Wednesday ORT: Franz und Max, Biden und Snowball, Sabrina und Gracie, Single Wiper Nostalgia

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Housekeeping/Help Wanted: One of our crew chiefs was badly injured on the road this week. He’s out of surgery and pulling through, thank God, but apparently his weak ass has had too much “internal trauma” and “uncontrolled bleeding” and “free-floating bone fractures” to work this weekend at Waterford Hills. Want to take his place and join the Hall Of Fame, the way Gehrig did Pipp? Comment below or email me. It’s a short-term position; if the G-man isn’t back on the pit wall by the OVR Autumn Classic I’m going to visit him at home and finish the job a raggedy 2005 Dodge Caravan started.

A great week to be Franz Hermann

sit your ass back down, super-spank

For those of you who don’t spend your lives with your noses glued to F1-related social media: Prior to winning the F1 race at Imola this past weekend — more on that shortly — Max Verstappen went to the Nurburgring and drove one of the Ferrari 296 GT3 race cars from his “Verstappen.com” endurance-racing team around the “NLS layout” of the track. The test day was supervised by NLS, which operates a 9-race series there every year. (It used to be called VLN, which may turn on a light bulb for some of you.)

He entered under the pseudonym “Franz Hermann”, saying that he thought a German name would be appropriate and that was the most German name he could make up, but word quickly spread around the paddock that “Franz” was, in fact, “Super Max”. Although he’d never driven the Ring before, he’d done a thousand laps in the simulator ahead of time and recorded a 7:53 on his first complete lap…

…and now we pause for actual information of which nobody else on the Web seems aware. The 7:53 that Max set was not a “Ring time” like the famous 7:59 that the R34 Nissan GT-R set back in the day, or the 7:50 I set in an Evora 410 a few years ago, or the 6:45 that a Radical SR8 set ten years ago. This is a longer layout of the track. The dipshits at “Planet F1” noted, regarding Max’s time, that “some hypercars do it in six minutes”. This is categorically incorrect. It would be like comparing NASCAR and IMSA laptimes at Watkins Glen; NASCAR uses a shorter course there, and NLS uses a longer layout of the Ring than the one used for “The street car record” or whatever the mouth-breathers on YouTube call it.

It eventually got out that Max got down to a 7:48, which was faster than the existing NLS record. The responses were interesting. F1 fans, the whole Drive to Survive crowd, were like, “Duh, of course Max was faster, he’s the best driver in the world.” Those of us who have driven actual GT3 race cars, on the other hand, were surprised, because the Ferrari is very different from an F1 car, but not all that surprised. GT3, internationally, is where people go when they wash out from open-wheel series. NLS is a pay-driver series for the most part, it’s basically SRO or IMSA GS. I’d unironically suggest that most SCCA Runoffs winners are better drivers than the average NLS podium finisher. To Max, the car must look like it moves in slow motion, the way a Spec Miata or American Iron car does to me.

And then you have Maro Engel, who washed out of open-wheel over to a comfy position as an all-purpose factory tin-top driver for Mercedes, where he has been successful. He decided to take the “aww, bless your heart” approach to Max’s drive, suggesting the car was overpowered and illegal under NLS rules…

…at which point Verstappen promptly corrected him. Keep in mind that Max usually makes no voluntary public statements of any sort. His social media is run by a team to promote his brand. So his decision to address Engel was equivalent to Robert Plant stopping a Zeppelin gig to chide a heckler. Engel immediately walked his statement back to “paddock chat”.

I have no difficulty believing that Max reset the track record in a legal car. I’m certain he could reset any of my track records with two days in my Radicals, and I have zero reason to believe that anyone in NLS/VLN is a measurably better driver than I am. So while the Drive To Survive fans are rarely right about anything, in this case I think the story is just as they see it: Of course Max could set the GT3 record! He’s the best!

Which he promptly proved again…

An overtake for the ages

Peeling the cap off an FIA Platinum driver just gave Max more appetite to publicly disrespect an FIA Superlicense holder two days later, apparently. I think Oscar Piastri will be this year’s world champion but you’d be a fool to bet against Verstappen when he is in the mood to be difficult. History shows that he will take just about any risk or chance any opportunity if there’s a net positive to be gained. In this case, Max would have benefited almost as much from crashing out with Piastri as he did from passing him, so like Terence Trent D’Arby he introduced Oscar to the hard line.

