Thursday ORT: Princess George, The Supremes, A/C-DC, Corvettes at 200

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Good morning, friends. Sorry this is late, I’m traveling yet again, and this time without a functional laptop. Since we have a political topic today, please accept a gentle reminder that we should discuss the issue, not each other. No pictures in today’s piece, because I don’t have an easy way to cut and paste them in.

In which the author single-handedly stops Ferrari from winning again

Ferrari were thought to be favorites at the start of the Austrian GP weekend. The FIA had reacted to Sir Lewis’s win in Barcelona by giving Ferrari a free engine upgrade, which is the sort of thing only the FIA would do. It seemed likely that Charles Leclerc would continue to implode while Hamilton steamed away to a completely uncontested victory in the manner of his Mercedes years where any rando with a heartbeat could have lapped the field in Toto Wolff’s overdog-mobiles.

Faced with this dismal prospect, I did the only sensible thing: I bet fifty bucks on Sir Lewis to win the race. Not fifty real dollars, mind you — I had a one-off coupon from FanDuel, and limited time in which to bet with it. That would have netted me $325 had it come to pass, and it is true that in my current situation I’d be glad of the money, but I was even more delighted to watch the $325 flutter away into the air as yet another oddly competent Ferrari strategy failed to catapult Sir to the head of the field. Princess George won it instead. Not since Jacques Villeneuve has a “lead driver” in a brilliant car struggled so mightily to succeed, but in truth there is little to criticize about Russell’s weekend. He did exactly what was required. And now we have a title contest, or at least the suggestion of one. More notes:

• It appears that after three years of diligent searching, Red Bull has finally managed to find a teammate whom Liam Lawson can beat. This Lindblad fellow is deeply unimpressive, he has all of the faults displayed by Hadjar but none of the brilliance. One wonders if Yuki, God rest his soul, could have finished fourth in this car. (Or, more likely, last.)

• Kimi Antonelli made the mistake in qualifying of slowing down for Verstappen’s local yellow at the end of Q3, which might have cost him pole, but it was an unlucky pit call that probably cost him the race. Had he waited just one lap to pit, he could have done it under the VSC from Sainz’s dead Williams (this is starting to be a pattern, isn’t it?) and potentially taken the lead. Since he was faster than Russell throughout much of the race, he surely wouldn’t have lost said top slot. As long as we are discussing Kimi… talk about aggression in the beginning of the race. Antonelli has the luxury of a considerable point gap, which means he can afford to lose a race while trying to beat his teammate. Princess George will have no such privilege. It’s like Jon Voight says in Heat: “This guy can hit and miss. You can’t miss once.”

• And speaking of Max: Is there another F1 driver — has there been another F1 driver, at least since the turn of the century — who so consistently drives the car at the limit? This was not a second-place car, much less a winning one. Yet Max almost pulled it off. His crash in Q3 was evidence of how close to edge he was willing to go. You can never count him out. If Red Bull were to get a few more useful improvements in, we could see him hunting down Antonelli the way he hunted down Lando last year.

• It is awful to see Charles Leclerc struggling like this. History will remember him as a poor steward of his talent. I don’t think he genuinely understands why he is so quick, in the moments when he is quick. Hot take du jour: Carlos Sainz would be ahead of Sir Lewis in the points right now, were it the two of them in red.

• I’m going to have to watch Silverstone with the sound turned down… or I’m going to have to bet a hundred bucks on Lewis, just so I have some common cause with the announcers.

Life begins at 200

In 1985, the C4 Corvette traded its “Cease-Fire Injection” system for the slightly less shambolic TPI and bumped the horsepower from 205 to 230. As a consequence of this and the C4’s admirably slippery shape, it became the first Corvette in a very long time to hit 150mph on the trot. The Corvette engineering team famously celebrated this with custom shirts reading “Life begins at 150”. And since the TPI engine was standard across the board, any Corvette buyer of that year could claim that achievement. I was actually a bit more impressed at the time when the IROC-Z got the TPI and was knocking on the door of 150 as a four-seat car with a lot more mass and exposed quad lamps, but that’s a discussion for another time.

For 2027, the Corvette Stingray gets the 6.7-liter “LS6”, which makes 535 horsepower and consequently bumps the top speed for the narrow-body car from 194mph to 200mph. It’s also expected to turn a high 10-second quarter-mile time. This is truly remarkable. I like to gripe about the insane multi-tier, New-Balance-centric Corvette product and marketing strategy, but the fact remains that the base Stingray is a tremendous value and a genuinely rewarding car to drive fast. Even more so, now. And who would have thought, in those dark days of 1985, that we would one day be able to say that the largest-displacement standard Corvette engine in history arrived in 2027?

Thank you, Corvette team. Now please supply the car with a manual 7-speed and something different in the way of back-half styling.

Side note: Congratulations to JR Hildebrand for setting a Pikes Peak record in the ZR1X. However, he was only 14 seconds faster than Jeff Zwart in a GT2RS “Clubsport”, on a 9-minute track. That’s the equivalent of being about two and a half seconds ahead of someone at Mid-Ohio. I just have to believe that there is more gap to be had between the two cars. The ZR1X has 1,250 horsepower. A lot of Pikes Peak is just accelerating in a straight line. If you give me a ZR1X at, say, Laguna Seca, I gotta think I’m 4-5 seconds ahead of Jeff Zwart without breaking a sweat.

On the other hand, Zwart toasted Emelia Hartford by more than half a minute, and she had 1,061 horsepower, so maybe Corvettes are just awful at Pikes Peak.

