Wednesday ORT: Bah-RAIN, Dragged Out, Shagged-uar, No DUI For DACA, Not So Neue?

All readers welcome

Good afternoon, friends. Let’s start with a brief commercial message:

Less new content than The Itchy And Scratchy Movie

It’s been called “one of the books released this year”, and now it can be yours: the paperback and Kindle versions of Rodney Redux are available to buy on Amazon. Unlike Cat Tales, this is a true anthology. Everything you’ll read was previously published at some point between 2011 and 2025. However, every story has been revised, clarified, and (where appropriate) expanded. Owning this book will also save you from having to wade through the bizarre omissions, technical errors, and click-through links that now infest and degrade TTAC. As before, I’ll have a few “Meow and Dent” early paperbacks with approximately 15 annoying typos for sale. Each will ship with what I think is a hilarious “Rodney” sticker, and can be signed as you request. Due to the annoyances of Amazon’s publication system, I still don’t have the books even though I know they are flawed, but you can contact me now at hardcover@cattalesbook.com to reserve your copy.

If you’re part of Kindle Unlimited, you can read the book there; please do so, or at least flip through the pages in a convincing fashion so I get paid.

A reminder: this is an NC-17 book and then some, so don’t buy it for your grandmother unless she’s a real G… randmother.

The return of the king

One suspects this will be the second year in a row where Red Bull’s slightly laggy development robs Max Verstappen of a championship. He was one caused-by-Kimi-Antonelli crash away from it last year; this year he is probably three George Russell crash-outs away from being able to come back and win it all. Had Kimi and George split the early races, it might have been possible. Alas, Princess George continues to suffer from problems not of his own making; he will also be taking a grid penalty at Singapore due to the power unit failure.

It’s worth nothing that Max probably didn’t have the fastest car; that honor would go to the Ferrari. But he had Hannah Schmitz where Ferrari appears to have either an early version of ChatGPT or a Magic 8 Ball (“All signs point to SLICKS.”) Other notes:

• This whole Bahrain-in-Malaysia thing was wild. They had a massive “Bahrain pavilion”, and the announcers were scrupulous about their track nomenclature. Expect this to be a killer trivia question in thirty years: “Name the country where the 2026 Bahrain GP was held.”

• I adore Sepang, not least because I took second place at my lone event there in 2013, and the quality of this race just makes it obvious that we should always have had it on the calendar. It’s a great track. The fans are great. It’s down the road from Singapore but attracts a different audience. We could stand to lose the COTA race in favor of a reanimated Malaysian GP.

• F1 is rightly embarrassed about the ECU lockups during the warmup laps, but remember that this is bleeding-edge racing of a sort; not every situation can be anticipated. In the end, the problem was sorted in a hurry.

• Sir Lewis distinguished himself during the race, both as a driver and an amateur strategist, but the British press was so busy licking Hamilton’s toes for pulling off the 18th-to-3rd move that they ignored Leclerc’s 22nd-to-4th. Charles doesn’t even appear on this week’s official Power Rankings, while Lewis is third. Without a Mercedes power unit failure, they’d have been 4th and 5th, hardly worth celebrating in what is clearly the fastest car on the grid.

• The much-feared Mercedes upgrade appears to have been a complete mistake, at least for Sepang. It hardly matters. If Kimi skipped four of the next seven races, he would still only have to beat George in the last three. This championship is effectively won. However, it is still quite possible for Max to finish third.

• Is this the beginning of the Aston renaissance? Alonso, like Max and Pierre Gasly in the second half of his career, tends to flatter the car. Lance Stroll’s 12th-place is more reflective of the actual pace, one suspects. Discussion for today: Where would Lance be if you put him as second driver in the top four teams?

We go immediately to Singapore, and my only regret is that I’ll have to (pretend to) pay attention to my own race and the races of my family before I can get home and watch it.

Heart like a weasel

It’s the worst thing to happen to drag racing in anyone’s memory. Darryl Cuttrell, owner of a company (Darana Hybrid) that outfits and equips warehouses, bought the IHRA, which is to the NHRA like the ABA was to the NBA (kinda). He spent tons of money and bought a lot of tracks. Then everything collapsed. Now the tracks are set to auction off. This is devastating for the sport. Perhaps Cuttrell saw himself as a straight-line Bruton Smith, but in the end he was more like Carly Fiorina or Eddie Lampert.

Three of his tracks are in Ohio; they represent the vast majority of drag racing here and possibly all the quarter-mile tracks as Norwalk and a few others are doing eighth-mile racing now. Will all of these facilities become data centers? I doubt it, as most of them barely had enough power and access to work as dragstrips. Still, this is an outstanding example of how not to be a caretaker. Hoping to achieve legendary status in drag racing, Darryl Cuttrell will now be remembered as the man whose ineptitude betrayed the sport, perhaps fatally so.

I take back everything I said about the X-Type diesel

The new Jaguar is here, and it’s awful.

While it’s certainly possible to make the case that Jaguar always sold the general appearance of an upscale British car without the attendant price, engineering certainty, or build quality — the late LJK Setright made that case every chance he got — the “Type 01” is about to take that proposition to the levels of parody. This new Jag is a pastiche of faux-Phantom-esque pretensions, battery-powered to the tune of 1,015 horsepower and commanding a minimum $130,500 pricetag. The only thing genuinely “Jaguar-esque” about it is the “reverse-TARDIS” combination of massive exterior size and cramped accommodations familiar to anyone who ever tried to put four people in an XJ-S. Four-wheel-steering will help it park, and at 206 inches it will need the help. This car is the size of an S-Class but appears to have the interior room of a 190E, largely thanks to the E-Type-proportioned bonnet.

