Wednesday ORT: F1 Test, Buick's Hard R, Peace and Quiet, Porsche Unplugs, Deadly DSP

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oh, come on, they couldn’t even get the “tv” perspective right

We’re running a bit behind this week because I have been, as the phrase goes, sick unto death for three days. Things are a little better now. Let’s jump into it.

Lewis is the winner!

Before we discuss the results of the “pre-pre-season” F1 test, I’d like to take a moment to recognize the scale of what the teams have collectively achieved. Nine of the ten teams managed to show up with all-new cars, powered by all-new engines. They are painfully restricted on how, where, and for long they can test the car as a whole or even components on an individual basis. Yet they had fewer failures, in total, than one might expect from a single Cadillac dealer’s Escalade inventory. This is a testament to how thoroughly the teams can prototype and develop in the virtual space.

I think the new cars look great. It’s a shame they rely so heavily on their batteries, but on the positive side that helps minimize competitive differences between engines. Speaking of: five engine manufacturers! What a time to be alive! All we need now is for Michelin to get back in the game.

It would be ridiculous to assume anything based on times from an ad-hoc reliability test, but Lewis was fastest. You will perhaps recall that his stated reason for moving between teams was his confidence that Ferrari had the best 2026 package. Maybe he was right! Unfortunately, even in this situation he is still Rubens to Leclerc’s Michael.

(Speaking of Lewis: For the record, Sir Lewis, I am totally convinced by your completely real relationship with Kim Kardashian that absolutely involves regular heterosexual stuff and is in no way fake! You’re basically James Hunt!)

It’s a shame Williams didn’t show up, but I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from it. James Vowles knows very well that his sponsor bread is best buttered with a few shocking podiums rather than a consistent 5th-place team performance, so reliability is less important than chasing a potential performance peak.

Everyone says the Aston looks weird — I think some of that is because people want it to look weird, they want Newey to have come up with yet another shocking idea. Painting the car a matte black that resists photography was a master stroke, however.

Early indications are that the cars will exhibit more slip angle and more handling variance at the limit. This surely plays into the hands of the traditional “wheelmen” in the field: Alonso, Hamilton, Verstappen… and, I’m calling it right now, Gasly.

With just a month left before the start of hostilities, I think this season will be one to remember. If I had to place a bet right now on the WDC, I would choose Max, but that’s just because he is the finest driver in the sport, not because I think Red Bull’s mousetrap is any better than anyone else’s.

Not too late to delete this, cuz

If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent a lot of time wondering, “When will I have a chance to hear the N-word in a General Motors advertisement?” Well, friends, I’m pleased to report that Buick kicked off Black History Month by doing exactly that.

Of course, they’ve done it late; Kendrick Lamar had a (cut-up) Buick GNX on stage at the Super Bowl last year, and GM did nothing to capitalize on that. Instead, they waited a year and released the lamest possible take on it:

@buickusa

Buick on Instagram: "Real recognizes real.

GNX meets Buick Env…

”Real recognizes real. GNX meets Buick Envista.” Okay, just for clarity’s sake: the GNX was the fastest-accelerating domestic production car over something like a 20-year span, and it was based on the multi-million-selling A/G-body Regal. Most examples were built in Pontiac, Michigan.

The Envista, on the other hand, is a Chevy Trax done up to look like a Lamborghini Urus — pretty well, I gotta admit! — and assembled in Korea from Chinese CKD kits. While they are both turbocharged, the GNX was a 3.8L V-6 and the Envista is a 1.2L inline-three.

Associating these two cars is just about the worst form of stolen valor possible in the automotive biz. “Buick just roasted themselves” was one of the more polite comments. I also think it’s more than a bit offensive for a taxpayer-supported corporation to put out a video talking about “bitches” and “n***ers”. But the worst part about it was that GM is too lazy to make even the most token concession possible in the product. Okay, so you’re gonna take a whole year to use the Kendrick Lamar song in your advertising? Then take that year… and come up with an Envista GNX! Make it matte black! Give it a retro interior and a boomin’ sound system! It’s probably not possible to squeeze much more than the existing 137-horse rating out of the 1.2 Turbo, but do something!

You idiots didn’t even make the Envista in your commercial BLACK!!!!!!! It’s literally one of the Envista colors! There are hundreds of black Envistas in showrooms right now! The opening lyric of “tv off” is

All I ever wanted was a black Grand National / Fuck bein’ rational / Give ‘em what they ask for

And you put a RED Envista in the ad!

