Good evening, friends. This will be a quick one so we can do a few reader-contributed pieces tomorrow and Friday. Also, a bit of Housekeeping: from now on, only free and paid subscribers can comment on Wednesdays. This is to prevent the occasional drive-by silliness, which rarely pops up but is not worth preserving anyway.
The only surprise was that he didn’t win
My God, doing 85% of the race with a f**d car. Of course, P2 is nice, but not in this way. I'm sorry, but what a disaster to drive. I've never experienced something like this in the wet or in the dry. It's really, really bad.
Your humble author has many personal qualities, some good and some bad, but I would like to think that history will primarily remember me as someone who did not like Sir Lewis Hamilton. Despite what one might intitally think, being a Hamilton hater is quite rewarding. Yes, he’s won seven WDCs — but he was also beaten by most of his teammates. He earns $100 million a year — but he has to go home to Kim Kardashian and listen to her talk, just so people don’t realize he’s gay. What would be so awful about coming out? Ralf Schumacher did it, which surprised no one.
The Brazil GP was delightful for all sorts of reasons, but the real weapons-grade delight was Hamilton’s race:
Sir Lewis started 20th due to equipment-change penalties, but made some fantastic moves at the start to immediately take ten or so places. The British announcers were vomiting superlatives into the microphones, even as Hamilton passed Ollie Bearman off-track and waited seven laps to give the position back.
At some point, someone in the announcer’s booth realized that Verstappen, who had started from one position behind Lewis in 21st, was still directly behind Lewis.
Then Verstappen passed Lewis, because Lewis had cooked his tires showing off.
Then Alonso passed Lewis.
Ferrari once again gave Lewis the undercut on his own teammate, allowing him to stay ahead of Leclerc until…
Lewis missed the pitlane entrance and spun his car on the kinked straight of Turn 14.
At some point, Ferrari just stopped responding to Lewis on the radio. Then they told him to stay ahead of Lando, who was lapping him, but Lewis somehow thought it was a battle for the front row. The radio transmissions became more and more comical.
Max finished second from 21st, Lewis finished 9th from 20th.
It was a weekend for awful car setups. Both Kimi and George reported unpredictable handling; Kimi spun out of the lead, while George spun in the pitlane and almost had his entire race ruined. As it was, he turned a certain podium and possible win into fourth place. Verstappen also reported multiple problems with the car. No such hard luck befell Lando Norris, who looked like the class of the field all the way through. McLaren is still bringing upgrades because they have a shot at third place in the Constructors’ Championship, with all the extra money that brings.
Under the gun at Racing Bulls, Liam Lawson delivered a first-rate qualifying performance and an even better race start. He’s surely done everything possible to keep his job, and indeed at any other team than Racing Bulls he would keep his job. But since the purpose of Racing Bulls is to develop future Red Bull stars, and Lawson has already failed at Red Bull, everything is still up in the air. At the end of a race chock-full of aggressive passing, Lawson offered the maximum possible resistance to Charles Leclerc, then was re-granted the position by the stewards after the fact. For the record, I think he would be a great fit with Aston Martin, leaving Stroll The Younger to transition into a natural role as the only F1 team principal to have set a pole position lap in many, many years.
Shout out to “Cadillac F1”, by the way. Their astoundingly shambolic season continued to a new low. Having previously demonstrated that they can neither compete nor even build a safe car to the regulations, the team lost Bottas before the start because someone cross-threaded a wheel nut. It seems obvious that they will continue to lose the American intramural competition to Gene Haas, which is reasonable because they only spent 1.3 billion dollars on this season compared to the mighty $130 million spend over in Kannapolis. Can anyone remember the last time General Motors won any kind of race that wasn’t governed by BoP regulations?
Speaking of keeping their cool
A reader notes:
Most C8 Z06 owners probably don’t know or care that the center radiator literally dead heads into the front trunk compartment. They will also never see the lovely piece of aluminum heat tape across the front of said compartment, or the inexcusable latch control module in front of that. As a result they will be blissfully unaware of the foam tape peeling away from the front edge of said compartment as the hot air desperately seeks an escape.
I will not speculate on the official explanation for the engineering oversight, but one can only imagine the tale that would be told after listening to the GM engineers’ excuses when the Grand Sport bested the Z06 hot lap time on the angry bird YouTube channel.
I would like to think in an ideal world GM would have provided a real Z07 package for the C8, comparable to that on the C6. i.e. the ZR1 bodywork, brakes and cooling etc. on a Z06. Unfortunately they did not, but there is a loophole.