The rest of the race was Max’s to lose, so naturally he won. Other notes, in no particular order:

• Yuki Tsunoda overcame an awful Q1 crash to score a point in the race. Crucially, he continues to beat Liam Lawson at every opportunity. Given how Hadjar is performing, however, surely they’re going to have him take a look at the Red Bull sooner rather than later. Doesn’t it seem likely that Yuki will exit the team alongside Honda, leaving the second seat to Izack?

• Prior to the season, I had concerns that Ferrari would stack the deck for Lewis at every opportunity. Which hasn’t been the case… but what they did at Imola was either incompetent or malicious. Leclerc was begging for new tires during the safety car period and got nothing. Lewis was given fresh tires and had the 18 or so second gap to Charles removed by the safety car. He then had the nerve to give interviews saying that he was inspired by Ayrton Senna to “fight back” up to fourth. My brother in Christ, the pit wall literally gave you fourth place by sacrificing your faster and more consistent teammate!

• Williams looked like a great team with a good car and some awful strategy. They threw away Sainz’s qualifying result, but they did score double points. There’s no way they aren’t the fifth-best team on the grid right now, heading toward fourth-best.

• Even if the WDC is still in doubt, the constructors’ championship seems pre-settled for McLaren. No one else is even close.

• As a product, F1 is surely at an all-time high right now. Great to watch, plenty of competition, all sorts of drama. Worth the money.

Meanwhile, at Indy

Anyone who wants to recap Indy is welcomed to do so — I’ve been asked by a few of you to discuss IndyCar racing but I haven’t had the time to catch up to it. I’ll pin any substantial responses or recaps.

We have always been at war with Joe Biden

If “Franz Hermann” had a great week, Joe Biden had an awful one. He went public with his cancer diagnosis, prompting speculation that he’s long been aware of the situation. Just prior to that, however, he was blasted in the pages of the New Yorker by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in an article called, astoundingly, “How Joe Biden Handed The Presidency To Donald Trump.”

There’s something both utterly awful and surprisingly human about how the Literati Department Of The Uniparty always insists on pulling the curtain away from their Wizard Of Oz machinations after the fact. It’s part flex, part a desire to be the ones who write the history textbook, and partly what John Updike once wrote of adultery: “No act is so private,” he snarked, “that it does not seek applause.” The New Yorker article is a transparent attempt to ret-con history with a new story: Trump aka Hitler won the election solely and entirely because of Joe Biden. No one else was responsible. It was all Biden, all the time.

In nakedly stating that a tired, elderly, cancer-ridden man destroyed the United States single-handedly, the DNC’s approved media arm nimbly avoids blame for anyone else and makes sure everyone else’s bread will continue to be buttered in perpetuity. It’s eerily reminiscent of Animal Farm, where “Snowball the Pig” was rewritten as a traitor, or how Emmanuel Goldstein went from Party insider to the all-powerful enemy in 1984. Plus, there are some legitimately juicy snippets to be had:

“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.” Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.

And he did it alone!

For the rematch in 2024, everyone involved with the campaign knew that beating Trump would be difficult—and would require a record-breaking amount of money.

This is worth highlighting. Why would it require a record-breaking amount of money to defeat Hitler? We kept hearing about the Biden economy was the best ever, and we had the most democracy, and the most freedom, and the least racism, and so on. Why would it require billions of dollars to convince people of a utopia that was, in theory at least, visible and apparent to all?

Regarding Biden’s “I’m not quitting letter” of July 8:

Despite the herculean efforts that the Democratic machine had made to shut down any sort of real contest, Biden cast his position as that of a true exercise in democracy, having “received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process… This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run,” he wrote, which was not really true.

So you’re saying the primaries were absolutely rigged in advance to get the desired outcome, and this was widely understood among Democratic insiders? How reassuring. Remember how those same insiders treated anyone who dared to complain about the “inevitability” of the primary process, or of the “inevitability” of Kamala’s ascension? I’m not a registered Democrat, but I spent twenty years as a registered Democrat and this makes me want to send about a dozen angry letters.

