Thursday ORT: Hoosier Blowout, F1 Z06, 695 "Ferrari" Driven, 250 Mile Jeans, The Handmaid's Fail

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Good afternoon, friends. I was traveling back from Frankfurt yesterday and didn’t have quite as much Internet access on the plane as I expected — so the Wednesday ORT is now a Thursday ORT.

Free tires can really cost you

I often think of my race team as a teaching hospital. We take young mechanics and give them a chance to learn on the job — but mistakes do get made. Last month, one of them misunderstood the procedure of removing a Hayabusa transmission from the engine case and failed to handle the disassembly correctly. So now I am a $7000 rebuild, and two months’ worth of effort, away from racing my PR6 again.

So I dragged the Neon out for this past weekend’s race at Nelson Ledges. I had four new-ish Hoosier SM7 tires on it. They’re the wrong tire for the Neon, but they were free as part of another deal, so why not?

Well, turns out they’d been stored in such a way as to let the belts deform and crack. The video tells the story: I took the lead at the start of the race but the Neon’s behavior got worse and worse until finally the tire literally blew up, sending me off track.

During the race I also got hit in the door by the CRX of Kevin Bus; I closed the door on him going into 12 at which point he panicked, locked his wheels, and spun out into me.

I had my “rain tire” set of Bridgestones sitting around so I put those on for the end-of-day pursuit race. This was a handicapped event where 19 cars started in reverse order based on their best time during the day. Frustrating for me because I was the only person who wasn’t using the same kind of tires on which they’d set the earlier time! I started 11th and finished 7th, setting a 1:18.624 along the way. Not bad for a 130whp Neon on RE-71s if I do say so myself. I spent the whole race playing hardball of the worst kind with young Madin Workman, a 15-year-old up-and-coming Spec MX-5 prospect. I really like the kid so I took it upon myself to educate him in every way he might get blocked, bullied, or mistreated in pro racing. He didn’t manage to get past me — I finished 0.3 seconds ahead at the line — but he learned a lot and we had a great conversation afterwards. Remember the name. This kid will do great things.

Another kid who will do great things: Mini Danger Girl, whom I did not block or bully and who consequently went from 12th to the podium. You can see her leading me and Workman into Turn 12, courtesy of local shooter and BMX maniac Noah Kleptach:

Noah also took this shot, which to me perfectly captures the exuberance of racing this little car. I’ve owned it for 18 great years, and I’m grateful.

This was also notable as the weekend where Danger Girl finally got her new engine kinda-sorta working. After dealing with random cut-outs and limp mode through Saturday’s race and Sunday qualifying, our crew fixed a grounding issue and turned her loose to run Sunday evening, where she set fast lap of the race and finished 2nd overall behind the T3 BMW 330i of Bill Pintaric. The margin of victory was 0.4 seconds. Her divisional championship is now assured.

After spinning off in Saturday’s race and fading to the back, Mini Danger Girl qualified second in SRF2 on Sunday, and in fact was in the middle of the overall SRF pack ahead of a few SRF3s, but she looped off Turn 13 while trying to make a pass on a slower competitor. These things happen with exuberant young drivers. The important thing is that her pace is now equal to that of the 20-year veterans in SRF2. I’m excited to announce that she is taking a test in a Formula Enterprises 2 car next month, in preparation for a possible move to FE2 next year and/or a trial seat in F4 afterwards. I think she has a real shot at being competitive against the 16-year-old karting prodigies in F4. There’s just one little problem, which I will illustrate with a picture of her podium announcement showing she is, ahem, head and shoulders over the other drivers:

Hey, Max is taller than Lando and you’d still bet on him every time, right?

It *do* sound like an F1 car… until an F1 car pull up

Doesn’t this make you want to run right out and buy a Z06? It kind of has that effect on me, and I’ve never given a moment’s thought to being a C8 owner before. The good news is that you can now get as much as $15,000 off MSRP on new Z06es. The special-edition C8 gold rush is well and truly over. If you want an even better deal, I’m hearing about $25,000 off for E-Rays. However, anyone who buys an E-Ray over a Z06 should see a psychotherapist, not least because it will never sound like the test-piped car in this video.

Mini Road Test: Fiat Abarth 695 “Ferrari Edition”

Thirteen years ago I evaluated the USA Fiat 500 Abarth, which wasn’t anything like the Euro Abarth. Instead, it was a North-American-spec 500 with a full SRT makeover. Meanwhile, our overseas cousins had already gotten the 178-horse Abarth 695 “Tributo Ferrari”, show here with two fellows who received them as company cars and appear to be less than thrilled:

On Tuesday, while attending the CDE Classic event held in Dietzhölztal, Germany, Mini Danger Girl and I borrowed a 695 Ferrari to run it up and down a local mountain road. I was curious to get an impression of how it differed from our USA-market 500 Abarth.

