Was Lieberman's WRL Weekend The Worst Guest Drive In Autojourno History?

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“i got two free outfits for accomplishing nothing, and i’m really bitter about it”

Housekeeping: Comments are rarely, if ever, deleted on ACF — but anyone who decides that I am “punching down” or “picking on” Jonny is going to get zapped into the ether. Jonny Lieberman is a highly compensated veteran journalist who portrays an experienced driver on Motor Trend TV, whereas I am a mostly unemployed rural cripple who uses an overheated credit card for each and every one of his club races. The purpose here is to have some fun, so let’s have fun. It’s going to be petty, and persnickety. Don’t like it? Go watch Doug DeMuro. Thanks. Now on with the show…

Forty-four years ago, Clive James wrote his famous Princess Daisy review, which opens with “To be a really lousy writer takes energy. The average novelist remains unread not because he is bad but because he is flat.” This, in a nutshell, is how I think of Motor Trend scribbler (and my former colleague at TTAC/Autofiends) Jonny Lieberman. To be a really bad autowriter takes energy — and Jonny has that in spades.

More than that, he has a truly admirable and essentially omnipotent self-esteem gland which keeps him hormone-drunk on his own excellence despite all evidence to the contrary. This is particularly true as it relates to his driving. In the past few years, Jonny has “accomplished” the following:

• Drove a factory-prepared Porsche GT4 Clubsport up Pikes Peak, finishing minutes adrift of his competition and essentially dead even with a completely-stock-powertrain Nissan Leaf;

• Was somehow beaten by “Supercar Blondie” in a contest of skill where all he had to do was drive in a straight line;

• Was given a completely open salt flat or runway or something like that to drive a Bugatti Chiron to 400km/h, only to get scared and quit at 396km/h. For the record, the Chiron he drove was apparently capable of 490km/h. I can’t make too much fun of him for this. I am also scared of driving fast in a straight line. The fastest I’ve gone in a straight line lately was maybe 181 or 182 mph, on my Kawasaki ZX-14R a couple years ago. In my defense, I might have gone faster if that section of the Interstate wasn’t slightly uphill. (That turned out to be a very expensive ticket, by the way, but I digress.)

I used to think that there was a cabal of PR people out there who were devoted full-time to making Jonny’s life as easy as possible, largely because of his Ron-Burgundy-esque willingness to repeat, unaltered, anything that is put in front of him — but after seeing his recent “motorsports” results I’ve come to believe that the cabal of PR people actually despises Jonny and is trying to humiliate him at every opportunity. How else can you explain the fact that Lieberman spent last weekend racing at Watkins Glen?

That’s right. Two of his competitors messaged me in advance to let me know, which bewildered me. Lieberman actually entered a race — the first such happening of which I’m aware since he and I ran LeMons at Altamont in 2008. You might think that it’s a bad idea to race at Watkins Glen with essentially zero experience. You might also think that it’s a bad idea to race Watkins Glen for the first time in this car, a V8 E92 M3 with the following equipment, listing at $6500 or more per weekend for a race seat. It’s described as “detuned with paddle shift”; if I read the regulations correctly, it’s probably allowed to make about 360-375 horsepower at the wheels. I don’t know how you get “paddle shift” out of it, maybe they swapped a dogbox in, or maybe it’s BMW Steptronic, who knows, I don’t really care. It’s still going to be an awfully fast car, basically in the neighborhood of a NASA ST1 or SCCA GT2.

This combination of “dangerous track” and “fast car” would, and should, discourage most novices, but not Jonny, who just knows he’s a great driver. So he went racing — and because it’s a WRL race, all the relevant data is out there for us to examine. Let’s compare his performance against a couple of different benchmarks, and answer the question: Has any autowriter ever gone slower, relatively speaking, in a freebie race?

Part Zero: Jonny’s Laptimes

I’ve marked Jonny’s stints in red. Removing out laps, in laps, caution laps, and laps where something obviously happened (like the 5:29 under green on day one), we get the following average and best laps.

Day 1: Average lap 2:24.5, best lap 2:21.2

Day 2: Average lap 2:27.6, best lap 2:25.3

Those of you who race at Watkins Glen are likely making some sort of “Oof” sound right now, but let’s put the numbers in perspective for everyone else. We’ll start with the most obvious comparisons, then have some fun with it.

Part One: Jonny vs. the best driver on the team in this car

I don’t know who the fastest driver in the Open Throttle M3 is, but the data is fairly unambiguous in this respect.

Day 1: Average lap 2:11.0, best lap 2:10.1

Day 2: Average lap 2:11.2, best lap 2:10.2

Compared to the team’s best driver, Jonny was 13.5 seconds per lap slower on Day 1 and 16.4 seconds a lap slower on Day 2. WRL endurance racing isn’t exactly IMSA, or even an SCCA Super Tour, but it’s still a place where people get very agitated about 2-second-per-lap differences. Having Jonny in the car was, on the average, an equivalent time penalty to a 5-minute “stop-and-go” punishment pitstop. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a worse performance, relatively speaking, in any endurance racing league other than LeMons, where you had people driving Town Car limos and whatnot. Lieberman’s stints were so bad as to be unprecedented in my personal experience of more than two decades racing around the world. Short of him actually crashing the car, I can’t think of a worse thing he could have done to his team. To answer the question in this article’s title: yes, this might well have been the worst free drive in autowriter history. Perhaps we’re being harsh, however, so let’s lower the bar a bit and see what we get.

Part Two: Jonny vs. the 2nd worst driver in the car

There was another driver who was clearly struggling in his stints, so roll the numbers

Day 1: Average lap 2:16.6, best lap 2:14.1

Day 2: Average lap 2:16.8, best lap 2:15.1

The gap between the best driver and the second-worst in the M3 is about half of the gap between the second-worst driver and Jonny. In a 25-lap stint, having this fellow behind the wheel was worth three and a half minutes of advantage compared to Jonny. To be charitable, his best lap on Saturday was only seven seconds ahead of Lieberman. So that’s, uh, definitely some participation. Keep in mind, the second-worst guy probably paid $6500 to race in the car, no doubt hoping the other drivers would carry him a bit.

Part Three: Jonny vs. the worst car in the race

The 2006 NC Miata of Reuben Performance Garage, known as “The Yeeter” for a variety of presumably disgraceful reasons, was the slowest car still running at the finish on Sunday. As far as I can tell, this is a dead-stock Miata using mostly refurbished components and cheap tires. It posted an average lap of 2:21.8 with a fast lap of 2:19.221, both times being comfortably better than Lieberman’s effort in the V8 M3.

Part Four: Jonny vs… Me!

Six years ago, I dragged a used Honda Accord to Watkins Glen on an open trailer to try my hand in Pirelli World Challenge. We were 70-80 horsepower down on the front-runners, I had just one set of tires, and my swaybar got disconnected during the race. Let’s see how I did in this slow-ass Honda. You’ll have to look down the chart a bit, but I’m there, I promise:

I started 21st and got as high as 11th before the swaybar committed suicide. To be honest, dear readers, I have long been bitter about how I performed in this race — but being 5 seconds adrift of Schwartz and Wittmer in cars that were vastly more capable than mine is probably acceptable for most people, even if it infuriated me. My best lap time, as you can see, was 2:08.725, comfortably ahead of all drivers in the BMW V8 M3. Compared to the car Jonny’s team ran, we had: 100-120 fewer horsepower, worse aero, Chinese 4-piston brakes, front-wheel-drive, slightly better tires in a narrower size, and me driving.

Jonny vs. the late Ian Prout

Trying to put Jonny’s laps into perspective using SCCA data and lap records proved to be an exercise in frustration, because pretty much every class you can imagine is much faster than he is. Spec Miata, you say? 2:14 flat. Touring 4, typically contested by stock affordable sports cars? Marshall Mast ran a 2:11.8. Happily, I was able to find a very highly-respected driver who set a class record of 2:22.0, a full eight-tenths behind Jonny’s best. The driver is the late Ian Prout, one of those handsome and accomplished men you associate with the glory days of sports car racing. He set the record in July of 2014 and it’s stood since. If you read his obituary you’ll see that he was a true racer, humble and devoted to the success of others in addition to his own. Ian Prout set his 2:22 using an Improved Touring “B” class 1986 Civic Si, likely making about 85 horsepower at the front wheels and weighing 1,970 pounds with driver. I don’t think I can adequately express what an achievement it was to get a poky little stock-engine 1986 Civic around the Glen within one second of Lieberman’s best time in an aero-equipped V8 M3. In this respect, at least, God did not create us all equal.

What Jonny said about his race

I think I’ve beaten the horse enough. There’s a certain minimum amount of talent and results you need to be actually considered a “race car driver”. For better or worse, Jonny doesn’t have it. As he was keen to remind his detractors during the Pikes Peak debacle, he’s received 15-plus years’ worth of the very best training, travel, seat time, globe-trotting track experience, and opportunities available to anyone, at any cost. I know a dozen or more regional and even national champions who have done far more with much less.

And we could end the article here, except for the fact that Jonny actually had a lot to say about his race on social media, including the following:

• A long rant about how the free HRX suit given to him by Bugatti fits better than the free HRX suit given to him by Porsche;

• Some bragging about how his team’s position improved two places during his Saturday session — one car in his class pitted for mechanical repair and another one died on track and another one caused a 32-minute red flag, in case you were wondering how Jonny passed anyone while being the slowest driver on track.

• He shared a video of him passing a 2.5-liter Boxster on the front straight of the Glen, neglecting to mention that the aforementioned Boxster ran faster than his best time for approximately 50 laps before having a mechanical.

• Lastly, he wrote “Personally speaking, I’m proud of what I did.”

Let’s recap what he was proud of:

• He finagled his way into a free drive for which he was vastly underqualified and which would cost a legitimate racer the remarkable sum of $6,500 post-tax dollars plus travel, hotel, and expenses.

• He was the slowest driver on his team by eight seconds a lap or more.

• He was usually the slowest car on the track, period, across more than 60 competing vehicles, driving a car from a top class.

• He cost his team the equivalent of an extra pitstop both days.

• Largely thanks to him, his E92 V8 M3 finished behind a detuned E46 330i fielded by the same preparer, said 330i being considerably faster than him even though it was quite a bit slower than the V8 car’s best driver.

Oddly enough, this reminds me of the time my 11-year-old son tried a rental Margay Ignite kart at Gateway Motorsports Park, which he’d never seen before. He qualified 12th of 26 in class then threw his helmet into the tech-shed wall during weigh-in because “to be 0.7 seconds behind the front row is so trash I’d rather go home than race.” I thought this was a bit tightly-wound of him, and I counseled him appropriately. There’s only ever going to be one winner in a given green-flag session, and if you can’t accept not being that man each and every time you’re not going to enjoy racing very much in the long term.

That being said, surely there’s a middle ground between being furious with a 0.7-second gap and… being thrilled and proud about a 15.2-second gap. I have a lot more trouble understanding the latter mindset than the former. Perhaps it comes from 15 years’ worth of being flattered and deceived by PR people. Perhaps it’s a function of having always enjoyed the lowest possible expectations for one’s performance. Maybe it’s just being comfortable with losing. I don’t know.

This could be the beginning of a real hero’s journey for Lieberman. He could decide to show me (and all the people who were texting me from the race) that he can be a real race-winning driver on his own dime. It wouldn’t happen without tremendous effort, and it wouldn’t happen overnight, but the Jonny Lieberman who exists at the end of that particular character arc is someone I’d really enjoy knowing, even if he still hates me and still keeps trying to have me banned from events. If that happens, then rest assured I’ll take a bit of credit for his transformation, if only as the irritant that eventually produces a pearl in even the laziest oyster. If not, well… there’s always next year’s Bugatti dress-up. To be a really bad autowriter takes energy — and Jonny has that in spades. He’s a perfect fit for Motor Trend, even if, as Clive James notes of Mark’s Club, “you would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette.”