Wednesday ORT: Autoblog Orders Chinese, Trump N' Trudeau, Why You Shouldn't Race With NASA
All readers welcome
Last week I received a thoughtful and detailed email from a venerable and valued Riverside Green and ACF reader, suggesting that I do more to encourage a positive mentality on the site. He’s dead right, and in the weeks to come I will work on that in absolute earnest. Today, however, I’m going to honor my long-time spirit animal, Antoine Batiste: I feel like funkin’ it up. Play for that money, boys!
Autoblog runs a Geely ad, refuses to elaborate further
Back in August I suggested that nobody would be able to tell any difference between the “bold and brave” Autoblog, so beloved of Matt Hardigree and others, and the venture-capital-rebooted Autoblog that would succeed it.
Allow me to eat those words, with a fortune cookie or two on the side, because it turns out there is a level of auto-journalist integrity below where the site was in August. Who’d have thought? Enter Nathan Adlen and his article “Hands-on with an off-limits Chinese SUV”. None Some of you will remember Nathan from his time on TFL Truck; he’s kind of a Tim Esterdahl sort, you know, the typa dude who 70% looks like he should be working as assistant forklift driver in the back of an Iowa Wal-Mart but who also 30% looks like he “stans” a favorite broomstick magic team in Harry Potter and/or cheered in the theater at the crucial moment in The Rise Of Skywalker when General Menopause and Glup Shitto defeated Jabba The Hut. (I’m assuming that’s what happened, you couldn’t pay me to watch those movies.)
Basically he’s the Nathaniel Rateliff of truck-bloggin’, minus the part where both Rateliff and his wife claimed to be bisexuals. I hope. I hope it’s minus that part. Where were we? Oh yes. Adlen has written a review of the Geely Starray, a Chinese home-market crossover that sits somewhere between a RAV4 and a Highlander, maybe a bit closer to the former.
Since this is Autoblog and not the Farago-era TTAC, it shouldn’t surprise that the “review” is quite positive — and why not? Who wouldn’t want a family crossover for $16,000? “The braking was good,” Adlen notes in one of the article’s less confusing sentences, “but the brake feel is a bit squishy for some.” Some what? The reader never learns. “The front design doesn’t quite balance out the rear design,” Adlen continues, “but the back is still handsome for many.”
(I can think of a few people to whom that applies, actually.)
What about the interior? “Seat comfort is quite good despite my hefty build in both the driver's seat and behind it.” Here, finally, Adlen earns my grudging admiration, because I rather deceptively made it through probably 150 car reviews without ever actually admitting to being “hefty”. Go on, big man. He shines some much-needed sunlight on a critical issue, namely: hefty boys don’t always get the comfort they need in that fun-lovin’ space behind the driver’s seat.
(It helps to have a non-hefty girl involved.)
“Some plastics do feel rather flimsy,” he continues, “and not everyone liked the environmental controls tied into the massive central screen.” Which brings us to my primary concern with this puffy-piece review: Who was “everyone”? Where did the “experience” detailed here take place? Who paid for the travel, the hotel, the meals, the gas?
All of that matters for two reasons. The first is that there’s some federal law involved in taking compensation of any kind, including travel without disclosing it in your review. The FCC doesn’t enforce it very hard, but the law is there. (Edit: the FCC doesn’t enforce it at all, it’s the FTC, I really should proofread!) The second problem is an ethical one. If Adlen flew on his own dime to somewhere the Starray is sold, he should mention that; if, instead, he took an all-expenses-paid trip to the UAE, as has apparently been done by at least one other autoblogger who reviewed the Starray, that should be disclosed.
I despise the passive voice and deliberate obscurity of this Autoblog review and will continue to call attention to this sort of morally vacant autowriting wherever it occurs. Let’s hope Autoblog doesn’t make a habit of this. Rest assured that I’ll be asking my army of industry snitches about how this particular “experience” happened, and once I figure it out, I’ll make sure everyone knows.
