Wednesday Night Racing/Open Thread: Jonny Shills Junk, GM Sells Data, Bearman Shines Bright

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he really loves letting that mouth hang open doesn’t he

People really win on ACF

The winner of our paid subscriber contest, to my eternal sorrow, is Thomas Hank, for nominating my mother, who is desperately ill with a chronic lung disease, as the most unlikely but true thing to weigh more than my F-250 Platinum. Since we can’t roll Mom over to the CAT scales near her nursing home, I have no technical reason to disqualify him. So he’s the winner. Second prize will go to NoID, for nominating the 2025 Dodge Charger Scat Pack. As soon as I stop being angry about this, I’ll be emailing them both to discuss their prizes. Thank God my mother is too cheap to read the paid articles. Avoidable Contact Forever — where cruelty is rewarded, and richly so!

Imagine having to suck this thing off for a living

In other heartwarming news — Lookie here! For just $286,845, you can get an electric PORSH sedan with 1,092 (one thousand and ninety-two) horsepower. It doesn’t have a back seat, so your wife and her boyfriend will have to leave you behind when they go out on Saturday night. Sorry about that. But that just means you’ll have more time to post about it on the Internet.

Our good friend Jonny Lieberman was right there to move his lips up and down the shaft of this profoundly stupid disaster, excuse me, “environmentally friendly supercar” as much as, or perhaps more than, Porsche demanded. You know, I’m not an inherently sympathetic person but I feel bad for the Loserman and everyone else who has to write about this like it’s a wonderful and important news item. I don’t know what’s worse: a nearly $300k rolling dildo that has 1,092 electric horsepower and no back seat, or the fact that it can’t quite lap Laguna Seca as fast as…

…some rando doing multiple laps in an old 1340cc Radical SR3 RSX.

Here’s the best part: having beaten the 1,092-horsepower Porker on lap 10 of a random warmup session, he does it again in lap 11. You think he could have done it again in lap 12? Now to be fair, this young man eventually got a Radical factory drive… five years after this video was made. At the time of filming, he was just a club racer. Not even an IMSA shoe like the Porsche driver.

How much power does a 2014-era SR3 RSX 1340cc have? About 185. If you want to try one out, I know of a couple for sale between $45k and $60k.

How many seats does it have? Two. Same as the Taycan Super Girlboss Edition.

Can all of you see the sheer Baron Harkonnen Fat Suit waste of needing 1,092 horsepower to not quite do what this little car does with 185? Now, if the Taycan Turbo Cockballstorture GTQIA actually carried four people in comfort, rather than two in hardback seats, you could make a little argument for the thing. But it doesn’t, so you can. And there’s no sense even discussing what it would have done on Lap Two, with half its battery gone and the tires overheated to the consistency of maple syrup. This vehicle is more obscene than the civilian Hummvees. It weighs 4,925 pounds. After the “lightness” was added.

Speaking as a former owner of three Porsches and a 20-year PCA member, I consider this Taycan — in fact, all Taycans — a disgrace. The Burgerkingring edition Taycan is the perfect opposite of the durable, efficient, and delightful sports cars that made Porsche a household name after World War II. Imagine letting James Dean step out of a time machine to see this thing without a badge on it. What would he think it is? Surely not a Porsche. He’d guess Packard or Studebaker, maybe. Dean’s car was the “Little Bastard”. This is the “Fat Bitch”.

I’m embarrassed for everyone involved. We can, however, take a moment to smile at Jonny’s assertion that some engineer “let slip” what the “real goal” was. He’s a regular Woodward and Bernstein all to himself, that Jonny. Hope he doesn’t get in trouble for his investigations on behalf of the reader. Oh well. Better to be a useful idiot than a useless one.

Just when you thought General Motors couldn’t get any worse…

Here at Avoidable Contact Forever, we have a complicated relationship with General Motors. They never stopped being a thorn in my professional side, from the time they kicked me off the Cobalt SS Turbo launch in like 2010 at the request of a frightened colleague to… uh, something I think I got paid not to talk about ever again. On the other hand, I am deeply sentimental about, and hugely fond of, many GM cars from the 1976 Cutlass Salon to the C7 ZR1.

