walked over with a mild scowl, grumbling about the human ego and the dirt on his shoes and pants; he was used to both in these situations.

    They walked together for a while. “Remember,” the Prince said in his age-softened voice, “no one is doing this for you. You are the creator; what you produce is very much of your own. The nature of the agreement simply allows you access to everything outside of yourself, to all the truths and relationships present in the universe.”

    Alistair nodded and let himself come to terms with this clarification.

    Towards the end of the season the team picked up two wins.

-

    The seasons became predictable: the design was set by the end of winter, the car was intimidatingly fast from the early practice sessions, the permitted updates kept it up front, other teams had to win on inspired racecraft or sheer luck when possible. Sometimes someone drew close, more often the navy blue and scarlet cars were unrivaled. 

-

    A quiet November morning, tea steeping, bread in the toaster. Alistair is scrolling through the news; his thumb stops the screen at a death notice. A Pritzker-winning architect, famed for his audacious designs across Britain, had passed after a long but puzzlingly lonely life with his last few years spent in near-exile from society. A single photo from a conference decades ago accompanies the story.

    The man standing between I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson in the photo is the old man from Wales.

-

    “Yes, I understand that the carbon weave is more difficult to execute this way. Yes, it is ABSOLUTELY necessary. There’s a modulus factor that results in a very particular degree of bending along a certain plane. No, it’s way too much to get into now; just get it down, maybe run the resin a bit thinner to prevent distortion.”

-

    Six years into the agreement, an irritated Alistair arranged for a meeting in Barcelona after the Gran Premio. The two discreetly walked along a side street. The slight smell of ozone prompted one or two café dwellers to instinctively check the clear sky for thunderclouds.

    “I have questions, as you might have guessed. We’re four races in and the Ferraris are completely dominating. I can tell that they’re on some kind of higher level. Are you double-dealing on me?”

    The Prince smirked. “Alistair, my dear, why so accusatory? Surely you understand that I’m not the only force in this game.”

    Alistair’s snap response caught in his teeth. A pause, and his eyes narrowed. “But that means…”

    A wave of a hand, a knowing chuckle. “They are Italian, after all. There’s some history of note there. But be patient; they are as human as you, and your kind just are not that good at handling the divine. Especially in groups that large. Give it a few weeks.”

    The prediction held. Faith started to be taken for granted, hubris and small mistakes began to build, and by Montreal the red cars started to end up in walls or the garage. Alistair’s dark blue machines were then again at the forefront.

-

    One evening in March; outside the sound of a motor cut abruptly, followed by a knock. Alistair put down his Hegel and answered the door. A young man, perhaps a bit older than twenty, Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi, dressed in an Alpinestars motorcycle suit and holding a helmet, stood before him. He was resolute, fearful, wordless.

    Alistair said, “Come back tomorrow," and closed the door.

    The message for him was part of the dream.

    The next morning at ten before eight the young man reappeared. By all indications he had tried to sleep under the bridge a quarter-mile away.

    Alistair said, “End of May. The rest will follow,” and again closed the door.

    Alistair felt for the young man, but he understood.

    The young man mounted his Yamaha sportbike and rode home to Manchester. That night, after a last fight with his girlfriend over the phone, he opened his laptop and a third bottle of Fuller’s 1845 and made arrangements to be on the Isle of Man during the Tourist Trophy races.

-

    He retired at age 68 as the formula was set to change substantially for the next year. He had done enough, more in a sense of completion than of fatigue, and was all too aware that the organic complexity of modern Formula One designs were already testing the capacity of even his phenomenal mind to translate the dark inspirations. The valedictories heralding twenty-some seasons of consistent competitiveness and success grew almost tiresome.

    He continued to follow the sport from a remove. Eventually the navy blue and scarlet missiles that racked up cubic meters of trophies fell from the top of the order. Some said that the magic was gone; no one who said that understood how true it was.

-

    He was content, if absolutely alone, in his idle years. The enormity of his bank balance barely registered on his everyday life, although he did acquire a small second home near Aix-en-Provence and, in a nod to his esteemed rivals, purchased a new Mercedes E-Class every few years; he also picked up a museum-quality example of the limited-production 911 he had revered as an adolescent.

    When not out on his bicycle in the countryside or casually experimenting with trying to cook some of the foods he had tasted around the world, he toyed with the idea of designing a street-legal sports car. He sat for the occasional interview, recalling fond trackside moments and gently explaining that the creative process was a mystery even to him and claiming that he had no favorite design among his work; he took everything as a sum, a sigma, a symphony in many movements. He admitted that the AF9 was perhaps the prettiest.

    An offer to write a book was respectfully declined.

-

    A motorsports writer in Shenzhen doing a technical analysis of the AF18 some years later puzzles over the curious arrangement of some lines, reads a report about the unusual weave of the carbon fiber in a wing. She feels a chill on her neck, but shakes her head and gets up to turn on her Nespresso machine. By the time she sits down with her coffee the pattern is no longer perceptible.

-

    Eventually, years later, it is time. He is alone in his room in the hospital on the edge of Avignon, the windows open, the sun growing orange in the late afternoon. The bed is turned so he can look over the fields.

    He smells a particularly fine strain of ozone and looks up at his guest.

    As always, the Prince is in his exquisite dark blue suit and scarlet tie. His face has not changed since that day in Belgium decades ago. He bows gently, as is his habit when final terms come due. It is time to harvest that lifetime of anguished isolation and regret.

    “You are a curious one,” he says in his same soft voice. “You’ve never betrayed the slightest bit of sadness or sorrow with being so completely alone. So it is; some can keep these things deep inside.” He looks at the sun as it eases down to the horizon. “I tend to prefer those, actually. They’re so much more thoroughly extended and developed, so much more powerful in their repressed pain.” He straightens his tie. “Anyway…”

    He extends his hand. Alistair slowly reaches out his. They grasp each other. Alistair feels the plasma flow again.

    The dignified little smile fades from the Prince’s face. He grips harder.

    There is no darkness to transfer. There is no anguish, no regret, nothing.

    The scarlet behind the irises flickers brighter. “I am expecting my balance under our agreement.”

    “I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “You never understood. All I ever wanted in this life was to create something perfect, something that would win; and I did, over and over.” A gentle, almost apologetic shrug. “Each of those cars, each of those victories, they were what gave me a sense of meaning; I never needed or, really, had room for anyone else. Being alone was a blessing of sorts. Take what I did and it was more than enough; I could never ask for more.

    “This was a beautiful life.”

    The Prince lets the hand slip. His fury is at a simmer, but he is not beneath granting a slow nod of respect. “I told myself long ago that I would be more careful dealing with artists. I didn’t expect one in such a, shall we say, technical discipline.”

    He turns and walks soundlessly from the room. A few minutes later the silver BMW pulls from the parking lot.

    Alistair smiles, at peace. The last breath quietly flows from his lungs. His soul lifts free and dissipates, its energies dispersing among the cosmos, joining the latticework.

    He had won one last time.