…Clooney said it was important to him and his team to include what he saw as misleading testimonials about Biden [before the 2024 election]. “We had to do it,” he said, to underline the importance of speaking truth to power no matter which party currently rules.

Also, he acknowledged, lies serve as an important reminder for anyone in the audience upset about the current state of affairs. Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, “that’s how Trump won.”

Loath as I am to disagree on any subject whatsoever with the man who played Ulysses Everett McGill, I have to wonder if Mr. Clooney’s admirable commitment to truth is missing a bit of self-awareness. It seems obvious to me that the American voter, on the aggregate, was tired of the Democratic machine and its various press, academia, and “woke corporate” tentacles. Donald Trump won the popular vote, for God’s sake. I’m not asking my Blue Tribe friends to sign off on the MAGA agenda or renounce their principles for the sake of accommodation, but let’s all live in reality here for a minute. After being subjected to a full 7.5 years of a trillion-dollar, 24/7 effort on every screen and printed piece of paper in America to portray a sort of common-and-garden real-estate developer in spray tan as the Antichrist, the voters took a look at the current state of affairs in 2024 and said, “You know what? Let’s see if Satan’s agenda is any better for the country.”

Furthermore, if what I read in Harper’s and the New York Review Of Books is any indication, the Democrats have no message right now beyond “Trump is Hitler”. This purely oppositional stance has them being Br’er-Rabbited into supporting MS-13 lieutenants and the Muslim Brotherhood and kids who stab other kids at high school stadiums because they just happen to have knives on their person at every school event.

Here’s my pitch for Democrats in the midterms. It’s free to use, they don’t even have to credit me.

Hello, friends! That word’s deliberate. We should all be friends here. This is a great country. It’s great enough to offer protection to its most vulnerable members. It’s great enough to extend a forgiving and magnanimous hand to people whose desire to share our American dream has led them to break unjust laws so they can join us here. It’s great enough to protect Europe from dangerous dictators and to feed kids in Darfur. It’s great enough to support the arts with an open pocketbook and to keep working to rectify the sins of our past. We don’t need to write policy out of resentment or small-minded fear. America is great enough to bear these burdens. For our good, for your good. Because we’re all friends here. Vote Blue in 2026, why dontcha?

Just out of fairness, here’s a pitch for Republicans that I feel will be equally effective:

If you return Team Red to power, we will immediately use nuclear weapons against whatever city in Australia hosts “TBH Skincare”. Talk about “Gen Z Boss in a mini?” We’ll show you B-2 boss with a Nagasaki!

Speaking of people, mostly women, who are dead inside

If there’s a girlboss-focused equivalent to ACF, maybe it’s “Matriarchal Blessing”, the place where the author can straight-facedly write “One of you reached out and requested that I write something up to teach boys about patriarchy without making them feel ashamed to be a boy.” Yeah, I read that article and if someone forced my son to read it I’d be tempted to grab the nearest 8-pound sledgehammer and go to work on them.

Here’s her newest, which Substack is extremely anxious for me to read, to the point where they’ve spammed me with it twice:

As a mother to teen daughters, I'm not that concerned about Sabrina Carpenter's influence (...but I am about Gracie Abrams)

Sabrina Carpenter, for those of you without young kids, is this little cute popstar whose shtick is that she’s, for lack of a less precise word, slutty. She sings “I think we’d have really good bed chem” and tells her boyfriend’s other girlfriend that “you’ll just have to taste me, when he’s kissing you,” the implication being that he only goes down on Sabrina. Her song “Espresso” is a great pop tune.

Gracie Abrams is the gorgeous and ultra-talented daughter of JJ Abrams who wrote and performed what I think is the greatest non-rap song of 2024, “I Love You, I’m Sorry”:

Classic Mercedes-Benz content in this one, by the way. If you can hear this tune without immediately thinking of how you’ve ruined someone’s life, then you will have my personal envy until the day I’m dead.

