All posts by Steve Stern

Michele’s new Bauhaus car

Around home, Cars

Audi-76Bauhaus was a German design school started by Walter Gropius in 1919 and closed in 1934 with the rise of Hitler (if the name Walter Gropius is familiar, it might be because he escaped from Germany and came to the United States, where he ended up influencing mid-century American Design and Architecture). Bauhaus was started to bring modernist design to mass-produced artifacts and, while it did have some influence, it ended up being most famous as the design school that the Nazis hated. Because its lifespan roughly coincided with the short period of pre-war German democracy and freedom, Bauhaus also has become – vaguely – emblematic of the interwar German avant-garde.

During World War II, Audi, like almost all German companies, relied on slave labor under brutal conditions. Audi, alone, used about 20,000 slaves and the conditions were so brutal that about 4,500 workers died. As Audi admitted this – years after the fact, naturally enough – it does not want to be defined by it, so, about the time that Volkswagen was coming up with the new Beetle,  Audi’s California Design Studio came up with a design exercise they said was influenced by the Bauhaus school/movement. Audi said that the TT embraced Bauhaus values like Honesty, Simplicity, and Purity, which – while I am not sure those were exclusively or, in many cases, actually Bauhaus values – resulted in a car with a very distinctive, very stylized, design.   

I think Audi was trying to do two things by the Bauhaus reference: exorcise Audi’s connection to the Nazi regime and establish a new design direction. I don’t know about exorcising their Nazi past, but the TT did change Audis corporate design. Michele said that she has lusted after a TT since they first came out and she finally got one.

Her  TT is in the form of a three-year old Audi TT convertible. While it is only a garden variety TT – not a S or RS – it is still very distinctive looking and surprisingly fast. When we were in Napa for a sort of proto-Thanksgiving for Michele’s stepfather, last weekend – to get me out of the house – Michele suggested that I take the TT out for drive. Actually, Michele had suggested I photograph some vineyards, but I opted to find a back road on which to go out and play.

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I’ve owned 32 cars over the years, alot of them were fast – fast for their time, at least – but I can only think of one time I’d driven a car that was faster than this (my beloved Renault R5T2 which, with its snub nose and rump,  is similar to the TT). Sure, there are lots of faster cars out there, much faster in many cases, but this car is much, much, faster than I am. Especially on a back road. It has an automatic transmission with paddle-shifters that I couldn’t get the hang of, so I just stuffed the shifter into the Sport setting and drove. The transmission always knew what gear I should be in, not even once, stepping on the gas when coming out of a corner, did it feel like the wrong gear. On a rough road like I was on, the TT just hunkered down and scooted. It was great fun.

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Audi-76-4 It had been a perfect day to play on back roads with a shiny new convertible. Now, as the day wore down, with the temperature dropping and the light changing – getting soft and warm – I turned on the radio to Jazz 91.1. In the fading light, listening to Jeremy Udden on alto saxophone, I cruised back to the proto-Thanksgiving dinner. Sometimes, Life is sweet.

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They are moving in and taking over

Uncategorized

Backyard-76For at least the last ten years, we have had a doe that visits our backyard. Michele would go out and talk to her in a soothing voice and she has become more brazen, even walking up on the deck to eat the potted  plants that I have brought on to the deck to protect. Then she started bringing her fawns with her. Last spring she even left her two fawns in our ivy. Somehow, it seemed like we had become her babysitters.Backyard-76-2Both Michele – I think – and I have mixed feeling about all this. Yes, it is fun having the deer around, but they also do an amazing amount of damage. They eat everything, including stuff that is – allegedly – deer proof.. This morning, when I went out to the garden, there was a large buck just camped there. I snuck back and grabbed my camera but by then he was nervous, jumped up, and left. I didn’t get much in the way of photos, so you will just have to take my word for the fact that he was a magnificent animal.

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A couple of thoughts on Voting this year

Americana, Politics

Voting-76

Don’t be cynical, A cynic is just a man who found out when he was about ten years old that there wasn’t any Santa Claus, and he’s still upset. Judge Philander Coates

I love voting but I don’t always love the results. This year was different, however, in that I didn’t particularly enjoy the voting part either. Partially because I felt certain that I would not like the results. By Tuesday morning, I had quit thinking the polls were wrong, still, I didn’t expect that much of a blow out. But even more disconcerting is that I didn’t care about the results as much as I wanted to and felt I should. My disappointment in Obama has bled into a generalized disappointment and that has dampened my enthusiasm.