Greenland, the 51st state, other drama
Standing in my race shop, surrounded by disassembled Radicals, loose Milwaukee M18 batteries, and a $349 armored motorcycle jacket into which a feral cat had recently chosen to vomit, I heard a sustained but distant cheer to the north, like a million plaid-clad hunters crying out in joy at once. That was when I knew that Justin Trudeau was gone.
In many ways, the younger Castro Trudeau was like the Canadian version of President Obama. Everybody loved him for being handsome and cheerful and not very politician-like at all. He said all the right things, posed for all the right pictures — but unlike his Kenyan Hawaiian counterpart, Justin Trudeau presided over an economic and immigration catastrophe from which it will take Canada decades to fully recover. Twenty-three percent of “Canadians” are foreign-born now. The majority of those newcomers are from Asia and Africa, with heavy emphasis on India, Indonesia, and other countries in the South/Southeast.
You can get away with opening the borders if there’s extra cheddar to go around — but in Canada there isn’t. The median income is about 5/8ths of what Americans get, and even that dismal number is flattered a bit by the fact that the urban population percentage is soaring, even as America’s sags. I’ve probably spent 100 nights of my life in Canada, and my ignorant impression of the place is that there isn’t much of a middle class. You meet a lot of rich people. You meet a lot of working poor. The American phenomenon of the community-college family that owns a home and a jet-ski on a state job and a Applebee’s general-manager gig just doesn’t seem to exist up there.
Trudeau’s successor, who is likely to be the unprepossessing Pierre Poilievre, has his work cut out for him — and unlike any given American president, he will not have the luxury of printing what is still, to some degree, the world’s reserve currency. Right now Canada is more like California; unable to make ends meet, beset by the consequences of its own deranged beliefs, and suffering beneath a human tide of people who, regardless of their long-term value to their new homes, act as an economic drag and social disruption in the short term.
South of the border, meanwhile, President-Elect Donald Trump just got done expressing plans to annex both Greenland and the Panama Canal. His rhetoric has been strongly opposed by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Panama’s Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha, none of whom could delay these annexations by much more than about 24 hours, should push come to shove.
Someone who has not entirely dismissed the idea: Lars Lokke, the Danish foreign minister, who indicated he was open to discussions on “how we can possibly cooperate even more closely than we do to ensure that the American ambitions are fulfilled.” Which is obviously Trump’s actual goal, the same way that his actual goal with the Panama Canal is to prevent the Chinese from controlling more than the 40% of access they already have in their pockets.
In this way, Trump is remarkably Reaganesque. I was around in 1980 and I assure you that the United States didn’t magically gain more ability to combat worldwide Communism in the 24 hours between the end of Jimmy Carter’s last day and the end of Ronald Reagan’s first day. What changed was the global opinion of how hard America would throw its weight: much harder under an emotional and/or senile Reagan than under a reserved and reticent Carter. And that knocked over the first domino in the other direction from how they’d fallen up to that point; the rest was history, or, in the famed lyrics, “waking up from history”.
President Biden seemed to view this country’s upcoming conflict with China as a likely “kinetic” one, or at least his staffers felt that way. President Trump wants to fight the battle via container ships, not aircraft carriers. Greenland and the Panama Canal have real strategic importance, and they are both vital to the shipping trade in very different ways. Does Trump sound crazy sometimes, especially to the sort of cultured Europeans and coastal types who, like Louis C.K. when confronted with a threatening teenager, are more worried about the tone of the conversation than its content? Absolutely. Is that part of Trump’s advantage in the negotiations to come? Also absolutely. Denmark has already committed an extra $1.5 billion to Greenland’s security since previous Trump remarks on the subject. More is forthcoming.
Ah, but what about the “51st state” comments regarding Canada? Could such a thing actually happen? Perhaps a better way to ask the question would be: How bad can the Canadian economic and social situation be permitted to get before the United States is forced to take some sort of action?
