Wednesday ORT: F1, 500, Charlotte, Stoops, Auction Report, SpaceX Slander
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Good afternoon, friends. We have a couple of ACF Classifieds. From Hurin3:
I have a 1989 F150 XLT Lariat for sale. Club Cab, 8 foot bed. 4x4. Little visible rust, none on the wheel arches. Some bad clear coat. Interior is pretty nice, with a split in the drivers seat upholstery. I moved from MD to PA a couple years ago, and ran this in MD on historic tags, which Maryland is uncharacteristically lax about. It has not been inspected in PA. I just replaced the cracked windshield, and replaced the tires a couple years ago. Who knows what it would cost me to register it in PA. It’s too big for my driveway, and SWMBO says it must go.
Known issues:
Weak starter. Doesn’t like to start when the engine is hot. Drivers window doesn’t work. Oil pressure switch doesn’t work I’ve replaced it twice. Front brakes/hubs click, stop when braking
I’m in York, PA
Wouldn’t you enjoy driving a real pickup like this? Sure you would. Contact me to be put in touch.
From yours truly, the author, we have an Astounding Porsche Wheel Deal for 986 Boxsters and, with some thought, 987 Boxsters as well. I have one set of OEM Boxster twists, 18x7.5 and 18x9. I bought them from a PCA member in 2005 and rattlecanned them brown to match my 550 Spyder Edition. These were track wheels and never got subjected to road use. They have old Falken RT615s on them now. I also have a set of Moda 5-spoke 18” wheels with Pirelli Sottozero snow tires on them. $800 for the factory wheels, $500 for the Modas. Paid subscribers take $100 off each set. Trackday Club members take 50% off. And don’t forget, Trackday Club members are now part of the ever-expanding Moonswatch/G-Shock/Orient Loaner Program. I’ve already sent out two watches and would like to send more.
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I’m sorry, Toto, but your Princess George is in another castle!
Never in my life have I been so strongly tempted to watch an entire race weekend with the volume muted. The F1TV/Apple coverage this weekend amounted to a non-stop fellation of Sir Lewis Hamilton, who skipped the simulator!! and has never been so comfortable in the Ferrari! and looks like the Lewis of old! Then he battled his nemesis Verstappen and came out on top!
Let’s take a less deranged look at the situation:
Lewis outqualified Leclerc for the sprint then ran into the wall and ended up 6th against his starting position of 5th. This is hardly luminiscent stuff.
Lewis qualified 5th for the race, ahead of Max in 6th. The two McLarens started on intermediates and disappeared for an early pit stop, moving Lewis up to third. Then George blew up, which guaranteed Lewis 2nd. Max passed him in a weaker car but Lewis was eventually able to catch back up and take 2nd place.
In other words, Lewis didn’t actually make a single place all weekend. Which didn’t stop the official F1 site from giving him first place in the Power Rankings, well ahead of Kimi (who won the race) and Max (who nearly beat him in a much slower car). At least they had the decency to also rank Colapinto first, because he finished sixth in an Alpine. I know the British establishment loves Lewis but this weekend’s coverage was somewhere between “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and “raceplay fetish”.
Now for the hilarious part: Sir Lewis is currently second in the World Championship despite having never been a threat to win a race and generally trailing his teammate by between five and fifty seconds at the end of every event. Who saw that coming? Certainly not George Russell, who even before Toto pressed the “Valtteri Blow-Up Button” on his Mercedes had been the subject of a comprehensive de-pantsing by a 19-year-old for the fourth race in a row.
Princess George is cooked. He is chopped. It requires no great feat of imagination to think that he will be out of a job next year. This was supposed to be his year, but instead it is Kimi Antonelli’s year. Comparisons to the Norris/Piastri kerfluffle of 2025 do not apply, for one important reason, namely: every single person at McLaren from Zak down to the floor-mopper desperately wanted Lando to come back and beat Piastri, but at Mercedes that role of “teacher’s pet” will belong to Kimi until Max reluctantly agrees to win two or three more world championships with AMG power. George knows he is fundamentally unwanted, and while you can imagine a more stubborn and mentally fit driver like Alonso or even Mark Webber thriving in that situation, the Princess will not thrive.
This is deeply upsetting to me because George is my idea of the perfect modern F1 driver away from the track. He is handsome. He wears real clothes. He basically bullied IWC into making a Princess George watch by hiring Bamford to prototype it. In the words of Nickelback, look at this photograph! Doesn’t he look exactly like a race driver from a movie?
Next to George Russell, little Kimi Antonelli looks like he should be delivering pizzas for Sal’s in Bed-Stuy. (More on that in a minute). Alas, it would appear that George only looks like a world champion. Kimi Antonelli is going to be a world champion.
Unless, that is, the Red Bull gets a couple of fixes.
The value of a great last lap
I don’t know what to think about Vintage Spec Dallara as a series but it’s hard to argue against the general competitiveness and crowd interest of the Indy 500 in its current configuration. There’s a NASCAR-ish sense of “pretty much anyone can win”, which I dislike but plenty of people enjoy. This was a very decent race, albeit one in which quite a few cars were trashed.