I want to be clear that I think Obama is a good, journeyman, President and I want to acknowledge that he has had an uphill fight in getting needed legislation passed . He has done alot of – what I consider – good. Much of it under the radar, like appointing a large number of – mildly – Liberal Appellate Judges which, importantly, is the pool from which the next couple of Supreme Court Justices will come. He has reduced the National Debt (a fact that is often hidden by the Republican’s hysterical screams). He has reduced taxes, although in sort of a backhanded and bumbling way, even if nobody seems to know it.

Still, I am disappointed. Some of that disappointment with Obama are what are usually touted as his major accomplishments ObamaCare and the Economic Recovery. I am not a fan of ObamaCare  – which I think is, primarily, a boon to insurance companies, subsidized by Federal Money  – still, he got a Universal Health Insurance bill through and nobody else has been able to do that. Yes, we have had  a steady, all be it slow, Recovery under Obama but the poor are not part of it and most of the money has gone to a cabal of the already rich.

My biggest complaints, in the end, my real complaints  with Obama are really complaints about his failure to change our National Direction, his failure to be the transformational president of his campaign. We are on a path that I believe is destructive to our country: at home, we, increasingly, have policies that result in less Economic Fairness, less Democracy, less Transparency, and more Oligarchy  and everywhere else, we are locked into what the historian Charles A. Beard calls perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Of course, Obama wasn’t running in 2014, even if the Republicans tried to make the election about him. I am not sure, actually, who was running because most of the Democrats weren’t running as Democrats. I think the refusal to run for the Democrat’s accomplishments but only against the Armageddon that the republican would surely bring on, was a big mistake. In Connecticut, Governor Dannel Malloy ran on the fact that he got some gun controls through, as did John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s governor. They both won but everybody else lost. Including, I think, me.

 

Tom Magliozzi , RIP

Americana

Good guys-76Tom Magliozzi died Monday morning from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. Tom, along with his brother Ray, were Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers on NPR’s Car Talk, one of my very favorite programs on my favorite radio network. I loved Car Talk and I don’t think that had as much to do with the fact that it was about cars as it was about humor. Both humor as in comedy and humor as in good humor, in which they abounded. They always seemed to be having fun.

I’ll miss him, I’ll miss Car Talk.

 

Turns out he wasn’t kidding,” said Ray. “He really couldn’t remember last week’s puzzler.” 1

 

Baseball, Family, F1, and Lewis Hamilton

Cars, Sports, Television, Uncategorized

Lewis Hamilton

Watching the Giants beating the Kansas City Royals Sunday evening – listening to the Giants beating the Kansas City Royals on TV while doing stuff in the other room would be more accurate – I was struck by the differences in the sports coverage in F1 and Baseball, especially in coverage of the driver’s/player’s family and girlfriends. I know that alot of players wives and girlfriends – here in after referred to as WAGS – travel with the team in baseball, because I have sat near them at games. But the WAGs are almost never shown on television and I don’t think that I have ever seen coverage of, say, a first baseman’s parents during a game.

In F1, the WAGs and parents – and in Hamilton’s case, even his brother – are often shown (one father, driver Jenson Button’s, always wore a trademark pink shirt that was frequently remarked upon; after his father passed away, Jenson even changed his helmet color to pink in honor of his father). One of the reasons is the size, in Formula 1, there are only twenty-two drivers – eleven teams of two drivers each – so the drivers, especially the drivers on the most competitive teams, are covered in more detail than baseball. It is not unusual to see a driver hugging his WAG or family after a race, often when they still have their helmet on. I am not saying that one is better than the other, but the difference is striking.

This may be just be an excuse to post something on Lewis Hamilton who has won four races straight as of last weekend, but I will try to make it as un-Formula One-ish as possible.  In Singapore, Hamilton’s car worked flawlessly while his teammate, Nico Rosberg, had a problem with his steering wheel wiring harness that knocked him out of the race.1 Since then, he has won two more races and is now leading in the Championship by 17 points. With three races still to go out of a total of nineteen, this has been an extraordinary season with more racing than any season I can remember. The primary  characteristic of the season has been the unreliability of  the fastest cars which has often forced drivers into high-risk racing. Both Daniel Ricciardo and Lewis Hamilton  have come from being impossibly far behind to win races. Hamilton, in particular, has driven more than several unforgettable races. After wandering through the wilderness, he is at the top of his career. As the season has gone on, I have become increasingly invested in Hamilton winning and, I think, it is for several reasons that are only slightly related.

