Christmas OT: 296 Crash, Five Other Time Travel Opportunities, My Automaker Wish List

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Merry Christmas, friends. Today’s thread is a lightweight one, just in case you’re bored between meals!

Got a time machine? Try these life hacks

Last night MDG and I were going through an absolutely joyless bit of exercise called a “pushup ladder”. You and someone else take turns doing first X number of pushups, then X-1, then X-2, and so on down to one. Then back up to X. When the Commander and I do this, we go 13 to 1 and back, for a total of 181 pushups. MDG and I were both already tired from working in the barn so we went 10 to 1 then back. To pass the time, I put on a Karen Carpenter video and explained to MDG what happened to her. “If I had a time machine,” I noted, “I would go back in time and hook up with her before she met her husband… and I would make her eat three meals a day… and that way we’d have gotten more Carpenters albums.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If you have a time machine available to you, it’s mandatory that you go back and kill Hitler. That’s a great idea, especially if you can do it right in the middle of 1941 so the General Staff seizes control, negotiates peace with the UK, calms Tojo down so Pearl Harbor doesn’t happen, and that way two million young European, American, and Japanese men don’t die, which means they go on to have families and descendants, and all of Europe doesn’t look like Sudan in 2025. Also, the Me262 gets developed as an air superiority fighter instead of a bomber, and the Arado Ar 234 is sold as a general-aviation item to thousands of happy Americans.

Wait — you say the time to kill Hitler was 1933? I don’t know… that gets you a fully Communist Europe until the end of time, probably. On the other hand, “Boney M” never would have released any records, so it’s a wash.

Anyway, for pure frivolity’s sake, I’ve come up with four more great ways to use a time machine that aren’t globally crucial. Or maybe they are. Anyway, the rules are: it has to be something that a recently arrived time traveler without special powers or exceptional luck can accomplish. The most you can do is show off your smartphone to convince people that you are, in fact, from the future.

2. Poison the well for DOS. If you could get to the DOS guy before Bill Gates does, you could negotiate directly on his behalf with IBM in such a way that IBM retains rights to the operating system. Doing that would have cut Microsoft off at the knees. IBM would have retained significantly more control of the market. Windows 95 never would have happened. Today, IBM might be a functioning company making the majority of personal computers in the United States of America, which would have had a thousand knock-off effects across the country. We could be as much as ten years behind on technological progress, which, let’s face it, would be fantastic.

3. Get GM to spend an extra six months on the X-car. Get into the RenCen, show off some future technology, and explain that the X-car is the key to preserving American market share in the future. It needs to be right. That means no brake failures and no abysmal QA to begin with. That way, the Citation has multiple million-unit years instead of one, and the foreign momentum is slowed down a bit, and maybe there’s more money to develop a better successor than the A-car, which wasn’t much different and which, over time, gave away the rest of the market.

4. Prevent the JFK assassination. This one would take some doing because, let’s face it, Oswald didn’t act alone. But it could be done. You’d delay or stop the “Great Society” that has done so much to eviscerate urban and rural American families, you’d change the nature of our involvement in Vietnam, and you might even hasten the fall of the Soviet Union!

5. Steal Kurt Cobain’s shotgun. Which would have prevented this:

He 360 no-scoped himself, apparently

Trigger warning: on-camera deaths

he did take it to the track, just not very well

I didn’t know who Vince Zampella was, and maybe you didn’t either, but in a nutshell: he was a massively less cool John Carmack. Like Carmack, he was a video game developer with a passion for Ferraris and other fast cars, but he didn’t have Carmack’s coding chops or charisma. He also appeared to be the target of some substantial grifting-adjacent behavior from “Ms Emelia” Hartford, who went from waitress to “actress” after forming some kind of “partnership” with Zampella.