Heat waves been faking me out

This week Europe has been in the grip of some unprecedented weather, and thousands of people have died from sustained heat. Even worse, some hospitals have been operating at reduced capacity, or canceling procedures, because their operating rooms are not air-conditioned. To an American, this seems willfully atavistic. Alright, so you’re not going to install AC in your home. But in your hospital?

I happen to be in Europe at the moment so I’ve asked several locals about this. The more perceptive of the answers I’ve gotten seem to all be along the lines of “Europeans disdain air conditioning because it is considered unattractive or unpleasant to make such an obvious concession to comfort.” I’ve long believed that the death of Christianity in Europe as an operating principle simply rerouted the Puritan and/or Calvinist impulses into secular religion substitutes, like “the climate” or “wir schaffen das”.

One fellow on Substack — and I apologize for having lost the link, I’ll toss it in when I find it again — went on a little rant about how Parisians justifiably hate A/C due to the aesthetic unpleasantness of condensers and compressors on the rooftops of the various arrondissements. And yet they are perfectly fine with turning much of Paris into an open-air Algerian toilet trench. Surely endless homeless encampments are a greater aesthetic crime than a few metal boxes. This, by the way, is how you know you are dealing with religion-adjacent beliefs. The same people who gleefully torpedoed the lives of young people around the globe to “stop the spread” of COVID-19 won’t raise a finger to keep thousands from dying in the heat. It makes the UK, and much of Europe, look like failed states. Maybe it’s better to say that they are simply in the grip of an ideology beyond the mere facts of life and death. We regret that the elderly of the United Kingdom have but one life each to give for the climate, and so on.

The most consequential decision was the least discussed

Three Supreme Court decisions this week. The most-discussed one was birthright citizenship. Ketanji Brown Jackson tossed a sassy little “understood the assignment” into her opinion, which has been ceaselessly and embarrassingly described in the right-wing media as “TikTok speech”. Clarence Thomas has been increasingly magisterial and quotable in his opinions during the last few years, and his dissent was no exception: ““I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time. The Citizenship Clause ‘added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship,'… Today’s opinion devalues that citizenship. I respectfully dissent.”

As I noted in a discussion with a reader yesterday, it is often said that the Founding Fathers couldn’t have predicted the AK-47 and therefore we need to revamp the understanding of the Second Amendment. But it seems obvious that they would have envisioned the relatively simple concept of a self-loading rifle well before the idea of a jet plane taking Chinese women to remote American territories to pick up dual citizenship for their children. Meanwhile, our judges and lawmakers continue to behave as if the United States of 2026 is the United States of 1850, where there was near-infinite land, zero social support, and a genuine need for new boots on the ground from sea to shining sea. It’s like watching a sixty-year-old actress pantomime youthful seduction. I’ve read that illegal immigrants or temporary immigrants account for one-seventh of live births in this country. Which seems significant, if it is true. Oh well. The votes, like the spice, must flow.

Next decision: that “trans women” are no longer entitled to claim federal protection for participating in women’s sports. This was long overdue and reflects the small-d democratic consensus. It is also a Godsend for capital-D Democrats, who are by and large tired of having to toe a massively unpopular party line on the subject. They can now throw up their hands and say “Well, the court has decided, so in the words of Flavor Flav — I can’t do nothin’ for ya, man.”

Critics of the ruling like to point out that there are relatively few biological men participating in women’s sports at the moment. This is scarce consolation for the women against whom they compete. I hate to drag out the old trope of the US National Women’s Soccer Team taking a practice loss to a team of 15-and-under boys, but those are the facts. I am a decrepit 54-year-old man with bad joints and no work ethic but it is a rare woman who can lift more weight than I can, and an even rarer one who can punch as hard.

I attended a Free Press dinner a couple of weeks ago and ended up chatting with a trio of liberal Jewish women. All three of them admitted to having been “radicalized” into centrist thought by the trans-rights movement, especially as it related to doing surgery on children. Having accidentally stumbled into normie American beliefs through the gateway drug of “don’t cut the breasts off 14-year-olds”, they are now investigating dangerous ideas like “what if we didn’t have 10 million Dothraki screamers crossing the border every year to kill, rape, and scam with impunity.” At this rate they will be hardcore tradwives within the decade.

Last, and most important, ruling: the President can fire heads of government agencies without cause, simply for political reasons or because he doesn’t like the cut of their jib. This, too, should be blinding obvious but of course the Wise Latina herself, Sotomayor, dissented. The media conventional wisdom on this decision is that it will unlock a topsy-turvy spoils system of preferments where Presidents load federal agencies with their lapdogs. I agree — and I am emphatically for this.

When Americans vote for President, they are expressing a “vibe” as much as an interest in the particular man or woman embodying said vibe. They either want change, or they want stability. But time and again this mandate for change has been resisted by an impenetrable federal bureaucracy that answers to no President and can often defy elected leaders at will. No sane person wants this. Sure, you might go on about “adults in the room” but the last adults-in-the-room administration we had was the Biden one and many of the decisions made were far from thoughtful.

There is also the fact that the federal apparatus leans hard blue because — let’s face it — the Democrats hold most of the levers of power in America, and likely always will until the day they are replaced en masse by Democratic Socialists. You can test this statement by asking yourself: “If Kamala had been elected, would she have fired anyone?” Of course not. Her people were already at the head of nearly every unelected department structure in the country. So although this new “spoils system” will no doubt be fraught with drama, that beats having a class of political mandarins who answer to no one.

As always, thank you for reading. When I get home we should have some neat car reviews for paid subscribers, including a thousand-horsepower Chinese EV or two.