Wednesday ORT: Aussie GP, Cummins Goes Gas, Dogequest Future, GM Goes Flirting

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For today, and in keeping with our F1 theme, I’m turning the “politics” knob from Medium: Please don’t discuss politics in terms of people to Inters: you’re free to criticize public figures but any hint of aggression towards another commenter results in comment deletion.

Already a season to remember

Back in 2003 or thereabouts when I used to host F1 viewing parties for my various track-rat dirtbag friends, the first race of the season would often feel a bit anticlimactic while it was going on. You’d have waited all winter to see what was going to happen, but often it was nothing but a predictable procession… and it would stay that way until the teams managed to get their cars optimized.

Well, 2025 isn’t going to be anything like that. Observations, in no particular order:

• The rookies did not shine, with four of them crashing, one finishing DFL among the remaining cars, and Kimi Antonelli making a hash of qualifying before taking advantage of some very favorable Safety Car period to move up to fourth at the end. And while it was great to have a lot of uncertainty in the first race of the year, if the SC comes out two or three rookie-related times for the rest of the season everyone will sour on it very quickly.

• Why did Carlos crash, again? He reported a power surge but James Vowles was exceptionally diplomatic after the fact in suggesting that the “power surge” in question was nothing but Sainz’s unfamiliarity with the Mercedes powerplant. This, remember, is the same team principal who went on Twitter last year to accept 100% responsibility for a brake-bias-related Logan Sergeant crash, so if he is unwilling to do the same here it sends a strong message. While I still think Sainz will turn Albon into a #2 driver almost immediately, it certainly didn’t happen today.

• Leclerc > Hamilton, and how. I predicted it, as did most other sane observers, but it’s always nice to be proven right: Leclerc is almost surely a greater talent than Princess George will ever be, and therefore we now have a race-pace gap for Sir Himself in addition to a qualifying gap. Expect that to continue. More worrisome for fans of The Chosen One: the good humor and childlike glee demonstrated by #44 during the move to Ferrari has been immediately replaced by some genuinely awful interactions with his race engineer. Lewis joined Ferrari in 2025 because he liked the team’s chances for 2026, so presumably no one is going to self-harm during this season — but if Ferrari is less competitive than hoped, and they are, the lack of pace from Hamilton does not help.

• The remarkable contrast between Lando and Oscar. Only one of the McLaren drivers behaved like Senna or Schumacher or (choose your own adventure here) during the race, and it wasn’t the one who won. Having been yo-yo’ed off from a hometown Grand Prix win by his own team, Oscar not unreasonably lost a bit of pace and concentration before simple bad luck put him further off course than Lando in a double track departure. His pace and conduct after he backed onto the tarmac was that of a champion. So what’s going to happen? Does McLaren think he’s Senna or… Bottas-in-waiting?

• #JusticeForYuki. So much is made of the poor strategy decisions at Ferrari, but ask yourself: When was the last time Yuki Tsunoda didn’t have the worst strategy on the grid? The man qualified fifth, defended his positions strongly, and somehow got shuffled out of the points. He made Lawson look like a chump. What does he have to do in order to get a first-rate team? Answer: not be Japanese, not be affiliated with Honda.

• Helmut Marko doesn’t like the town crier: Hadjar’s on-camera breakdown after a very early departure from the Grand Prix drew support from Anthony Hamilton and scorn from Helmut Marko. Unfortunately for the Algerian French, of course driver, only the latter can really dictate the course of his career. Listen, your humble author has cried at many occasions, from the reappearance of a feral cat to the final thirty minutes of August Rush, but there’s no crying in racing. Schumacher didn’t make any noise when he broke his leg in the car, for God’s sake.

• Max could win it, couldn’t he? The list of Verstappen accomplishments in the Grand Prix was a bit daunting to consider, since it included things like having intermediate-tire pace in the rain, on slicks, but years from now we will all remember how the sport’s finest-ever driver simply carried the RedBull on his back for the second half of last season and, likely, all of this one. At this point in his career, Sir Lewis couldn’t beat a moderately motivated Nico Rosberg, but the adult Verstappen’s presence in the cockpit is basically worth one grade of tire in the better direction.

This will be a season to remember. It already is a season to remember.

Surely a 1.4T is next

Remember when GM made the Olds 350 into a diesel, making a new block for it but being too lazy and arrogant to change the critical dimensions? Welcome to the reverse. Cummins has just released a medium-duty inline-six with up to 300 horsepower and 660 pound-feet of torque. With a dry weight of 1,150 pounds, it’s about a hundred pounds above the Cummins diesel in Ram pickups, but you’re highly unlikely to see it there. The intended home is medium-duty trucks in California, which is busy running diesels out of existence.

It’s a smart, if cynical, move. I’d like to see Stellantis put it in a truck, because for an extra ten grand or so over the 392 Hemi you’d get… a million miles’ worth of easy durability? How long can a medium-duty Cummins last when you turn down the boost? Until the heat death of the universe? At that point, Ram could sell rolling chassis pickups via the dealer network and you could swap them out every 500,000 miles.

Prediction that won’t come true, but I would love to see come true: somehow this starts a fetish for ultra-long-lasting gasoline engines in passenger cars. Imagine being able to buy an E230 Benz sedan with a diesel-equivalent gas engine. Suddenly, it’s 1979!

This business will get out of hand

wow, only about 30 teslas in all of greater los angeles

Much ado was made earlier this week about Dogeque.st, a website purporting to show the home addresses and personal data of Tesla owners and DOGE contributors. It’s down right now but early reporters indicated that at least some of the data was correct. The media has made light of Elon Musk’s use of “domestic terrorism” to describe this and other doxxing attacks, but what else could you possibly call it? At the very least, it’s incitement to violence. You don’t give people a shopping list and expect them not to shop.