The mind boggles. Fuck bein’ rational, indeed.

In other Black History Month news

The internet is buzzing about peaceandquiet.io, a website that purports to show where people can live “in peace and quiet”. You can put an address into the site and it will show you how many of the following you have within a 3-mile radius:

• Bail bondsmen

• Public housing, Section 8, low-income subsidized housing

• Methadone clinics, liquor stores, pawnshops

• Payday loans, Boost Mobile stores, beauty supply stores

• Popeye’s Chicken, Church’s Chicken, Waffle House

• Vehicle registrations for Nissan Altimas and Dodge Charger/Challengers

• First names that are “black-coded”

• Violent crimes reported — although this isn’t given as a number, but merely used in the overall calculation

For instance, if we look up my old house in Powell we get:

My current home has no “hits” on any of the categories and just a couple of generic poor-person names — Tamara and Darrell. The supreme irony, of course, is that on IndyCar weekends we get very little peace and quiet, because IndyCars are loud. That being said, it is still quieter in my bedroom during the actual Indy race than it is in any bedroom, or hotel room, in New York City at any time of the day or night. I have never heard an emergency siren in this house. Never. Not once in three and a half years.

The obvious purpose of the site is to show you how to avoid African-Americans. Don’t for a moment think that America’s upper crust don’t have access to tools exactly like this, only far more powerful and better-researched. I bristle at the suggestion that any website like this should be made illegal, or that it should be forced out of business. Instead, we should be asking: What can we do to improve race relations in this country to the point where no one wants to use a site like this? Although I didn’t vote for President Obama, I was quite naively hopeful in 2008 that his election would turn down the temperature in our national discourse. Instead, it got cranked to 11.

Now for the irony: The most dangerous parts of Columbus, Ohio largely show green or yellow on this website. Why? Simple: the Black folk have been run out by the Somalis.

“718, er, 911 Forever”

New Chief Executive Officer Michael Leiters may scrap the planned 718 line of Boxster and Cayman EVs because of development delays and rising expenses, said the people, who declined to be named discussing internal deliberations.

The gasoline versions of the two models for years proved a relatively affordable path to owning a Porsche, with starting prices at around €70,000 ($82,754). They were discontinued in 2025.

The move may be necessary because Porsche faces budget constraints due to slumping sales in China and the cost of reversing its EV strategy. Deliberations to add a plug-in hybrid variant to the new line have only complicated things further because such a car requires different underpinnings, the people said. That would delay the project by several years, putting Porsche at risk of introducing older technology at a time it needs to generate excitement with its products, they added.

So says Bloomberg, anyway. There are two ways to view the astounding waffle-flopping of Porsche’s entry-level car from ICE-only to EV-only to EV-and-ICE-hybrid to ICE-only. The first is as rank corporate cowardice, trend-following, and stupidity. The second is as an attempt to immediately return in the direction of expressed customer preferences the moment it was legal/permissible to do so. I think the latter actually applies here.

Porsche is in a bit of a bind despite high sales and extraordinary per-vehicle profits in their upscale models, to wit: the mid-engined cars have a “hairdresser/budget” vibe that is no longer in keeping with their considerable MSRP, the 911 is being forced to occupy several market niches at once, and the volume models are no longer terribly prestigious simply because they are so common.

Without further ado, then, here is my foolproof (right) plan to fix the company’s fortunes:

0. Develop a next-generation sports car that can be built in either two-seat mid-engined or four-seat rear-engined form. Call the mid-engined car the 550 and the rear-engined car the 911.

1. Make all engines and packages available on both platforms. So you can have a four-cylinder base 911 with leatherette if you want, or you can have a GT2RS mid-engined car. This eliminates the amateur-hour bungling of trying to separate the vehicle lines and “protecting the 911”.

2. Develop a front-engined BR-Z/400Z competitor in conjunction with another automaker, call it the 951, and let it carry the “cheap-PORSH” torch.

3. Eliminate the Taycan, it’s a loser and no one wants it.

4. Drastically simplify the Macan and Cayenne lineups.

5. No more EVs, period. They reflect poorly on the brand.

6. Simplify the Panamera lineup to the top models and make it look more like a Taycan.

Simple, right?