Unlike the Nazis at Ford, GM will let you order Willy Nilly from the parts bin. You can upgrade to your wallet’s limit.
It’s impossible to do the same with the Shelby/dark horse Mustangs because they require a one for one part exchange, and don’t you dare ask about the GTD!
Knowing of said loophole, still in existence from the good old C6 days, I undertook upgrading the Z06 to a more free flowing cooling system with ZR1 parts. I attached some photos. They should be self explanatory but if not just ask.
These pictures are not completely self-explanatory to me, but I don’t own a C8. Those of you who do, speak up if you want to see more.
Filling the smallest niches, sometimes literally
Speaking of Dark Horse Mustangs… Ford’s model choices with the current “S650” have been a little tough to understand. There’s no stick-shift EcoBoost, a powertrain combo that probably didn’t make money (10% of sales in S550) but built credibility for the car with the enthusiasts. The current GT is really, really, really expensive but it’s peanuts next to the Dark Horse lineup, which gives you the choice of a plain Coyote for the same price as a 2021 GT500 or a GT500 successor for a robust $106,490.
Just to put this in perspective: The 1988 LX 5.0 cost five hundred dollars less than a base 1988 Toyota Camry DX sedan, but the base GT 5.0 now costs 58% more than a base Camry. I mean… tell me you only want to sell to Boomers and Xers without telling me, right? And the newest news won’t address this situation.
Ford has announced a “Cobra” for 2027. The audio file used on social media suggests either a street-focused version of the 550hp Mustang GT3 Coyote 5.4… or the return of the 5.2-liter “Voodoo” from the gone-too-soon GT350. I’m sure it will be a nice car. Ford hasn’t made a bad Mustang since either 2011 or 2005, depending on how you feel about the 3-valve and 4.0. The problem is that Ford seems unwilling to make a Mustang for anyone under the age of fifty.
The obvious thing to do here: stick-shift Ecoboost tuned to Focus RS levels, with the basic interior, for the same $30,000 flat as a base Camry (or CR-V EX.)
In other news: President Trump’s admirable advocacy for kei cars has reached the not-at-all-obvious conclusion of Toyota bringing their Pixis minitruck to the States under the reanimated Scion nameplate. They’ll be assembled in the USA, likely from completely knocked down (CKD) kits. Pricing is expected to be under $30,000, but there’s a catch: right now, it’s fleet sales only and a 25mph speed limit.
If you’re wondering why anyone would pay nearly the price of a Maverick for a truck that can’t leave private property, then you’re not the target customer. Airports and the like are already using them. Having Toyota support and local assembly will make a difference to those customers.
If you’re not the admirable combination of a) fleet customer and b) quite patient, then you can order a Daihatsu HiJet delivered to you today for the same money. This is relevant because the Scion KEI-01 is a rebadged HiJet.
Toyota also showed a couple of ATV/SxS-like things at the same press preview. I didn’t realize this, but the United States apparently takes nearly half a million of those things a year. They are all that keep most motorcycle dealerships afloat. The biggest possible nightmare for said motorcycle dealers would be having to compete with their local Toyota shop. Let’s see what happens.
Make this fellow the governor of California, stat
El Salvador’s Maximum Leader Nayib Bukele is, if you listen to the Economist, somewhere between a common thug and a community-theater actor. You can just hear the clucking of the Western press as they talk about Bukele, who used heavy-handed methods to make the murder playground of El Salvador into a place that is literally safer than any major American city and most American states. Can you believe how stupid the Salvadoran voters are, choosing a guy who makes the streets safe over the much-admired previous administration, which paid lip service to Socialist revolutionary principles while gleefully looting the very little that the poor little country had to offer?
Bukele has suspended civil liberties for known murderers and terrorists. This sits very poorly with, say, the British, who reserve that sort of unilateral action for, say, Russell Brand and/or people who criticize Islam on social media.
(The Russell Brand thing, by the way, is deranged. This man is going to do ten years in prison because four groupies say he raped them during Obama’s first term. The best proof they apparently had was transcripts of counseling sessions. I remind you that the United Kingdom let an Islamic student go free after raping a teenager because he testified regarding the worthlessness of women under Islamic law. The United Kingdom also looked the other way for decades while approximately 250,000 white British girls were raped by organized Pakistani gangs. Documented rapes in the UK have soared from 9,000 per year before Tony Blair’s immigration flood to 70,000 a year now. Many rapists are sentenced to house arrest because there’s no room in the prison… but they absolutely found room for Russell Brand. One of the supposed rapes for which Brand is being imprisoned beggars belief; the victim claims that she saw Brand at a comedy gig then abandoned her boyfriend at said gig and went to Brand’s house to perform oral sex on Brand. She then consented to vaginal intercourse but claims she did not consent to anal intercourse. The rape charge, which helped incarcerate Brand, was based on the putative victim’s 2026 recollection of how she felt in 2009, and no other evidence. The other counts of rape are no more compelling, by the way. If they did this in America — if they sent you to prison in 2026 for consensually sodomizing random women you’d just met in 2009 — I have to think they would need to build enough prisons to hold 50% of the working musicians in this country, and at least one prominent Substacker in the automotive/music space.)