It should also be noted that anyone who thinks they can avoid the reach of the federal government through Very Smart Boy Encryption And Hiding Behind Seven Proxies is a fool. Maybe they can’t reach out and touch a Chinese state actor — that’s not something on which anyone should ever bet, by the way — but they can absolutely reach out and touch any Redditor Mint Linux nerd who thinks he can ‘vibe code’ a bad Web app and get it hosted overnight. You’d be better off trying to fake wire transfers out of some closet-case gay insurance executive’s accounts in the Cayman Islands. There would be less heat that what you’ll get by advocating violence against the property of the dude who just rescued stranded American astronauts.

From a perspective of long-term political sense and effect, this Dogequest tactic, and its many, many successors to come, will prove to be about as sound an idea as burning crosses in the yards of biracial couples was in the Sixties. Tesla has sold almost seven million cars, largely to people of progressive political bent. For many of them, this doxxing incident or the next one will be their “omg, the Khmer Rouge are going after people with spectacles” moment.

It also really, really, really makes me want to buy a Tesla. Come on out to the township, all ye action direct types, and let’s have a forthright conversation. It’s barely 162 yards, also known as “4.9 inches of drop”, between the mailbox and the front door. You’re highly likely to make it!

(nota bene: at avoidable contact forever we find violence of all types deplorable, and are working tirelessly to prevent even mild incidents of hurt feelings.)

The autowriters keep getting dumber, but GM PR stays the same IQ

There’s so much to lampoon in this — Erin Marquis thinking the hyper-gentrified and ultra-hipster-fancy Bronx is some hardass bar straight out of Stone Cold, the general illiteracy of the post, the fact that it’s on Bluesky — but I want to be serious for a moment and discuss how the sausage is made.

As early as 2009 I was discussing GM’s attempts to control the narrative via personal, intense, and highly expensive methods. In particular, they were reaching out en masse to unknown and low-tier bloggers to build relationships. Some of the names who lived on the General’s five-star largesse are lost to history — Gary Grant, who now does barbeque, Michelle Naranjo — but their 2009-2010 blogger net did catch and retain Joel Feder, who is now a Someone at Internet Brands and who has been able to guide content for a decade now. More amusingly, it caught Ray Wert, whose attempts to become a Super-Someone have been trivialized, eclipsed, and eventually dismembered by the actual political momentum of his wife, Emperor Palpatine Mallory McMorrow:

addressing the galactic senate, to thunderous applause

Chances are you think about PR relationships with autowriters via the various tropes detailed in major media over the years: Ferrari Is Angry With Chris Harris, or GM Pulls Advertising from Car and Driver, or even Ford Screams At Derek Kreindler About The MKZ Fuel Door. You’re also read me griping about the de facto five-figure payoffs to various autowriters over the years in the form of travel, cars, unique opportunities, and so on. The carrot-and-stick approach seems obvious…

…and I’ll refrain from griping about how “carrot and stick” is almost always used incorrectly, it’s a carrot on a stick, not a carrot or a stick…

…but it’s a small part of the way the business runs, and not nearly the most seductive part. The seduction is what you see here with Erin Marquis, who has generally shown herself to be a depressing combination of arrogant, incompetent, and hotheaded: you patiently respond to her edgy and/or stupid behavior with a slow drip of kindness, assistance, approval, charm, quiet meals around the corner from the office, and so on. She thinks she is shocking them by inviting them to a hipster bar. They will all show up, display the appropriate emotions to ingratiate themselves with her, and that’s how the relationship is built.

They’re not brilliant people, as a rule, but you don’t need to be brilliant to out-maneuver Erin Marquis or any everyday Jalop. You just need to be patient, thick-skinned, and willing to work the process. Never forget that Jonny Lieberman and Ray Wert and Patrick George all started their career as “rebels” against the establishment. Your humble author isn’t immune to this; as examples, I have been an absolutely captive and unabashed fan of Gerry Khouri at Bufori and Jean-Marc Gales at Lotus. They’re both fantastic fellows who built some great cars for classes of buyers that, frankly, have very little interest in reading or heeding consumer advocacy.

Nor would it be truthful to say that my brother and I have always avoided forming close personal friendships with various members of the public-relations community. In these situations, however, a little bit of self-awareness goes a long way. (When it doesn’t, you wind up with a hybrid Performance Car of the Year, Bark.) We all have our weaknesses. The key is to not let them drive the bus for you too often.

The most important insight the GM public-relations staff has had, and the one I’d like you to have as well, is that tone matters not. There is no difference between Erin’s Edgy Bar Challenge and Jonny’s Free Ski Vacation In Abu Dhabi. There’s no difference between a standard FTC disclosure of freebies received and Jalopnik’s arch “GM wanted us to drive the Corvette so badly they bought us a free first-class flight, three nights in a five-star hotel, and stupid New Balance dad shoes.” The only thing that matters in the long run is whether you’re an advocate for the reader or an advocate for the manufacturer. Not that Erin Marquis was ever anything besides the latter, but at least now it’s made more plain to everyone. I tried to be the former for a long time. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I did not, and I deeply wanted my readers to know that I was loyal to them above all else, but to paraphrase the saddest thing the late C.G. Hill wrote in the distant aftermath of having lost the woman he truly loved:

…if anyone ever truly felt that way about me — well, it hardly matters now.