Wednesday O/R Thread: D-Rizzy, BBL Drizzy, Willow Sprizzy, Hunter Bidizzy

Open to all readers

Apologies to my older (than 50) readers who are bewildered by this week’s headline, just hold tight and I’ll bring you up to speed.

Justice for Danny and Jesse

where the magic happens

This was a double race weekend for me, with F1 in Montreal and IMSA at Mid-Ohio. I had commitments which kept me away from my home track, but I watched with interest because I had six teammates in the IMSA race, including one former boss. Let’s cover F1 first.

After the embarrassing procession that was Monaco, Liberty Media needed a banger of a race, and they got it. The entirely normal Verstappen-Norris 1-2 result concealed the most eventful race of 2024. Thoughts at random:

• I never fail to shit on Danny Ric, and neither does Jacques Villeneuve, but credit where it’s due. Hearing the former world champion’s dismissal put, in Ricciardo’s words, a “chip on his shoulder”, allowing him to lift his qualifying record to a robust 2-7 vs. Tsunoda. He’d still have lost to Yuki in the race thanks to a perhaps overly strict penalty — but Yuki did him the service of spinning out, which cost the team some real points. I don’t expect to see Ricciardo get the better of Tsunoda very much in the long run, but this was a genuinely admirable performance.

• Princess George needs to get it together. I have a lot of personal sympathy for him, because I’ve had some pretty first-class race performances marred by avoidable mistakes, but if he is going to lead the team in 2025 he needs to combine the brilliance he’s shown recently with, say, about a Bottas’s worth of consistency.

• Who didn’t love seeing Magnussen rip through the pack? And who was surprised by Haas botching his stop?

• Sir Lewis said he drove one of the worst races of his career. I don’t see it. He worked well with his strategy. Russell had the tire advantage on him at the end. There’s no shame in losing that position.

• Clowns of the weekend: The Ferrari team in general plus Sergio Perez, whose performance was essentially no better than Logan Sergeant’s. The news of his contract renewal makes me think Red Bull values Mexico-market sales more than they value the constructors’ championship. At this rate it will be Verstappen standing next to Zak Brown at the FIA dinner.

• Speaking of Max: It’s nice to see him get a chance to conclusively demonstrate that he’s the best driver in F1, not just the fellow with the best car.

Over at Mid-Ohio, it was like a reunion for me. Thaze Competition, which is running AMG GT4s in the VP sprint races, is owned by my One Lap and NASA teammates Brian Makse and Faisal Ahmad. If you ever hear that I sucked off a Mossberg on a weekday, it will be at least partially due to the fact that my two friends have ascended to professional sports-car glory while I spend my miserable days doing temp labor and eating affordable meals. Seriously, however — I love these men.

Unfortunately, they were banging fenders with my other endurance-race teammates Jesse Lazare, Eric Kerub, and Carl Hermez of the McLaren Motorsports In Action team! And I mean literally banging fenders, with contact between the cars on Day 1. The final results: Thaze 2nd and MiA 3rd on Saturday, with MiA first and Thaze 2nd on Sunday. To wrap up the “It’s A Small World” aspect of this, the other driver on the podium, Luca Mars, is the talented son of dealership-inheriting moron Brett Mars, whose zillion-buck AI Mustang I lapped in a NASA race in 2011 using… Faisal’s PTE-class Honda Civic DX.

Faisal and Brian are really tearing it up, and I’m proud to know them. I’m equally proud to have driven the MiA McLaren in the past, and to see that team win. Jesse should have won the Pilot Challenge enduro as well, since he started from pole, but they had some typical McLaren mechanical issues.

My final former teammate at Mid-Ohio was Larry Webster, who somehow scored a free ride in the new spec Mustang Challenge but failed to distinguish himself in any way, running at or near the back of the pack both days behind a bunch of Boomer tourists and kids transitioning from go-karts. As bad as my life is right now, at least I never finished 158 seconds behind a club-race hobbyist in a 40-minute identical-car spec race. I would kill myself if that happened. Larry’s performance aside, I heard a lot of negative chatter about Mustang Challenge in the paddock. The cars are cool, being 500-horse Dark Horse cars prepped to about GT4 level. But it’s expensive and the pace is pretty far back — Larry’s weekend best lap of 1:33.140 and the race leader’s best lap of 1:30.506 don’t compare well with Jesse Lazare’s 1:26.287 in a car with less power. Hell, they don’t even match the 1:29.7 I set in my 150-horsepower Radical last year before the re-paving. And for the record, if you added up every penny I’ve spent on that Radical since I bought it and ran it across three race seasons, you still wouldn’t have enough money to run a major-team-prepped Mustang Challenge car for a single IMSA weekend. I don’t see the value. But I’m also not a white-sock 55-year-old with more cash than talent.

(I’m 52.)