It should be noted that discussions like the above would not have struck anyone as particularly unthinkable at any point in American history prior to about 1960. What’s changed? Like most of you, I’ve mostly grown up in an era defined by Fukuyama’s stupid-assed “end of history” and a belief that the liberal democracy was the final and inevitable form of every government on the planet. Here’s the problem: nobody read China or Russia or Iran or even Israel in on this state of affairs. All of those countries think that history is still happening, and that the future will be marked by the same sort of major geopolitical changes that have been a consistent and repeated part of the human experience since before the Neanderthals were, ahem, “absorbed” into the genome.
It is the height of privileged ignorance to genuinely think that history stopped and the borders of the world were all magically frozen into permanence circa 1992. There is nothing ordained in Heaven about the particular ownership of Greenland or the Panama Canal. For that matter, there is nothing ordained in Heaven about the current makeup of the United States. It could have fifty-one states ten years from now… or fifteen. You might want history to be over, but what you want will have little bearing on what actually happens. Watch and see.
Maybe resolve to give up franchise racing in 2025
Last week I mentioned that I’ll be racing at least three of my cars (the two Radicals and the Neon) across no fewer than 25 days this summer. I’ll drive with multiple SCCA regions, the independent WHRRI organization, and maybe one or two other providers — but not NASA, because at the end of 2024 the organization chose to accept my fees for a national membership and competition license renewal before secretly canceling those licenses without a refund.
As far as I can tell, this was done because Jay Andrew, the owner of the NASA Great Lakes Region franchise, didn’t like an email I sent to his race directors after some mouth-breathing moron driving a lapped-traffic Mustang chopped the nose off my Radical SR8 while I was leading the Super Unlimited category, and the entire race field, by something like twenty seconds, during a NASA race in April. I’ll publish the complete email in the near future, but this was probably the relevant part:
I'm asking the two of you privately to re-evaluate how lapped traffic is handled, before someone is seriously harmed or killed. It won't be me; I'm not bringing the SR8 back… I'll be delighted to see you both again at a NASA race. I just won't be racing something where I'm at this kind of risk. And I am not the only sports racer entrant from the weekend who feels the same way.
The way NASA handled the above concern was to secretly cancel my license in their “portal”. When I realized this had happened, I emailed the owner of the region for clarification. None was forthcoming. Instead, he waited a month before emailing my wife, explaining to her that I was no longer welcome to race in the region.
Presumably he only did that because he doesn’t actually have my mom’s email — “Dear Jack’s Mom, your son isn’t allowed to come over and play anymore, sincerely, Jay Andrew. P.S. You have to tell him, I’m not going to.”
I’ll be the first to admit that my relationship with NASA has been uniquely fractious. On the good side, I’ve won a regional championship, gotten a podium at Nationals, and set a few track records in the course of an undefeated season. On the negative side, I’ve was involved in four contact incidents between 2007 and 2024. Two of those involved no real damage to any car. The third was the other driver’s fault by his own admission after the fact. The fourth only damaged my Radical.
Perhaps more pertinently, I’ve repeatedly criticized the fundamentals of the NASA system in TTAC, Road&Track, the Hagerty website, and elsewhere. I always did so with a view towards spurring positive change from within — but now that I’m officially an outsider, I no longer feel any particular need to sugar-coat my dissatisfaction. So…
If you’re thinking about building a car to race in 2025, or if you’re not certain where you’ll be racing this year, allow me to give you a few reasons to choose the SCCA, which is not perfect, or any other nonprofit racing series over NASA:
As a privately held for-profit commercial enterprise that essentially sells franchises to regional operators, NASA is in no way answerable to racers either individually or as a whole. They can, and do, suspend and ban drivers with no genuine process of appeal or consideration. The SCCA, as a counter-example, always gives drivers one or more appeals in a process that is thoroughly documented and understood. What if I’d purchased or built a NASA-specific car for 2025, not knowing that I’d been secretly suspended?
