Wednesday Open/Racing/Car-Weak Thread

All subscribers welcome

leaving those child support payments behind

This is a travel week for me AND a week without F1, so I’ll open the thread to anything anyone wants to discuss.

Just for laughs, here’s my race update. This past weekend was the SCCA OVR Sprints. On Saturday I drove from 10th to 2nd in the first corner but couldn’t do any better than that in a mixed group. On Sunday I started 2nd and finished 3rd because Bill Niemeyer showed up with his Stohr-built “Sorcerer” P2 car and easily caught me during the race. Best lap of the weekend was 1:30.580 on a track that was alternately wet, oily, or just plain scrubbed clean. Over the past month we’ve learned that the little Radical really needs to have its nose low in order to perform.

In fact, doing a total of 9 race weekends in this car as Albany Autoworks steadily improves it has taught me something about non-sedan racing. For the better part of two decades I’ve read blathering on social media by people who “can’t get their car set up right”. I’ve always had open contempt for people who don’t drive well when the car isn’t “correct”. God knows I won more than a couple races in a car that hadn’t been aligned in a long time, even.

The Radicals are different. They need to corner at 2g or thereabouts in order to make laptime — as an example, my car is slower on the back straight than GridLife GLTC race cars that are 6 seconds a lap behind me — so if you can’t get the nose to bite then you drop down to 1.5g in a hurry, which costs you all sorts of time. Alternately, just tapping the brakes in Mid-Ohio’s Turn 1 or 11, which I have to do if there’s open-wheel lapped traffic ahead of me in that turn, costs me an instant two seconds in that lap.

It’s now easy for me to understand how F1 teams rely on their third drivers just to work through setup issues. It’s simply impossible to drive around a lack of grip in my car — or theirs, I suspect.

“If there’s a cool car scene in the universe, you’re on the Pebble Beach it’s farthest from.”

I’m not one of those people who is always expressing “gratitude”, but… THANK GOD I am nowhere near “Car Week In Monterey” right now. I’d rather work a day shift at Burger King than attend “The Quail” or “Motorlux” or “Sadwood” or “The Monterey Historics”. As cringey as the Concours itself may be, at least there’s some sort of quasi-legitimate historical-preservation aspect to it. The rest of “Car Week” is just a Bataan Death March of profoundly uncool rich people trying to be Steve McQueen while fending off a zombie horde of camp-followers who want to separate them from their money. Expect the usual veneration of 1938, 1955, and 1967, stirred and mixed to (dis)taste with brand-new supercars for people to put in “car-coons” back home in San Jose.

The whole thing is just so dreadfully… striving and wanna-be and infra dig. I don’t know when it stopped being a legitimate event and started being yet another endless celebration of generic wealth. I’ve heard it expressed by many long-time event-goers that a similar fate appears to befall every concours with Hagerty involvement, whether as owner or sponsor, but I can neither amplify nor refute that opinion. I will say this: few things are more upsetting to watch than the spectacle of people who were born outside a social group trying to buy their way into the center of said social group. The only way to pull it off is to be Rodney Dangerfield in “Caddyshack” or Elon Musk carrying a kitchen sink into Twitter. If you don’t have that level of “rizz”, as the kids say, then it just looks like you’re a fraternity washout trying to buy beer for the chapter after being voted out of rush on Day One.

The Future Of Car Prices

All signs point to a gradual relaxing of transaction prices in both new-car and used-car markets. The Car Twitter crowd thinks it’s related to increasing new-car inventory, but I wouldn't be so sure. Every salesman knows that cars are always bought on payments. And since interest rates are WAY up, everybody’s payments are going up. This doesn’t mean that demand is any lower, or that the supply of new cars that you’d actually want to buy (e.g. not EV) is much better.

Your humble author counted himself lucky to get 5.99% over 60 months on my 300C. Two years ago, I was looking at auto loans with a 2.4% rate. Most people are paying between six and ten percent in the real world. The difference between a 3 percent loan and a 9 percent loan, over 72 months, is about 18% per payment. That’s real money and it will drive consumer behavior for a while to come.

The current prime rate isn’t ahistorical — as long as your view of history is long enough. I grew up in a world with ten percent prime rates. But it’s been twenty years since loans were this expensive. The problem is that new-car pricing is also soaring with inflation now. Suddenly, it’s 1979! The primary difference is that you simply couldn't build Chevette Scooters and Dodge Omni Misers now. The base load of Federally-mandated equipment makes it impossible. Something like the $22,000 Chevy Trax, with its less-than-robust 127-horse 3-cylinder turbo, is as good as it’s gonna get.

What say you, ACF? When it comes to new cars, do you think transaction prices will continue to fall?