Mick Schumacher got Rookie of the Year, which was nice, and survived a bump against the wall.
Felix Rosenqvist deserved to win the race, and he wasn’t going to let a red flag stop him. His last lap has already been called “the greatest lap in Indy 500 history”. It was the closest finish to be sure. It shows the strength and the weaknesses of the spec format; when all the cars are the same it’s often just a matter of conserving momentum and having some luck.
Katherine Legge had a not-really-her-fault crash to start her double weekend.
Here comes the rain again
Sometimes the race off pit lane is the race — and that was the case at the Coca-Cola 600, which ended under rain conditions with Daniel Suarez up front. This was MDG’s first weekend as an authentic NASCAR employee, which means she is no longer free to give her opinions on why certain cars did or did not win the race. Having heard her off the record, however, I think she is right.
Katherine Legge had more bad luck with a damaged front corner, but let’s give her credit for being fit enough to compete in both races. This is a rare accomplishment and doubly so for a female racer.
The unexpected end of the race didn’t do too much to harm Tyler Reddick, who is out in front by a truly remarkable amount. His lead isn’t that much less than Kimi Antonelli’s.
The cars are okay, the bids are not that great
Our friend Greg Smith, with whom I once took an overall ChampCar win back in the Obama era, listed his Abarth on Cars and Bids. Had he asked me, I’d have told him not to do that, because you always get more money on BaT. A mutual friend said that “at six grand, this car is Grand Theft Auto.” Yet that’s where it wound up, with a final bid of $6,100.
I bopped over to BaT to see what Abarths like Greg’s fetch:
The bottom line is that no Abarth in any condition has ever failed to fetch more than $6,100 on Bring-a-Trailer. Period, point blank. Friends don’t let friends list their vehicles on Cars and Bids. Spread the word. Even “regular traffic” does better; I recently saw a manual-transmission late-model Forester go for $21k when the CarGurus listings are in the $15k range. I’m not saying I’m a fan of Hearst or Randy Nonnenberg or any of the players involved, but the facts are plain: Bring-a-Trailer gets you the most money for almost anything.
“Aesthetically, it’s not as good”
The internet is up in arms about an episode of the social media series “Subway Takes” in which a Saudi-born Pakistani nepo-baby producer who moved to New York City in her twenties tells an Egyptian comedian who moved to New York City in his twenties that “White people should not be allowed to sit on stoops in Bed-Stuy”.
Bed-Stuy, for those of you living decent and fulfilling lives outside the eight-figure-population rabbit warren of the Tri-State Area, is the Brooklyn neighborhood called Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s featured in the famous Spike Lee film, “Do The Right Thing”, in which a block erupts in violence against an Italian pizzeria owner after the NYPD kills a “gentle giant” in their community1. If you’re a Gen X or younger New Yorker, you probably think of it as an historically Black neighborhood…
…but the name of the place should clue you in a bit. This neighborhood was laid out in the eighteenth century and largely built in the nineteenth. Germans built the houses, Irish bought them later. Not until the Thirties did it have much black presence at all, but from 1930 to 1990 the percentage of black residents went from ten to ninety.
Once “Giuliani came in and deaded shit,” to quote the great Ja Rule, New York City was on its way to the theme park it would become for real under Bloomberg, at which point Bed-Stuy became a viable place for white people to live. Today, the stone townhouses that lined the setting of “Do The Right Thing” would be worth between $1.5M and $3M. This was called “gentrification”, which everyone knows is awful.2
Which leads us to the “Subway Take”:
AROOJ: White people should not be allowed to sit on stoops in Bed-Stuy.
KAREEM: Wow, 100%… disagree!
AROOJ: What???
KAREEM: Let the white people sit on the stoop.
AROOJ: Oh My God. (In stereotypical “7-Eleven voice”, possibly as self-parody.)… It looks bad.
KAREEM: It does look bad. Aesthetically, it’s not as good.
AROOJ… those historic brownstones… I mean, I have lived in Bed-Stuy for 12 years, and I too do not sit on my stoop… I take one for the team… and I feel as more and more white people are moving into Bed-Stuy, and messing up the vibes, and having, like, our favorite bars and our favorite places close down… they should not be inviting their friends to come here and sit on the stoop.
KAREEM: …I just want my white fans to know, I love you.
Let’s face it: if Brother Bark and I sat in the bed of my F-250 and we broadcast a conversation about how black people shouldn’t have the right to come to my township and sit outside in public in front of their own homes, we would be publicly executed by a roving unit of the People’s Justice Army. This is a conversation of staggering, insane racism.
Plenty of people have pointed out that “stoop” itself is a word borrowed from the Dutch, who originally settled the area and whose ideas attached themselves to the architecture and language of New Amsterdam, later New York. Plenty of other people have pointed out that Arooj’s family wealth comes from literal slave trading. One person photographed her name on the takeout list at a “slop bowl place that opened six months ago lmao”.