The NASA model of having “group leaders” and “series leaders” who race in the own classes they “lead” is, in my opinion, abysmally stupid. A quick check of NASA Great Lakes results since 2006 shows a very high correlation between “group leader” or “series leader” and “series champion”. I’m aware of at least one highly controversial incident where a series leader declared a reverse grid shortly before the final race of the year — which just happened to give him the advantage, and the regional championship, over the driver who was leading the points going into that final race. That same “series leader”, by the way, then got involved in the production of parts for the series. Do you really want to race against the person who makes the rules and the parts?
NASA’s practice of having omnibus multi-class races occasionally leads to some real excitement for the spectators. This is not a compliment. A few years ago my region had a race that, as I recall, ended with a Spec Miata on top of a Thunder Roadster, because a Honda S2000 in yet another class spun ahead of them. NASA often has just two race groups for the same number and variety of cars that, in the SCCA, warrants five groups. This is because…
The primary focus of NASA, as far as I can tell, is selling HPDE and Time Trial slots. Which is great, if you’re an HPDE participant or Time Trialer. If you’re a racer, then you can expect a variety of negative consequences, from having the paddock continually terrorized by speeding Caymans with novice drivers behind the wheel to losing time in your sessions because the HPDE sessions take priority and therefore they are extended when there’s a black flag.
NASA has chosen to balance most of its non-spec race classes via dyno testing. In an era of multi-mapping and total computer control, this often feels like an open invitation to cheat. Also, your series leader will probably know in advance if the dyno is going to be there for compliance. When I raced in Performance Touring, I learned in a hurry that one buddy of the series leader would be what another series leader called “bad fast” on any weekend where the dyno didn’t show up. When they changed the series leader, that dude immediately failed a dyno test. Oops. At least he got about 12 free Hoosier tires for winning races before that happened!
The process by which NASA classes and balances cars is done, as far as I can tell, in total secrecy by about four people. There is no documented or established procedure to it. You’ll show up one season and your car has been penalized, or removed from the class, or put somewhere else. How did it happen? Your guess is as good as anyone else’s. Hope you didn’t have too much invested in that car!
If you want to spend any part of your career racing an actual race car, like something prototype-shaped or open-wheeled as opposed to a 2012 Mustang with stickers on it, you’re going to end up either in the SCCA or with a serious organization like Formula Race Productions. So why not start there, and see how the big boys do it?
I know two dozen people who have gone from NASA to SCCA. It’s been fifteen years since I met anyone who went the other direction. There are reasons for this.
If I could start my racing career again from scratch, I’d start with the SCCA immediately rather than wasting eight years with NASA. Not because the SCCA is beyond criticism — far from it, they just kicked my Radical SR8 out of Prototype 1 and back to GTX because someone on the classification committee thinks it’s a turbo — but because it is a club with real and documented policies and procedures for everything. They’re not always right, but they always try. Maybe the SCCA will, in fact, boot me out one day for mistakes I haven’t even started to make. It could easily happen. Let me tell you what won’t happen: they won’t do it via a passive-aggressive email to a woman.
If you’re building or buying a new race car, I recommend you do it with the SCCA in mind. The pace of change in the rules and classing is slower. You’ll likely enjoy your car for a longer period of time, and have more options to continue racing it when it is no longer competitive in the chosen class. (Example: I can race my Neon in Improved Touring, Super Touring, and Prepared.) They say the SCCA won’t be around forever, but only a fool would think that NASA stands a great chance of retaining racers against the continual encroachment of GridLife, WRL, and ChampCar.
If you’re a current NASA racer who would like advice and/or help on how to move to the SCCA, I’m willing to expend considerable personal effort on your behalf. Comment below or send me a chat request in Substack. I’ll help you leave a business and join a club. Thanks for reading.
Housekeeping: If you’re interested in history, theology, or both, don’t hesitate to check out Monday’s guest post about Epiphany.
With six you get eggroll.
Aren’t you banned from Canada?