The way I’ve chosen to look at it lately: without the childish actions of GM in general, and one GM executive in particular, I’d still be attending endless Zoom meetings about nothing. Also, I wouldn’t have this Substack, which is a true source of joy for me. So I’ve been feeling kind of good about the General…

…until yesterday, when I found out that GM has been recording its owners and selling the data to Lexis/Nexis.

LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.

On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

According to the report, the trip details had been provided by General Motors — the manufacturer of the Chevy Bolt.

There’s no reason for this, no justification, no possible excuse. This is simply evil. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. General Motors isn’t the only company that does this — if you sign up for various “smart driver” programs with Kia, Subaru, and Honda, you’ll also find your driving data on the open market. But it appears that GM is the only company that doesn’t require any sort of opt-in to sell your data. I’d suggest that you keep this in mind when you shop for your next car.

Ollie, Ollie, in (the points) free

lean on me, when you’re not strong

Seventeen long years ago, I watched the Formula 1 debut of Sebastian Vettel from a seat at the end of Indy’s long road-course first straight. It nearly went very wrong at the start, but the teenaged rookie recovered from his mistake and went on to score points in his debut. It seemed obvious at the time that Vettel was a generational talent, and in a world where Max Verstappen didn’t exist I think people would still be talking about Seb’s unique talents.

(In hindsight, one wonders if perhaps Max couldn’t have accomplished Vettel’s four-in-a-row with considerably less drama and post-race damage repair. Certainly he could have made the difference at Ferrari.)

Something similar happened when Oliver Bearman made an unexpected debut at Jeddah. He wasn’t physically ready for the car — look at that headrest, crumpled from the impact of a thousand 5g impacts on a mostly untrained neck — but he was mentally ready, and he didn’t shy away from big moves. Surely he has a memorable future ahead of him.

Other notes:

Justice for Yuki! — At least VCARB didn’t make him swap places with Danny Ric this time, largely because DR3 was busy spinning off the back of the pack for very little reason. At this point, there are only two possibilities. The first is that Ricciardo is washed up and needs to go home. The other is that Tsunoda should be driving the second Red Bull.

Still George Rises — Tinfoil hat time. Is Mercedes dialing back Lewis’s car, or have they just stopped dialing back George’s car? Discuss.

K-Mag plays hardball — There’s more than a little irony in Nico Hulkenberg getting points because “the most unsporting driver on the grid” was playing Hanson Brothers on his behalf.

Aston needs more pace — But I don’t think they will get it. Last year’s Aston saga was oddly reminiscent of Brawn GP, except they never actually won. I can’t see Mr. Stroll’s Wild Ride doing any better than fifth in 2024.

Geri Halliwell Dresses Like Princess Leia To Stand By Her Man — I’m going to make a couple of predictions about what’s likely to happen next, and why. The first is that The Horners don’t have an entirely conventional marriage, which is why Ginger Spice didn’t retreat into the shadows during this “scandal”. She was in show business for twenty years. She married Horner right after his previous girlfriend gave birth to his child. She’d posed nude and reportedly done worse than that prior to being a Spice Girl. Do you really think she cares what Christian texts some mid-looking camp follower? Second prediction: there are massive power games being played beneath the news that are far more important than anything you’ve seen or heard. Regardless of this, however, surely the Red Bull championship machine will disband at the end of 2024. Which will suit everyone just fine, including most of the fans. Your humble author will laugh out loud, however, if the Verstappens take their roadshow to the “progressive” Mercedes team.

All in all, I think Formula One is putting on a decent show, and perhaps better than decent if you confine your attention to what’s happening in second place and below. My favorite moment of the race, being an avowed Verstappen admirer and even more serious Ricciardo detester, was watching the Red Bull lap the VCARB near the end of the race. Great job, Danny! You sure showed everyone that you wouldn’t stand for being the second driver in Red Bull! And now you get to see your old seat from the outside, on lap 58!