Wednesday ORT: F1 AI, Big 10 Ferrari, Dopey Experts, SLS or SLR?

All readers welcome

yes, that is wood

Good afternoon, friends. Just like Apple TV’s F1 coverage, we start with the ads.

I was in The Free Press last week with an article on Chinese cars and their media fluffers. Paid subscribers to ACF also had a chance to read a 152-mph test drive of the Denza Z9 GT that offered additional insight beyond the FP article. At the Washington Examiner, I reviewed the latest Olivia Rodrigo album. Spoiler: it’s remarkably good.

I just received 40 hardcover copies of Cat Tales from the printer. For $30, I will ship one to you, signed as you like and with a limited-edition “Sparkle SNOBES” sticker. I take Venmo, Paypal, personal checks, cash, and medically pure ketamine in small baggies as payment. Email hardcover@cattalesbook.com to get in on this. Proceeds will be going towards Tiger Dad’s recent $330 vet bill, about which more later.

The day the computers turned on Princess George

If George Russell fails to win the WDC, last weekend’s race at Spa will perhaps be cited as the moment when he lost his last shred of hope. He was down on straight-line power for qualifying, a situation that some observers are blaming on the AI-powered adaptive-learning algorithms that, at most of the teams, now govern the availability of power from the battery. In other words, there’s a computer that has the ability to determine on the fly how much of the battery the driver is allowed to have at any given point. It might decide to choke the driver on corner exit to preserve the battery for later down the straight, and so on. So in George’s case, his AI might have had a different opinion from Kimi’s AI on where in the lap the battery would be most profitably discharged.

Yes, this is astoundingly stupid. F1 could ban it, but they have yet to do so.

George’s woes continued at the start, where his “SoC”, or State of Charge, changed down the straight and he was unable to fend off Lewis Hamilton, who then managed to wreck him out of the race without incurring any damage himself. This had the nifty effect of putting Hamilton into 2nd once again in the driver’s championship. Despite the awful nut-slurping noises from Jolyon Palmer and Alex Jacques about how it was “just a racing incident”, the stewards disagreed and hit Sir Lewis with a 5-second penalty that ended up having little effect on the race.

Max Verstappen’s brilliant charge to the front didn’t last, but he was able to hold onto a podium. Random thoughts on the race below:

• Whatever mental advantage Sir Lewis had over Leclerc is now completely gone. There is a 35-point gap between the two, but there are a lot of races left and if Leclerc takes the lead position more often than not this will be the fourth time in five seasons that Hamilton’s teammate has been paid significantly less than he was to score more points.

• Isack Hadjar really demonstrated his value to Red Bull this weekend, both as a teammate to Verstappen and in his own right. I don’t think he will ever be one of the greats, but he has certainly shaded his two predecessors in the seat. Laurent Mekies has claimed that Red Bull is getting calls from current F1 drives who are interested in a seat; increasingly it looks like that seat would be next to Hadjar rather than previously occupied by him.

• The superclipping and fast-turn downshifting is getting so bad that F1 TV is taking the speedometer and power graphs off the screen during some of the single-car footage. Surely everyone involved must understand that this is a major problem with the series, exacerbated by the “fussy AI” business discussed above. The 2027 and 2028 changes are band-aids. The obvious thing to do is to bring the 2031-proposed V-8 forward immediately and tell the teams they have open cost caps to develop an engine.

• During the final third of the race, I never once thought that Kimi Antonelli might crack or make a mistake under pressure. Had it been George up front, that would have been my only thought. This young man is everything he was supposed to be. There is probably one person on the grid who could consistently beat Kimi in the same car — and that person decided, wrongly, that he didn’t want a fifth world championship this year if it arrived wearing gloss silver and black.

I know I’m sad and old, because I love it

DK Engineering in the United Kingdom is selling a 2021 “Tailor Made” 812 Superfast. I don’t suffer from a lot of envy in my life but I openly envy anyone who has an F12berlinetta, an 812, or any development of that car. I had a chance to track an F12 and put 500 varied road miles on it way back in 2014 or thereabouts. I’m not sure I have ever loved a roadgoing sports car more; the various McLaren LTs absolutely bitch-slap it on track but then again my Radical SR8 is a cut above the McLarens so I don’t yearn for them the way I do for my very own front-engined V12 Ferrari. The minimum asking price on them now in the used market is half a million dollars and, sad to say, that’s more than fair.

And now I’ve found my favorite 812 of all, a “Tailor Made” program vehicle that self-consciously imitates a vintage 166.