Of course, the E-Type (and the XJ-S) had either six or twelve cylinders to hide beneath that bonnet. The Type 01 has… a frunk? Batteries? Nothing?

As a former Series III XJ6 Vanden Plas owner I’m horrified by this crass, ill-proportioned, absolutely unjustifiable late-term abortion of an EV. So I asked The Autopian’s Adrian Clarke for an alternative viewpoint. You’ll be able to find his thoughts in detail tomorrow morning at that site, and I’ll update this paragraph with the appropriate link when it’s ready. Adrian says, via e-mail:

We live in an age of flattened culture. The algorithm dictates aesthetics and taste. Coffee shops are all have exposed bricks and string lights. You will drink a small batch IPA. New consumer products invariably end up with rounded corners and come in various shades of griege. Human interactions have been replaced by apps with soft fonts and purple to orange gradient backgrounds. The flip side to this unthreatening bouba-slop norm, is that it opens up space on the outside for hyper-targeted products aimed at very specific audiences. The splashy hyper-neon corporatism of Bungie’s “Marathon” is one of the most distinctive and original art styles seen in a computer game for decades, and like the Jaguar attracted eye rolling amounts of outrage. But the people who love the game (myself included) – really, really love it. By making the Type 01 exterior hostile to external audiences and the interior welcoming to Linkedin AI thought leaders, Jaguar is undoubtedly counting on the buying power of Silicon Valley HNWIs to achieve the same result.

Thank you for that reasoned and intelligent run-down, Mr. Clarke. As for me, I’ll tell you what the Type 01 deserves:

They’ll drink to that

we all knew she looked like this

We all know that Virginia is not the place to speed. Former Jalop Patrick George did three days in jail ten years ago when he took a Camaro ZL1 to 93 in a 55. (Astoundingly, he would then go on to crash a different Camaro at Belle Isle; maybe he should just stay away from Camaros.) And if you think they are hard on speeders, you should see what they do to drunk drivers. We’re talking jail time, ignition interlocks, and a Class 1 misdemeanor — for the first offense. Virginia grinds the living shit out of drunks.

Unless, of course, they’re one of the 500,000 illegal immigrants granted de facto citizen status due to DACA. Then the state opens its loving arms and finds alternative solutions. Last week, the House Judiciary Committee questioned Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti regarding her office’s policy of waiving DUI charges for illegal immigrants. She admitted under oath that her office will reduce or change DUI charges if the drunk in question is here illegally, stating

Generally, in Northern Virginia, with a non-elevated BAC, a first offense would not necessarily result in jail time to begin with… DACA recipients and others have been subject to prosecutions, fines, and jail just like anyone else — just not MORE than anyone else. It is the disproportionate collateral consequences that we are trying to manage, and it is for everyone that comes before us, whether it be housing, employment, or immigration status, as long as it is consistent with public safety.

Emphasis mine. To be clear, she is referring to the fact that a DUI can cause a DACA recipient to be deported. Under Presidents Obama and Biden, this did not happen; the general response of the Federal government was to pet the drunk DACAer on the head and say, “You little rascal, run along now!” However, President Trump has deported about 100 DACA recipients due to their criminal behavior, so Mrs. Dehghani-Tafti, who is a native of Iran, has consequently decided that protecting the immigrants is more important than protecting Virginia’s motorists. In colloquial terms, this is called “Brock Turnering”, which is a term I just made up for supporting the bright futures of young people who are more important than the lower-status people around them.

In retrospect, it’s obvious what Patrick George should have done when he was pulled over: responded with a brief “no hablo” before stealing the trooper’s Taser and going buck wild on the fellow’s ball sack.

It could have gone a lot worse

Welcome the not-quite-Neue 3-series, available starting at $51,250 for the 255-horsepower turbo-four sedan and $67,250 for an M350 with all-wheel-drive and a combined 437 horsepower (420 ICE, 17 EV) from a turbo three-liter straight six.

While the i3 and iX3 are all new, and I’ll have an iX3 review for you next week, the car you see above is just a facelifted-and-revamped version of the car already acclaimed as “the best modern BMW” by our friend(s) at Gen X Garage Talk. Of course, it has more screens than does its illustrious predecessor:

BMW used this revamp as an excuse to remove the manual transmission globally; it wasn’t required by emissions or regulatory standards but why not do it?

There’s some value here, as the new car offers a bit more in regards to electronic features while not really costing any more. The 4-cylinder is all the car anyone really needs and the M350 will be more than anyone really needs. If the iX3 I just drove is any indication, the interior will be quite upscale in person. The pasted-on Neue Klasse looks are, in my opinion, a bit of an improvement on what came before.

I’ll give BMW full credit for not abandoning the compact-sedan format. It still matters to many of us. And there’s some satisfaction to be had from the fact that today’s NPC-types all buy crossovers. When you see someone behind the wheel of this car, regardless of color, powertrain, or option load, you’ll know that you’re in the presence of someone who likes driving and wants to do it well.

Would I buy one? Hell no. I’d buy this:

It’s an old, old, old car. Which, sadly, is the best recommendation you can give nowadays.