There are two ways to look at this. The first one is cynical and it’s best expressed by this Tweet:
It’s worth noting that you have to be a transplant to have these kinds of ideas or even that level of romanticism about NYC. Two weeks ago I found myself walking through Rowayton with one of my relatives who opined, in response to my request for dining suggestions outside the 3 or 4 places I always eat in the city, “You know, we tried to eat in the city as little as possible. It was where you had to go to work. We were not really happy to be there. The idea was to leave as quickly as you could and get back to a restaurant in Westchester or somewhere.”
My long-time guitar teacher, a native New Yorker and Italian-American, left the city not that long after I did, and he will always cap some astounding story about having Larry DiMarzio rewind his pickups or gigging with Bill Frissell with “Well, of course, shortly after that we got lucky enough to move to Ohio.” Let’s face it: if NYC had been anything other than a tenement-heavy, garbage-juice nightmare for most of the past three hundred years, the United States would be basically Singapore. There wouldn’t be any human settlement past I-95.
Ah, but then you take a week like I did with the Commander and Mini Danger Girl, and you go to all the great clubs, and you walk on the High Line, and you see all the shops that have everything you might possibly want in stock rather than back at the warehouse, and you visit the Guggenheim… and you see the romance of the city. You’re just walking down Fifth and you see The Little Prince! And hey, over there is the Dakota! If all you ever did in New York was play music and eat interesting meals and wander aimlessly, you would think it was the greatest place in the world.
Well, for rich kids like Kareem and Arooj, that is their experience. They have two-million-dollar homes and they can do whatever they want with their time. To them, the city is a theme park with Tomorrowland (Billionaire’s Row) and Adventureland (Central Park) and Cultureland (the Village) and so on. So I can see why they are upset.
Anyway, that’s the cynical take on the Subway Take. The more black-pilled one: you’re watching an exercise of power. You are watching two wealthy immigrant transplants set the rules for civil behavior in New York City. They just got here, they are neither American nor African-American, but they have the ability to dictate to both of those groups. Arooj can buy a brownstone with daddy’s money, and then she gets to be difficult about white people sitting on the stoops. She and Kareem get to sit on the subway in perfect safety because of hard-nosed people like Rudy Giuliani, and they get to do a little TV show of sorts. Because they have power, and you don’t.
If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a Pakistani woman telling you what you’re allowed to do in America… forever. And why not? Isn’t the mayor Muslim? Put the whites and the blacks together — basically, everyone in “Do The Right Thing” but the girlfriend and the convenience-store owner — and they are 49% of New York. More importantly, neither of those groups has the self-awareness to pursue their own interests in the city, while many of the incoming groups do have that self-awareness and will be as aggressive in setting up their power structures as “Boss Tweed” was for the Scots and Irish of Tammany Hall.
It will be interesting to see what happens, but I think the first thing likely to happen in the Mamdani era is that it won’t be safe to do “Subway Takes” for much longer. I can’t imagine my mother wearing an Arooj’s worth of gold jewelry on the subway in 1971. I don’t think anyone will be able to do it in 2031.
Did you hear the Starship blew up?
Some people say that Alaska is the last frontier, which is why my son went there last week to hike in the mountains. (He didn’t die, and he didn’t even fall asleep in an old transit bus.) Others say the city is the last frontier, and that’s closer to being true; the major cities of the world are the only places that are never the same place twice.
As long as Elon Musk lives, however, there’s another frontier, and it’s space. Much has been made of the Starship “disaster” this past week, usually accompanied by video of the Starship main unit blowing up. While it’s true that the booster segment failed to land itself properly, the Starship itself did just fine. Its explosion afterwards was according to schedule; apparently it’s cheaper to build another Starship than it is to go get an existing one out of the Indian Ocean.
If we have a future off this planet — and a lot of very smart people don’t think we do, for many good reasons — then it will start with the Starship and its descendants. This is why I will always admire Musk without any concern for what anyone else thinks. It’s highly instructive to see what people do with money and power. Bill Gates tried to change the demographic makeup of the world to something he likes better. Larry Ellison put his kid in charge of the media and bought a bunch of stuff. Steve Jobs paid attorneys to keep his daughter away. Ted Turner bought a ranch the size of Israel and wouldn’t let anyone go there. Most people with nine figure net worth just want a condo in a major city, to always fly private, and to not see any poor people, ever.
Elon Musk, by contrast, wants to go to the stars. How can you not admire that?
I thought it was a great film at the time, and it arguably still is a great film, but like much of the best art it uses its excellence to push themes and agendas that, when filtered through lesser talent, become something between tiresome and actively harmful. How many people saw the death of George Floyd through the lens of “Radio Raheem”? The answer to that is, almost certainly: a lot of powerful people.
Whites leaving a neighborhood — “white flight”. Whites moving back in — “gentrification”. Both outcomes are scorned, and participation in either outcome makes you a bad person. This is the language of power.