Noted trackside photographer and car-culture critic Charlie Grafton calls it “the $600,000 version of one of those ‘Big Ten’ edition Silverados.” He is undoubtedly correct, just like I was undoubtedly correct to be horrified when my grandfather replaced his aesthetically perfect ice-blue 1979 Eldorado Biarritz with a pearl-white 1981 Eldorado Biarritz featuring the Rolls-Royce grille and faux-convertible top, but I now understand the sense of nostalgia that led Jack The First to make the swap.

The colors and interior choice are retro but they are also lovely. Most importantly, this car seems calculated to have absolutely zero appeal to: Arabs, tech bros, young hedge-fund types, and all the other people whose earnest patronage of Ferrari is a blight on the firm’s appeal… to people like me who can’t afford the product. Even if I had the (unspecified) asking price, I wouldn’t buy this 812; I’d buy an LMP2 and a newer Lexus sedan. Doesn’t matter. This is absolutely lovely to see and I hope more people take advantage of Tailor Made to create unashamedly road-focused, gentleman-operated Ferraris.

A vaccine for Gell-Mann Amnesia

The NACTOY jury has forty-nine members. About ten of them could be trusted to find their own ass with two hands and a flashlight. Five of them, to my knowledge, have ever successfully tried racing wheel-to-wheel: Lauren Fix, John Davis, Dan Carney, Henry Payne, and Steven Cole Smith. The rest are mommybloggers, buffet-browsing fossils, no-talent clowns, and Internet-personality wannabes. It is astounding what they don’t understand about cars — and this week, we will take a look at some remarkably confident, yet astoundingly ill-informed, comments by one of them.

The Car Collective is a Substack that claims to be written by credentialed industry veterans. One of them is NACTOY juror Gary Vasilash. In a July 20th piece about “affordability”, he makes some truly remarkable claims:

That is, in 2018 the average number of vehicles sold per dealership was 1,028. The average retail selling price was $35,608. In 2025 the average number of vehicles sold per dealership was 955. But the average retail setting price was $48,205.

Looked at from the point of view of total revenue, in 2018 it was $36.6 million and in 2025 it was $46 million, or a 25.7% increase in revenue with 7.1% fewer vehicles sold. Sure, the average 2025 vehicle costs a lot more. But when it comes to the transactions, the 2025 scenario was better from the sales side. What’s more—and it truly is more—NADA has it that the average dealership revenue in 2018 was $61.23 million and $76.60 million in 2025—or a 25% increase in total dealer revenue.

Emphasis above is mine, because it’s about to be funny. That 25% number for revenue increase from 2018 to 2025 seemed suspiciously familiar, and it should:

CPI inflation from January 2018 to January 2025 is 28.18 percent. So it turns out that “what’s more — and it truly is more” turns out to be less.

Now, there’s an actual useful tidbit in Vasilash’s data, which was earlier in his article. He notes that dealerships got this 25% increase on a 7.1% decrease in vehicles sold. So even if we adjust properly for inflation, we are still seeing a slight rise above general consumer inflation in the price of vehicles. Cars cost more than they used to, even after you take the dollar out of the picture. Since Gary isn’t familiar with esoteric graduate-college economic concepts like “inflation”, however, he missed the actual significance of the numbers.

But wait, there’s more funny stuff:

Consider that there was a 35.4% increase in the selling price between the years 2018 and 2025. Odds are the dealer invoice price—as in what it pays to the OEM for the vehicle—didn’t rise 35.4% but something more along the likes of 15% to 20%.

Consequently, the dealer has a better gross profit per unit.

So it isn’t a matter of selling more. It is a matter of making more.

And more expensive vehicles allow dealers to make more.

This assertion can really only be explained by the fact that Michigan has about the cheapest legal marijuana in the continental 48 states. (This also explains how “Big Gretch” stays around, I think.) If Vasilash is correct in his assertion, then it means that the margin between dealer invoice and MSRP is close to 25%. Vasilash uses Cadillac Escalades in his article, as an example of a high-priced, extremely profitable vehicle, citing the Escalade-V as the most profitable.

If Gary’s calcuations are correct, then the dealer invoice on a $161,990 Escalade-V should be about $121,500, and the dealer would take home $40,490 on every Slade-V sold, plus the 3% holdback and any direct-to-dealer incentives. As it happens, however, the invoice price — and this is a publicly available number — on the truck is… drumroll… $153,990. That is a five percent margin. On the most expensive vehicle that Cadillac actually sells.

