Wednesday ORT: Dealer Negotiations, SVRA, China's Missing Cars, Mister Mayor

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Hello, friends! I’m coaching at a Viper Club event today so I’ll be a bit less loquacious than usual. Believe me, I already have a few stories to tell, and they will be told on Sunday.

It’s okay if you want to brag a little

There’s been some interest in doing a “how to buy a new car” post, or at least talking about dealer negotiations. It’s a fun topic even if you’re not in the market for a car; in many ways, auto dealerships are the last remnants of old-school American retail business. Motorcycle and powersports stores are even worse in that regard — most of the consumer protections Nader et al. got into law have never applied to them — but since most of you will never buy a new motorcycle it’s not as interesting.

When I was still a teenager I read the great Remar Sutton’s Don’t Get Taken Every Time, which was written during the real outlaw days of the biz. On an upcoming Sunday I’ll tell my favorite stories from that book and also share what’s changed since Sutton left the game. In the meantime — let’s hear your best dealership negotiation stories. And, if you’re brave enough, your worst ones, too.

In which a $179,000 race car meets a $394,500 race car, and is beaten

As many of you know, I view my ownership of a final-generation Radical SR8 as sort of a “game over” thing. I’m no longer successful or wealthy enough to own the luxury and/or exotic cars I drove when I was in my thirties, and in fact I wouldn’t even have the Radical had I not been lucky smart enough twenty-five years ago to accidentally buy a Porsche that appreciated to 4x what I paid for it. The Radical is my last and only “nice car”. When I crash it, I won’t even have that, and I’ll just be another middle-aged man driving a used Toyota to a lowered-expectations “career”. For the moment, though, I feel like the world’s luckiest fellow every time I fire it up.

In reality, however, Joe Cauley is the world’s luckiest fellow. He’s taller than I am, better-looking, and even has a little hair left. His very charming father owns Cauley Ferrari in Detroit. They’re trying to sell the Dallara EXP as a trackday car and club racer. The base price is $394,500.

Let me tell you: it’s worth the money. Cauley beat me like a rug at the SVRA Speedtour three times in a row last weekend, posting 1:25 laptimes around Mid-Ohio in the kind of murderous heat that had the SR8 gasping to hit just 151mph on the back straight while running a best 1:26.4.

The EXP is beautiful and cranks 500hp (plus push-to-pass!) from a turbo Duratec four against a dry weight of about 1,800 pounds. It can easily put two or three car lengths on my Radical each and every straight. But in the corners… it has more downforce than the Radical!

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for me, however. I had the chance to run against another Gen3 SR8, which I was able to beat in all three races. As a consolation prize, in the course of taking second overall I managed to sneak past a different Dallara:

That’s the ultra-competent Scott Dick driving a Dallara IPS, the V-8 car from the 2007 Indy Lights series. He’s a little older than I am so the 95-degree heat was harder on him than it was on me, allowing me to get ahead and stay ahead despite his car’s much more admirable performance envelope. Truthfully, readers, I’ve never felt better in the race car. Turns out doing a year’s worth of pull-ups and planking, instead of riding pump tracks and skateparks, actually pays off in these situations. Sorry, Dad, I know you tried to tell me before.

I also managed to get past a decent P2 car and Andrea Robertson’s 204mph Doran Ford GT. Here are the opening laps of Sunday’s race, where nobody has any grip:

So I took second place for the weekend. Mini Danger Girl was there as well, and her races were… interesting. We’re going to wait a week or so to talk about them, but here’s a hint: it involves yet another 60-something dude being difficult about losing to a girl.

Speaking of numbers that don’t add up

kevin williams, “sounding the siren”, and “blowing the horn”

Oh, this is bad news for the China-fluffers in the automotive media, which at last glance is almost everybody now. The CCCP is cracking down on the practice of grossly distorting publicly-reported sales numbers by registering unwanted new cars as “used cars” then dumping them to the Third World. Reuters reports:

These so-called "zero-mileage" cars have never been driven but they are being exported as used to markets like Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East, allowing Chinese automakers to show growth and to dispose of cars that it would be difficult to sell domestically… The support for the practice from local governments would make little sense anywhere outside China's centrally planned economy. But here, showing rapid growth in sales and employment can bring about promotion or unlock new funding while missing economic targets that trickle down from Beijing can lead to demotions of local officials.

Because these export firms both purchase and sell a single car, the transaction value is double that of new or used-car purchases, so local governments court them to set up shop on their turf to quickly and artificially boost their GDP statistics… The tactic is only one sign that China's car industry – the world's largest – is allowing production to outpace demand, driving a protracted domestic price war and spurring accusations of automotive "dumping" abroad.

I hope this makes it clear, even to the mouth-breathing Shanghai-fluffers in the auto-media associations, that the “unstoppable” Chinese EV operation is built on nothing but lies, market manipulation, back-door government support, and wishful thinking on everyone’s part. Not only are Chinese EVs not really the best-in-class superstars that will destroy Western makers upon arrival at any of our ports… they’re not even that popular in China!

This also makes it obvious just how important it is to have a strong tariff structure in place against Chinese automobiles. You might not like tariffs in general — I’m not thrilled with them right now, I just paid the US Government a lot of money over a shipment from my tailor — but if the Chinese government is fundamentally subsidizing the overproduction of these vehicles, the United States government needs to take strong action to protect our all-American, welfare-free, USA-worker-supporting automakers, by which I mean Honda.

A nepo baby brings the Shining Path to NYC

He’s never held a real job, he actively espouses socialism, and he thinks New York City should own and operate grocery stores for everyone. But unless the voters break with long tradition to choose a Republican or independent mayor, 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani is about to run the capital of the world, having won the election-in-all-but-name Democratic mayoral primary.

The former MoveOn employee and failed rapper is the son of a film director and an African Studies professor from Columbia. You couldn’t make this dude up, he’s like a character from the “Girls” HBO series. His platform, which is kinda vague but also sorta wacky, has a lot of ideas about how to spend the city’s $112.4 billion budget.

What fascinates me about this is that it was allowed to happen. The mayor of NYC has a lot more power over the city than, say, President Trump has over the country. He can let it turn into a crime-ridden murder capital, as Koch and Dinkins did; we call that “weak men bring hard times.” He can make it into a police state, as Giuliani did; we call that “hard times bring strong men.” He can grind the homeless and welcome global investment, as Bloomberg did; we call that “strong men bring good times”. And now we are in the final stage, namely: “good times bring weak men.”

Mamdani is the archetypical weak man. He has no idea what it’s like to live in a Seventies-era New York City. He grew up in the nicest part of a modern capitalist Disneyland and, like every suburban kid from every Rush song, wanted to tear it down.

While there was never any scenario in which your humble author was going to move back to NYC or even the commuter towns, I’m doubly glad to be in the township now — but I’m going make sure I get all my various trips to watch boutiques and important museums done now, before this moron releases the Khmer Rouge Kraken on Madison Ave.

Prediction: if he actually does half of what he says he’s gonna do, someone will have him killed, and pronto. In a very real way, New York City is the only downtown that genuinely matters, anywhere. The stakes are high. For us Country Mice, the amusement factor will be even higher.