Her name is not in the Peace and Quiet list, by the way

Alright — so what do we see in this photo besides a “Storm Teal” Allbird shoe? If you guessed “A tire that is worn completely bald on 80% of its surface,” you would be correct. If you further guessed that the tire is mounted to a RAM Promaster, you would be further correct. If you took it all the way to say “Based on the color of the very small visible area of painted body panel, that is an Amazon delivery Promaster,” you would be 100% correct.

Today’s ORT is about 45 minutes late because the quite lovely and cheerful young woman who was driving this Promaster got it stuck on my property while making an Amazon delivery. The oval drive that I laid out and installed last year has one section that is a few degrees off-camber. You wouldn’t notice it just walking around it or driving it under normal circumstances. My ES300 doesn’t care about it, for example. In a Promaster with two absolutely worthless front tires, however, it’s enough to put you off and into a snowbank. Even if it is plowed down to the point where you can stick your finger into the snow and touch the gravel beneath it.

This young lady, whose name was Crimson, is the second delivery person to get stuck out there in the past week or so, and in the same twenty feet of driveway. The first was my laid-back, kinda hippie-dippy mail guy in his Ford FFV. I looped a recovery strap around his front bumper and pulled him out with the Roxor. He had four good tires and didn’t need more than about a twelve-inch tug to get into a good spot.

Crimson was not as lucky. She’d panicked, floored the gas, and had dug herself into the snowbank. The Promaster had no front tow hook, and unlike the FFV mail truck the bumper doesn’t stick out to the point where you can loop a strap around the impact beam. The fix was to use the Roxor’s tow hitch and 4-Low to shove her backwards out of the snowbank… but when she tried to go forward the bald tires put her right back in the mess.

So I pushed her back out, put the tow hitch against her rear bumper, and push-steered her through the off-camber section by applying varying steering angles to a corner of said bumper as we went along. Nothing she did with the wheel was useful; with that little tread, the Promaster was an unguided missile.

Once we had her out and onto the road, I showed her the tires and explained how to look for a safe tread depth in the Promaster fleet. She works for a Columbus-area “DSP” — one of the independently contracted firms that Amazon uses so the worst of their worker abuse and risk can be pawned off on smaller, less lawsuit-vulnerable entities. When you start your morning at the DSP you are expected to just walk to a truck and get into it. Any truck will do. I gave her my phone number and told her to call me if there was ever a day when there was no safe truck to choose, because in that case I would call her DSP and start with, “I’m Jack Baruth, and I write for the X and the Y…”

Then I came back in the house to fume for a bit. Crimson has been victimized by multiple layers of society here. She truly did not understand that tires could wear out. She didn’t realize that tires needed tread to work in snow or even rain. Yet she was clearly in her mid-twenties. No one had ever cared enough to show her, or known enough to show her. The people who own her DSP must have known that the Promaster’s tires were bald. They are endangering her life to save pennies per day. Amazon knows perfectly well that the DSPs do this sort of thing as a rule. They look the other way because it helps pay for their CEO to invite his ex-wife’s husband on his yacht for a long trip in which I am absolutely certain no one is sitting in any “cuck chairs” or watching anything they shouldn’t be.

Everyone looks the other way until something awful happens.

I also cannot believe that Crimson is most useful to society as the driver for a penny-pinching delivery service. I’m not sure the service should even exist, not in this form anyway. FedEx, the USPS, UPS, and (kinda sorta) DHL all exist as responsible corporate entities that provide healthcare for their employees and maintain vehicle safety. The only reason the DSPs exist is because they’re a couple pennies per delivery cheaper.

The whole thing just makes me realize that as a child, to use Sir Isaac Newton’s phrase, I stood on the shoulders of giants. My parents gave me hundreds of lessons in what was safe, and what was the right thing to do, and what pitfalls to avoid, and so on. No one will ever call my father a master mechanic but I never drove a car away from his house that didn’t have full tread depth on the tires. Crimson did not even know that tires could wear out. It was like the scene in “The Wire” where Bodie didn’t realize there are different radio stations across the country:

As all long-time ACF readers know, I have a bit of a crusader mindset at times. I can’t do anything to ensure that the Crimsons of the world grow up at least hearing about safe tread depth. But I do think I can shine some light on this awful Amazon DSP business and the risks it places on the shoulders of very vulnerable people. If you know a way to help me in this crusade, drop me a line.