The most important thing happening in music, trust me

Remember the Drake/Kendrick “beef” of May? Thanks to a genuinely unique set of circumstances that couldn’t have occurred until recently, it’s now rewriting the course of music history via… an AI-based, crowd-sourced, “disstrumental”. And it all started with a single throwaway line by Drake on the “Push Ups” battle rap:

Metro, shut your hoe ass up and make some drums, n******

Drake was referring to Future’s producer “Metro Boomin”, who promptly took his advice to heart. He started by finding a song called “BBL Drizzy” by Black comedian and programmer King Willonius. The song, which implies that “Drizzy Drake” had plastic surgery, was entirely generated using AI tools. Willonius won’t say which tools he used, or how much time it took, but take a listen to all 1:38 of it. The track sounds exactly like Sixties Motown, right down to the computer-generated James Jamerson bass line:

I mean, it’s a great song! What’s extra-frightening is the idea of being able to generate a studio-quality recording from an “AI” prompt. Every songwriter in the business must be thanking God that this stuff can’t have a copyright. Which meant, of course, that Metro Boomin’ could take it, speed it up, and make a new beat from it, which is here:

Thus, the “disstrumental” — but now it gets advanced, because Metro gave it to the world, offering $10,000 and a proper copyright beat of their own for the best Drake diss record that used it:

https://x.com/MetroBoomin/status/1787038173501039095

This ensured that homemade Drake slap tracks would basically carpet-bomb the rap universe. Not all of the responses were “hood raps” — there are Japanese and French and guitar and saxophone and bass and interpretive dance versions!

Perhaps the most surprising person to record some bars over BBL Drizzy was… Drake himself, who used the beat for a universally despised rap collaboration with the utterly talentless Sexxy Red in which he rapped

Why you love me? Still a mystery
Me and the surgeon got history
I changed a lot of girls' lives for real
They need a new body, they hittin' me, ayy
BBL Drizzy, they want a new body, they ask me for it

The #1 YouTube comment on the song was: “Just 2 bad bitches singing”.

What fascinates me about the whole “BBL Drizzy” situation is how it reflects pretty much every upcoming trend in music all at once:

• Some of it was generated with “AI” tools, and none of it required anything besides a computer;

• It was deliberately crowdsourced and shared with the world, ensuring that it would have much greater impact than a standard release;

• The variety of responses to it, including the vast amount of frighteningly fast YouTube guitar and wind instrument players, show that genre is less relevant than distribution. In other words, we’re back to having one radio station for the whole world… and it’s called TikTok. It doesn’t matter if you’re a trapper in Chicago or a piano player in Osaka. You’re getting your vibes off TikTok.

• Drake thought he could defuse the situation by rapping over the beat, but he was wrong, because he did it poorly.

• BBL Drizzy is a negative sentiment, not a positive one, because negative sentiment drives engagement.

It will be interesting to see if one of the BBL Drizzy creations somehow makes it into paid major rotation on the social media channels. At that point, you’ll need a team of fifty forensic accountants just to figure out who gets paid, and why, and how much.

I think it goes without saying that my son and I would do something over the beat… if he didn’t have a full schedule of flying and Civil Air Patrol stuff at the moment. Count yourselves lucky you don’t have to hear my ideas!

Political prosecutions, chapter 2

he claims to be packing nine for the big guy

Hunter Biden was found guilty on all counts this week in his firearms-under-disability prosecution. I didn’t think much of the Trump prosecution and I don’t think much of this one. While what Hunter did is, in fact, a recognized crime that required no jiggery-pokery on the part of a district attorney’s to fold and spindle into a felony, it’s out there on the fringe of federal gun regulations.

You’re not supposed to be touching a gun if you’re addicted to, or even under the influence of, a federally prohibited drug. Still, this has the Al-Capone-tax-return stench all over it. I challenge anyone to find the record of a similar prosecution in the past. If Hunter was, in fact, brokering 8-figure deals with Ukrainian oligarchs on his father’s behalf, prosecute him on that.

As a father myself, however, I’m absolutely disgusted by the way that Joe Biden is letting his son twist in the wind here. Surely he knows that every single aspect of Hunter’s life is the product of how he was raised, indulged, and/or mistreated. It’s made worse by the fact that Biden is already one son short. Why did he let Hunter go so wrong, for so long? The most plausible, but unpleasant answer: there’s almost nobody home in his head nowadays. His antics at the D-Day anniversary celebration sure don’t do anything to dispel this theory.

It won’t surprise any of you to know that many of the people who decried Trump’s conviction are cheering this one, but to me they represent two sides of the same unacceptable situation, namely: the misuse of the criminal-justice system to achieve political ends. If Trump is elected, will he pardon Hunter? And will that pardon have to be issued from inside the Presidential Maximum Security Suite?

Willow Springs For Sale

Many of you have contacted me to discuss the fact that the Willow Springs track appears to be for sale, and most likely with the intention of developing it for housing. I can’t stand the idea of losing another track to McMansions, especially an historic one, but if such a thing must happen, let it happen to Willow Springs, which is one of the least characterful, competitive, and interesting tracks I’ve ever driven. It’s basically Nelson Ledges for men who use Dude Wipes in the trackside bathrooms and put their Caymans back on the trailer when it rains. I’ve been there three times and haven’t enjoyed a minute of it.

And the less said about “Streets of Willow” the better.

Let’s hope the next owner keeps it going and keeps the club racing happening, thus removing a powerful incentive for Angelenos to move to the Midwest. Were I a club racer in the Golden State, however, I’d be looking at this and the Laguna Seca drama with squinty eyes. Why live in a place that hates you? They have In-N-Out in Utah now.