When four Salvadoran airplane technicians were kidnapped by Haitian gang members in October, Bukele immediately sent the military to Haiti to secure their return. That didn’t work, and the techs were likely killed the minute the Haitians understood what was happening, but the action was so popular in El Salvador and in Haiti that Bukele has doubled down and is now simply killing random gang members using the power of the Salvadoran armed forces. “Most of them ran away without even trying to fight,” Bukele noted on social media. “What cowards!”
Some readers will recall that the Clinton Foundation was involved in a Haitian adventure that was so visibly corrupt the foundation has had to put up a website saying “The Clinton Foundation didn’t “take billions from Haiti.” This would be like Jensen Huang publicly declaring that “Jensen Huang did not sleep with one thousand Chinese spies"; the idea is to accommodate you to the idea that the Clintons only stole millions of dollars from Haiti. Now their mess, and USAID’s mess, and the mess generally encouraged and aided and abetted by the American foreign policy apparatus is going to be set right by a man whose country is so poor that their attack helicopters are literally just the “Island Hopper” piloted by “T.C.” in Magnum, P.I.
If we are going to have open borders in the near future — and it seems obvious that we are — maybe we could get El Presidente to come up here and fix North America the way he’s fixing Central America.
Salon, we hardly knew ye, and hardly cared
The online outlet Salon closed this week after 31 years of operation. It had been sold to a private-equity firm a while ago, and said firm got tired of absorbing losses. I’m surprised they made it this long; rarely has any outlet anywhere been as consistently evil as Salon. The outlet’s defining moment was their 2015 defense of pedophilia written by would-be child molester Todd Nickerson. “I’ve been stuck with the most unfortunate of sexual orientations, a preference for a group of people who are legally, morally and psychologically unable to reciprocate my feelings and desires,” he writes. How unfortunate!
While I will go to my grave thinking that Salon and its accumulated historical masthead should have been the site of further US atomic-weapon testing, there is something a little unsettling about its demise. The market for journalism, online or offline, left or right, has not been this unpleasant in two hundred years. Most of us are “educated” in the news and current events by social media, which actively filter-bubbles us into small, cohesive cohorts from which a profitable outrage can be dependably mined. I’m not aware of a single remaining major editorial outlet without an easily discernible, and thoroughly adhered-to, ideological bent. Even the AP and Reuters nowadays often come off as the modern equivalents of pre-USSR-collapse Pravda and Izvestia. Today’s readers are largely forced to choose between right-wing media targeted at the defiantly illiterate and left-wing media targeted at the painfully naive.
I can’t fix this anywhere else, so I’m going to try to fix it here. As most of you know, my personal politics can best be described as “Knights Hospitaller meets Eugene Debs meets Dwight Eisenhower.” Which means that we rarely hew to the Red or Blue line here — but there is more to be done in the way of fairness, decency, and consideration to all viewpoints. I’m asking each of you to speak up as often as possible to make sure that we avoid partisan blindness and/or intellectual bigotry. As always, thank you for reading and commenting.
Hey Jack, the deal with Russell Brand is a reminder that a lot of guys have consensual sex with women, and then years later, out of the blue, the woman decides that it was a bad thing. I’m thinking about Supreme Court justice Kavanaugh: the woman had no idea the exact date or time or place of the assault, she had no witnesses, yet she got almost $1 million from a GoFundMe. It just seems like allowing these lawsuits and legal actions, when the alleged event happened so long ago, is patently unfair to the defendant. Isn’t there a statute of limitations?
Growing up with newspapers, the current print media is horrible. The NYTimes which once described the word "screw" – in the carnal knowledge sense – as a minor obscenity, published the text messages about the Cornell rape, only censoring who the "victim" was. Their slogan now should be "All the news that fitted to print." Years ago Mad Magazine called the Sunday morning news interview programs correctly: Faze the Nation, Beat the Press, etc. Noted New Yorker media critic A.J. Liebling said in 1960: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." The Associated Press is asking for donations for the sake of "freedom of the press" — give me a break, it was owned by wealthy newspaper publishers for years.