BMW and Mercedes have margins closer to seven percent; Honda and Toyota often have margins in the four percent range. It’s true that if you could set the time machine to 1980 you’d find Lincoln Town Cars with a 20% invoice-to-MSRP gap — but a 1981 Escort would have been eleven percent max. The margins have squeezed a lot since then.

In fairness, these numbers don’t represent the actual cost picture for a car sitting on a dealer lot. You subtract holdback, you subtrack some incentives — then you add floorplan cost, which is much higher than it was in 2018, and you add insurance cost, which is skyrocketing as our vibrant technicolor dreamcoat crowd of diverse true Emma Lazarus Americans becomes increasingly interested in trashing dealership lots and stealing the inventory thereof.

Had Gary bothered to pick up the phone and call a single dealer principal at any point in the last fifty years of his automotive journalism career, he also would have learned that dealerships love volume. Turning inventory is a primary passion of a dealership. There are many, many programs that pay them more for volume. The banks pay them more in F&I kickbacks when they sell more cars. Increased turnover can even decrease floorplan costs if you finance with a captive like Ford Motor Credit. There is a reason a Lexus dealership is worth more than a Ferrari dealership, and that reason is: volume.

Vasilash and others like him are the people who pick your Car of the Year, who infest the print magazines, who serve as “industry experts” on panels and suchlike. It’s all a scam, it’s all worthless. There’s a reason the autowriting business has collapsed in favor of shiny-faced influencers: it deserved to.

Turns out they’re just about equal, in a way

Two Mercedes-Benz grand tourers with wacky doors, both alike in dignity. The SLR was the much-ballyhooed collaboration with McLaren. It cost $495,000 in 2005, which would be $875,000 now. It ran 11.6@125 courtesy of a 617-horsepower specially fettled take on the 5.5-liter supercharged V-8 that Mercedes-Benz slapped in everything including the CL55 I used to drive to work. It was hand-built at the McLaren Technology Centre using a carbon-fiber monocoque. The doors went up in dihedral fashion. The nose was very, very, very long for no reason anyone understood.

The market has never really liked the car, not least because around the same time you could buy an SL65 AMG that went exactly as fast for around one-third the price.

The next time Mercedes-Benz did a unique GT car, they did it themselves. The SLS cost $232,000 in 2013, which is $337,000 today. It ran 11.9@123 courtesy of a 583-horse version of the in-house 6.2 (badged 6.3) liter AMG V-8. It had gullwing doors:

For the record, The Commander was a massive fan of the SLS back in the day and I took every opportunity to give him a ride in the cars. I wonder if he remembers.

While everyone loves the SLS Black Series, which I drove with murderous abandon during a couple of different tests and pronounced the greatest thing since sliced bread, the jury was more ambivalent on the standard car and there were a few years where you could get a silver one with no options for $105,000, give or take.

Well, an SLR and a base SLS both closed on Bring-A-Trailer today. Which one fetched more money? Take your guess… then scroll

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A low-mileage SLR for $391,000. That’s all the money, isn’t it? What about the SLS?

Same color, same low mileage because I’d say 1,700 miles on a 2013 isn’t morally distant from 7,000 miles on a 2005, and a hammer price of $405,000.

Which car will history venerate more? If you come back fifty years from now, which will be more expensive? My money is on the SLR. The older the cars get, the less likely they are to be driven, at which point the remarkable pedigree of the SLR will come to mean more than the AMG-built status of the SLS. The fact that the latter car is a little easier to drive and maintain won’t matter much.

A friend of mine came to see me last week, driving his newly-acquired stick-shift 991 Carrera. “Everything costs too much now, and everything’s awful,” he opined, which is an odd thing to say when you’re in a nice new-to-you Porsche but is perhaps justified by what he had to pay to get it. And he is kind of right. It is ridiculous that the SLS costs so much. Would you like a much better and faster car, running 11.2@130 and capable of lapping either of the above piggies in a single 25-minute session? Then you want this, photographed by the mighty Matt Tierney as I was zooming around NCM at a pace just a little short of what JR Hildebrand did in a flippin’ Senna:

One of these is for sale, right now, in Ohio, in this color even. The price is just $138,995. It is a better car than the SLR or SLS. Faster, more usable in the real world, much more competent on track. A real joy. Now, if I had $138,995 sitting around, I still wouldn’t buy it. I’d buy a rebodied Elan sports prototype and go win the P-class at the SCCA Runoffs. But if you buy it, I’d sure like another session behind the wheel. Today’s column is concluded; go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.