Anyway, both these chicks are great in their own way, but my fellow Substacker is concerned that Gracie’s pro-relationship, obsessed-with-a-boy-in-particular message is more damaging than Sabrina’s bed-chem-is-all-that-matters-and-you-can-have-it-with-everyone vibe:

Ideally there would be other choices other than just the Madonna or the whore. Both those roles are side characters to a man’s starring role, and I want my daughters to be the main character in their lives.

I don’t want any woman, let alone my daughters, to have to choose between the ancient archetypes of the Madonna or the whore.

But if I did have to choose, honestly I’d prefer the whore.

If you’re going to be screwed by the patriarchy either way, may as well go with the option where orgasms are more likely.

a) this is deranged and completely at odds with reality. Women make up the majority of college graduates. They’re getting the executive roles, they’re making the money. The cigar-chomping villains of “the patriarchy” are in nursing homes now.

b) if she thinks women who have endless one-night stands have more orgasms than women in committed relationships, she’s never read a single double-blind, peer-reviewed study on that subject. To the contrary, I’d suggest that the primary enemy of the American Orgasm in 2025 is the SSRI, followed closely by OxyContin, not anything having to do with being too into a single person.

Putting the snark aside, however: imagine wanting your daughter to be a “whore” because you don’t want her to be manipulated or overwhelmed by any one man. Imagine being so concerned about her having a bad relationship that you’d prefer she instead just test her “bed chem” for twenty years after high school then disappear into the aether of multiple-cat ownership and solo wine enjoyment.

The truth of the matter, as I see it at least, is that we are defined by our behaviors and accomplishments but we are created and sustained by the emotions we experience along the way. I’d prefer that my son have a better life than I’ve had. I’d like for him to miss out on the injuries and trauma and criminal mischief that made me who I’ve become. But I wouldn’t lift a finger to keep him from falling deeply in love with a woman who breaks his heart or runs him ragged for a while. If you’ve never cared enough about someone to contemplate suicide over them — if you’ve never been utterly destroyed by the mention of someone’s name — I’m not sure you’re even a whole person.

I had a conversation like this with Mini Danger Girl a while ago. She said, to paraphrase, “Why should I find a man over whom to obsess, when I have my racing and my career and my other accomplishments to pursue?” All I could tell her in response was that there comes a day when you’ve won all the races you want to win, and maybe you have all the watches or handbags or scientific patents you could possibly need. And on that day, the prospect of the next win or the next Italian vacation will seem more like a potential chore than anything else. But if you manage to find the right person, even if it’s only for a single year or a single day, the memory of that person will never get old, it will never leave you, it will never stop breaking your heart. And that’s important, because without that level of emotion, without what Robert Bly called “yearning and longing, those strangely un-American feelings,” we’re just… bags of meat engaged in Brownian motion on a macro scale.

Furthermore, as much as I love disrespecting the Boomers, they already wrote the definitive song on avoiding emotional entanglement for the sake of success:

Speaking of soft rock

Remember the Mercedes-Benz Mono Wiper? I sure do. I worked for David Hobbs BMW as a kid and my best friend worked for Ed Potter Mercedes-Benz at the same time. We used to argue about the mono wiper, like on a weekly basis. It was obviously a better mousetrap, but it was ultra-complex and my friend said that customers hated it. Eighteen years later, I restored a 190E 2.3-16 and ran it in One Lap of America, which put me behind the mono wiper for a full eight days of largely awful weather. Readers, I loved it. I was hypnotized by the eccentric motion, the perfection of its sweep path. At 120mph on the night freeway, trying to build naptime in a schedule Brock Yates had specifically designed to prevent naptime, the wiper would impart a sort of somnolent rocking motion to the entire car, as if the world wanted me to sleep…

…okay, let’s face it, the mono wiper almost killed me in 2006, about ten times. But I still love it and I’ve often thought about buying W124 260E or something just to have it back. Here’s a great video about how it works. I didn’t understand half of this stuff. Now I’m even more impressed. Should it be on today’s cars? Probably not. It was an answer to a question no one was asking, and it came with plenty of drawbacks. And yet… Share your mono wiper memories in the comments.