Our test car had the automated “MTA” single-clutch manual 5-speed, which is not a good transmission. It works best when you treat it like a standard manual, which is to say you shift it via the paddles and lift throttle for every upshift. In automatic mode it is absolutely bewildered by even the simplest on-road situations, like “go sharply uphill around a corner.” It’s clearly quicker than our USA-market car, probably because it is a few hundred pounds lighter. It’s also perfectly sized for rural German towns in much the same way that it is anything but perfectly sized for an American superhighway.

Braking is brilliant, and handling is utterly predictable. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you will have ND Miata pace in the Hocking Hills; it doesn’t turn that well and the power advantage is slightly blunted by the amount of time the car dithers during its mechanically-actuated shifts. What the 695 Ferrari is, however is: utterly predictable, with great sightlines and a general sense of being comfortable on small roads.

MDG wasn’t as charmed as I was. She thought it was slow and tippy. Well, if you drive a stick-shift Nissan Z Performance to school, the 695 is slow and tippy, by contrast at least.

Here’s what I really loved about the 15-year-old Fiat: Another autowriter in our group had the new Cadillac Optiq, complete with about 440 horsepower and instant torque. He thought he was going to intimidate us on the test route, and in fact he did intimidate us going up the first few long hills. I couldn’t get that ugly new Caddy badge out of the rearview mirror…

…but three hairpins later, he wasn’t even visible. Suffering through this modern era of silent skateboard-platform exercises in zero tangible character, the buzzy, poppy, kinda-awfully-assembled 695 Fiat is even more of a joy. Even the goofy Ferrari badging is nice. The general vibe can be summed up in one picture:

If you’re driving the 695, you’re the fellow in the middle.

Save the environment, help a countryman

I think most of you know that I’m a bit of a left-wing loony at heart. I think a lot about the environment and about fair labor environments. I have zero interest in the Thomas Friedman school of global exploitation and I don’t have any patience with the idea that shareholder value is the only value that matters.

On the other hand, I also like having Fancy Man stuff.

Imagine my joy when I heard about Raleigh Denim going through the trouble to make a $495 pair of denim jeans with a sub-250-mile supply radius, grown from two specific crops of certified organic cotton:

Working with Eric Henry of TS Designs and Cotton of the Carolinas, we connected with two North Carolina farmers willing to grow organic cotton specifically for our denim. The first crop came out top quality, and we moved it through the local supply chain: from farm to gin, spinning mill, denim mill, and finally to our factory in Raleigh.

The result: jeans made from the first Certified Organic Cotton ever grown in North Carolina—with the smallest carbon footprint of any jean we know on earth.

Made from stem to stern with American labor. People earning a living wage making a durable, respectable product. Not a single ounce of Bunker-C burned. No suicide nets in evidence. No currency arbitrage or worker exploitation.

Yeah, $495 is an insane price for pants. However, I suspect you could wear them every day for years on end.

I’m not going to buy a pair because I spent the summer stocking up on American Giant Roughnecks in all seven available colors — that’s a separate kind of manic stupidity we can discuss later. However, if any ACF reader buys these, let me know. I’ll mail you a couple of stickers and keychains in appreciations. We should have more clothing like this, doing good for Americans rather than harm to the environment.

Committed To The Bit

I know this is a no-politics week, so take this as a commentary on media and how far people will go to support their chosen narrative. Jennifer Bendery, who writes for the HuffPo and specializes in what I think of as “MSNBC wine aunt outrage”, alerted her readers to the following situation happening in Washington DC:

A few things:

• The Guardsman waving! Looks like someone can spot a photo op in progress.

• I assume the “DC resident” was quite well known to Bendery, because it’s Bendery in the picture.

• Who else is tired of “Jedi Brain” and the inability of adults in our society to understand anything except as a variant of fiction aimed at children and/or young adults?

Also, The Handmaid’s Tale is a fetish book masquerading as feminist literature. If you think it’s a serious effort, you probably also think Twilight was an attempt to educate people about the danger of vampires.

This moronic phenomenon is in no way limited to the Left. Earlier today I saw a sticker very similar to this in my township, next to a bunch of “1776” and “3 Percenter” stuff:

This is not political discourse. It’s not worthy of us or of this country. And it gets us nowhere fast.

This week’s housekeeping

Book clubbers: please finish Blindsight ASAP, we will cover it on Monday. Tomorrow I’ll run the followup to “The Watery Big Bang” plus review the McLaren GTS. Thank you, all of you, but especially: