Wednesday: F1, Hemi Returns, and Part One Of The SuperThreads

All subscribers welcome

Housekeeping: So much insane stuff has happened in the past few days that I’m separating the normal Wednesday ORT into two parts. Today is for F1 discussion and the topics below. Tomorrow will be a paid-subscriber-only discussion for: The Hesgeth Houthi Chat Thread, 23 And Me Goes Belly Up, and Corvette Inventory Spirals Out Of Control. We will also likely discuss The 25% Tariff at that time, as well. So please plan to return tomorrow! — jb

Yuki shifts seats, Max sells a jet… oh, and wasn’t there a race in there somewhere?

It seems likely that Yuki Tsunoda will be sitting in the second Red Bull at Suzuka. As several of you know, I have sworn to see this in person, should it happen, so I’m watching all communications channels for an official confirmation.

A recent interview with Alex Albon provided some context for why Liam Lawson has looked deeply awful in the RB21: according to Albon, Max prefers the “sharpest” front end possible, which is already difficult for anyone else not bred out of two first-rate drivers to handle — and then he demands the nose be sharpened even more as the season goes on, which causes his #2 driver to become first worried, then frustrated, then stuck in a tire wall.

Prepare to laugh, but this is also why my attempts to run my Plymouth Neon in the AER endurance series proved so frustrating. I did everything possible to put the back of that car on skates, from 800-pound rear springs to tire-eating toe-out. This was so I could at least pretend to turn with the Sentras and Miatas at Mid-Ohio. But when we put people in the car who had cut their teeth on BMW E30s or Miatas, they spun the car, again and again. Which is not to say that I’m like Max Verstappen in any way. For one thing, I don’t spend my days with an older woman, parenting someone else’s preschool-aged daughter.

Chinese GP comments, in no particular order:

• Ready for a conspiracy theory? Here it is. Remember when Lewis Hamilton’s teammate beat him on a one-stop strategy, made it past the scales, but then got re-weighed with a fuel draw and disqualified? I mean, I could be talking about George Russell in the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix or Charles Leclerc at the 2025 Chinese GP… but it’s odd that it’s happened twice. Here’s my unhinged theory: Lewis complained to the FIA both times. Only this time his compliance plank was also bad, so…

• Oscar Piastri, the real deal. Who could possibly be a Lando Norris fan when being an Oscar Piastri fan is an option? Not born with $200 million, not afraid of his own shadow, makes big mistakes then does big, brave stuff. A racer’s racer, and still young enough to get better. Plus, you just know he won’t let Max shove him around. “OzempZac Brown” has some deciding to do in the near future, I think.

• What’s happened to Yuki has been nothing short of criminal. Twice his own team has knocked him out of the points with astoundingly bad strategy… and this time his nose came apart from… no impact whatsoever. Does he deserve a RedBull seat? He certainly deserves at least a Hannah Schmidt’s worth of strategy.

• The second best racer to wear #31… is Esteban Ocon, and he’s getting it done. As did Haas in China. You love to see it. They’re the real American team.

• First he cries, then he flies… Let’s take a minute to appreciate Hadjar’s sterling work this weekend, including but not limited to his absolutely bloodthirsty desire to beat 3rd-tier competitor Jack Doohan in the Alpine on track despite knowing there was a 10-second penalty waiting for Doohan at the end. What I see here is an emotional young man — and I can approve of his tears a lot more when we see the masculine drive to humiliate one’s opponents in the following week.

• Princess George getting it done. Guess who is #2 in the driver standings? Alright, that’s Max. But George is a strong #3 and he’s clearly gotten everything out of the car. He’s handily beaten his former teammate both GP races.

• Will Lewis get a confidence bump from the Sprint win, or will he be deflated by being ordered to swap positions with Leclerc? Certainly The Sir looked commanding on Saturday. Not even I, the biggest Lewis detractor in history, can argue that he still has what it takes to win in the fastest car — and that’s not damning with faint praise, because a lot of people don’t have even that.

• Smooooooth disintegrator. Remember all the idiots who said Sainz would end Alex Albon’s career? I was one of them! And we could all still be right, but it’s not happening right now.

Clearly this is another banner season in the making. You have to admire McLaren for not enforcing team orders, too. Can’t wait to see Yuki in dark blue at Suzuka — but I’ll still be wearing my Tudor Ceramic, not one of those Monacos.

Someone should check in on the New York Times, and also there’s probably another pandemic on the way

America’s newspaper of record is going hard after the Insane Main Character Syndrome Boomers — just look at these happily co-located headlines above! — but they still have time to bemoan the fact that “they” were “misled” about Covid-19. Now, it’s an op-ed written by a Turkish-born Princeton sociologist, not an ex cathedra Editorial Board piece, but it’s still out there for everyone to read.

Perhaps the choice of a relative outsider was deliberate, because saying that the Times was somehow the victim of COVID misinformation seems eerily like when Swedish scammer Bo Stefan Eriksson blamed his 162mph, Enzo-splitting crash on “Dietrich”, the mysterious driver who appeared out of nowhere to just, you know, take Eriksson on a random drive. In this case, the Times is Eriksson and various unnamed “others” are Dietrich:

The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.

More than any recent event — and there have been many competitors in this disingenuous regard — this “wet market” business shows the difference between education and intelligence. I know hundreds of very educated men and women who uncritically swallowed the wet-market story simply because it was in the Times and on CNN, and they have been flawlessly educated to believe those particular outlets. I also know plenty of intelligent men and women who said, “You expect us to believe that this bat virus just happened to come out of nature down the street from the Temu Bat Virus Study Building?”

Remember in 1984, when O’Brien said he could float off the floor if he wished to, but the Party did not wish it? That’s the level of reality-denial going on here. It’s not like these labs are around every corner, either: here’s the map. But you could lose your job for pointing this out in 2020. It was racist, although nobody could adequately explain how it was racist to say “maybe the bat virus escaped from the bat virus center” but it was absolutely not racist to say, “Gosh, those Chinese folks love eating raw bat meat so much they’ll pretty much cough themselves to death doing it.”

The wet-market deception had more serious effects than just, uh, keeping people from burning the Wuhan Institute down. It’s been the figleaf that has prevented the entire virus industry from engaging in any self-reflective behavior whatsoever. If Trump can manage to cut down on gain-of-function research, he’ll do what none of the three past presidents, including Trump, have spectacularly failed to do. There is little to no evidence that GoF research has ever helped anyone at any time. The evidence to the contrary is all around you. Not that the Times has ever worried much about what things look like in the real world.

That thing got a Hemi?

Here comes the hotstepper, again: Stellantis is restarting production of the Hemi — this time, in Detroit. “Restarting” is a little hyperbolic, as I’m not sure Saltillo was going to stay out of the Hemi business for long, and there was still demand for what they call the BGE, or Big Gas Engine, in the Ram 2500 and 3500 trucks.

What’s exciting about the Hemi news is the return of passenger-car-spec 5.7 and 6.4 engines. They say it’s for the Durango and the 392 Wrangler, but they would say that, wouldn’t they? And, it’s in Detroit. I never liked the fact that Mexico built most of the Chrysler and GM V-8s. Now the mighty Apache 392 is being built where it always should have been.

Jalopnik is assuring us that the Hemi won’t fit in the Charger, which is just silly. There’s the correct amount of space, it’s just not necessarily configured for a V-8, because it was meant to ship with an inline-six. If this story sounds familiar, it should: Jaguar engineers designed the XJ40 to deliberately exclude the possibility of the Rover V-8 replacing the Jaguar inline-six. Such an awful thing was absolutely considered back in the days of the Ryder Report, trust me.

Surely the current Charger wasn’t designed to exclude the Hemi in favor of the Hurricane. They just didn’t think the engine would still be available. Or… cough… maybe… chuckle… they were pretty certain that… HOCKHOCKHOCKHOCK… the Charger EV would be all anyone would want!

This isn’t even the biggest discount out there. EV Dodges are dead on arrival. But Hemi-powered Chargers would be quite alive, trust me.

As my brother pointed out to me earlier today, this is bad news for those of us who bought the “Last Call” cars. Except it isn’t. I’ll gladly lose some resale on my 392C, which isn’t going anywhere anyway, if that means the Hemi is coming back for everyone else. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one!

ACF comes out against private equity…

I have little to no patience for the bizarre anti-private-equity blabbing that seems to occupy the time of so many autowriters nowadays. Private equity has its function in a healthy economy, the same way that scavengers have a function in the ecosystem. This latest piece from Taibbi’s Racket, however, has me thinking.

Private Equity's Version of "The Sting"

Here’s the tl;dr: A lot of private-equity firms spent a lot of money on companies that are proving quite difficult to unload on the next sucker in today’s economy. So they’re forcing the companies to take out massive loans and pay them off anyway — only by calling it a “dividend”, they also get to keep their equity in the weakened firms.

Car battery maker Clarios International Inc. raised debt to pay a $4.5 billion dividend to its buyout-fund backers, one of the largest such payouts on record. That paid for a distribution to investors, including Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. and Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec, letting them take the equivalent of 1.5 times their equity out of the deal, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the deal is private.

Brookfield and its investors ensured a profit by loading the company with more debt. The investors get the money, while the company still has to pay the debt. For Brookfield and Caisse, there is nothing but upside. Investors, to borrow from the Logan Roy character, have already made their nut. Plus, there’s more money to be made if interest rates go down and the demand for their EV batteries remains strong, which could make conditions ideal for an IPO.

Bloomberg compiled data that shows 20 businesses in the U.S. and Europe in 2025 have borrowed to make big payments to their owners.

Well, this is just insane, isn’t it? This kind of predatory behavior is why young people increasingly feel quite justified in adopting openly Communist sympathies — because when you are continually exposed to the worst examples of the other system, how could you not think that maybe a little ownership-by-the-people is in order?

What I’ll suggest to close out today is this: Capitalism did well prior to the turn of the century because it was moderated, however weakly and dimly, by religious morality and by upper-class communities that had the power to disapprove of the worst among their numbers. It didn’t hurt that we had a Democratic Party that had not yet been totally and completely co-opted by the Targets and Apples of the world into performative ideologies that allowed or even encouraged everything from predatory bank practices to actual slave labor overseas as long as the right things were said about sex, race, and academic philosophy.

Those guardrails have all been demolished. Today’s robber barons dream not of funding libraries but of making a quick billion and disappearing into the anonymous global yacht-and-jet elite, where the idea of a moral compass is openly ridiculed. Is it any surprise that schemes like this “dividend recap” come to pass in such a degraded world?

It cannot end well — but there’s nothing that suggests it’s going to end soon.