Immediately after Zampella’s death, Hartford ran to social media to emphasize at maximum volume to everyone that Vince was “her best friend”, just in case any handsome alpha-style investor bros had been concerned that Zampella was sleeping with her in exchange for funding what is rumored to be a Matt Farah style car storage facility.

Zampella’s crash was eminently, hugely avoidable.

A zillion people have made “take it to the track” comments, but there is all sorts of evidence that Zampella did take it to the track. He ran a Cayman GT4 Clubsport with Emelia Hartford, in addition to several other high-dollar cars, at Pikes Peak and on multiple racetracks.

What I’d like to suggest is that perhaps the training Zampella received, from Hartford and maybe others, was instrumental in his death. It’s very common now for rich people to get racing instruction, and even race time, in stuff like the McLaren Artura GT4 that Zampella was racing in a one-make McLaren customer series.

(Zampella’s co-driver in this was social-media gadfly and wannabe racer Kezia Dawn, by the way. I hate to say it, but this dude has simp burned into his DNA.)

If you’ve driven a McLaren GT4, as I have and my wife has and my daughter has, it’s very easy to feel confident about your ability to drive quickly. Mini Danger Girl ran one last year at Speed Vegas. At the time she hadn’t run anything on track besides her mother’s NC3 MX-5 Club — and she was pretty close to the all-time record at SV. The combination of turned-down horsepower and superb grip makes the car feel uncrashable. Even Sheena Monk was able to take an IMSA win behind the wheel of a McLaren GT4.

When you go from a 420-horsepower car on Pirelli slicks, in controlled conditions, to a 296 GTS on the street… that is a massive difference. You’re looking at 819 horsepower on tires with substantially less grip, on roads that can be dusty or dirty, and — in this case — with a well-documented visibility issue coming out of a dark tunnel. Zampella has far too much pace for the turn here. And he’s going that fast because he is irrationally confident about his ability to turn the car at speed.

I think Zampella would still be alive today had he been a little more properly afraid of his Ferrari — and I think that receiving bad coaching, in a context that failed to properly prepare him for other situations, was probably a big part of the problem.

The lesson to all of us: If you’re racing a Civic or Miata in LeMons or something that, you should be proud of the fact that you’re driving competitively on-track. Just don’t expect it to translate to something like a 296 Ferrari. This also applies the other way around, oddly enough: don’t think that your experience in a Jaguar F1 car makes you ideally suited to drive a Jaguar road car around a track.

If you want to drive fast on the road, for whatever reason, you should drive your road car on track, using the same tires, in similar conditions. Which is not to say you should be “mobbin’ the canyons” in the first place. But that’s a discussion for another time.

A quick wish list

Back when I was in autoblogging I would occasionally write a “OEM Christmas Wish List”. I’m doing a short version here. Let’s hear your wishes.

0. Let’s get a four-door Z with a Skyline badge on it. This one is probably already in progress, but: Using the 420-horse NISMO tune of the current Z engine, let’s have a four-door, stick-shift, aggressive-looking successor to the Q60. Sell it at the Nissan dealer, and call it “Skyline” now that the R35 is no longer for sale in the USA.

1. ES350 Ultra Luxury Coupe. Keep this around as an alternative to the new hybrid ES. Doesn’t need to be anything but… a two-door ES350 UL with all the options, for $54,995.

2. USA-legal Hilux Champ at $14,990. This is an obvious product, and Trump might force the DOT’s hand if… they made it in Georgetown, KY.

3. Mustang Lincoln. Another obvious product. 5.0 Coyote, six-speed manual, proper upscale interior and exterior.

   

4. Return of the two-door full-sized SUVs. Why not? This is a product that can and will sell in quantities greater than any non-Tesla EV in history.

   

5. Bare-bones versions of the Civic and Corolla, please. It would be possible to do cheaper versions of these cars with low-output NA fours and manual transmissions. They might not sell 100,000 units each, but — again — they will outsell EVs, at much less cost.

That’s all I have for right now — let’s hear your ideas!