Auto racing is expensive on almost every level and that is a major selection factor towards drivers with rich parents. Hamilton is an exception. He came from a family that was far from wealthy and, as racing became a bigger part of his life, it put big strains on the Hamilton family. Hamilton’s parents divorced and his mother didn’t or wouldn’t go to his races. When Hamilton first started racing, his dad was his racing engineer and manager.

lewis2_1017899iOf course, as Hamilton started racing at higher levels he used professional racing engineers, but even when Hamilton started driving in Formula One at McLaren, his dad stayed on as his manager, Lewis Hamilton 2008 A couple of years ago, maybe four, Hamilton fired his dad and hired an outside agency. It tore the family apart and his dad eventually sued for back pay.

Shortly thereafter, Hamilton left McLaren, the racing team that had given him his first Formula One job and a Championship. He moved to Mercedes Benz. Now Hamilton is leading the Driver’s World Championship and I think a good part of that is because he has become his own person. As painful as it was, Hamilton had to leave home to grow up.As an adult, he has reconciled with his family, not only his dad but also his mom. Hamilton put it best and I’ll end with a quote from him:

I just feel relaxed, all my family are a real positive beam of light for me at the weekend. 

I spoke years ago, when my Dad was my manager, and said I couldn’t wait for the day when he was here just as my Dad. And that’s what you’re seeing. And that’s one of the greatest feelings, having him here. Since the first day I ever got in a kart – I remember the day of my first race – I created a handshake with him. I was eight years old and he was there. That’s one of the most special things. He said today it felt like I was eight years old again attending kart race, when he was watching me.

I don’t know what Dad thought when we started. I was good but I don’t know if he thought that in 20 years time we’d be winning the Singapore GP. I try to imagine his mentality, getting four jobs to get the money to get a crap kart together, to respray it or try to bend it back to shape because it was the oldest kart in world, trying to get some fuel because we had spent all the money on tyres. Going through all that to now be at the pinnacle of the sport, I’m hugely proud of my family, so it’s really cool for dad to be here. I’ve gotta stop there – I’m getting emotional!

 

1. As an aside, Formula One car steering wheels are complex and everything is controlled from by them,  as the accompanying picture shows. When the wheel has a problem, it is a major problem.

F1 Steering wheel

1 BOOST: F1 cars have an electric-hybrid system known as KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) that regenerates braking energy, then boosts acceleration—at the push of a button—via an 80-hp electric motor. Another feature that increases speed is the movable rear wing that flattens to reduce drag. The wing is controlled by a foot pedal. 2 LAP TIME  3 HARVEST : Regulates the amount of energy “harvested” during braking. The regen system can alter the feel of the brakes, and because these guys drive with exacting precision, they’re picky about tactile feedback. This knob lets them customize.  4 DOWNSHIFT PADDLE   5 MIX: Adjusts the engine’s air—fuel mixture to balance power and fuel economy. F1 cars don’t refuel during a race, but economy is still vital—fuel adds weight.  6 BITE POINT: The race start is critical because the cars begin from a stop and the initial sprint is a prime overtaking opportunity. The bite point adjusts how the clutch engages as the drivers release the paddle, so they can execute a perfect launch. 7 BPF During practice starts, the driver uses the “bite point find” to record the clutch behavior. Engineers use the data to instruct the driver where to set the bite point dial. 8 CLUTCH PADDLE. 9 BBAL Displays the front—rear brake balance, a critical adjustment that drivers make to fine-tune the braking performance. Most passes are done in the braking zones. 10 REVERSE GEAR. 11 SHIFT LIGHTS. 12 LIMITER Restricts the car’s speed to the pit-lane limit, 62 mph. 13 ENGINE PARAMETERS. 14 UPSHIFT PADDLE. 15 TORQUE The 2.4-liter V8 revs to 18,000 rpm and delivers north of 700 hp. That’s a handful in a 1400-pound car, so the drivers use this knob to adjust the engine’s torque curve, depending on track conditions. 16 TYRE Teams use roughly half a dozen different tires that vary in construction and diameter. This dial tells the computer which tires are fitted so it can calculate wheel speed. 17 CLUTCH PADDLE. 8 DIFFERENTIAL Thanks to electronic controls, the characteristics of the rear differential can be tailored for corner entry, midpoint and exit—each with 12 settings. Frankly, we’re amazed that the drivers can detect such minute rear-end differences during cornering events that last for maybe a few seconds. But that’s why they’re paid millions.