Wednesday O/R/T: George Pits, Lap Record, Tactile Switch, Tulsi Bows, Zuck Snarls

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they take the flag back afterwards!

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Finally, the repass

look dad, i’m doin’ it!

Ask any racer, any real racer, and they’ll tell you: starting from pole position can be a curse as much as it is a blessing, and this has certainly been true for Lando Norris. One gets the sense that he is a better pure driver than his young teammate Piastri but somehow quite a bit mentally weaker, a point made in arch fashion by Christian Horner who told an interviewer “…it’s remarkable that that’s only Lando’s second win in that car.”

Now it will be a duel to the end. Lando needs to win them all, or he needs Oscar to pull consistent seconds behind him, or he needs Max to DNF a few times. The longest of long shots, if you ask me — but it was also a seriously impressive margin that he pulled on Verstappen over the long run. The great talent of Lewis Hamilton, in my opinion, was that he could almost always win when he was given the best car. Not everyone can. Lando’s dropped the ball a few times, but he still has a chance at the World Championship.

Other notes:

• Why in God’s name did VCARB just throw Tsunoda’s race away with two stops in a row? Anyone could see that softs were the wrong choice at that point. I was yelling at the television.

• Speaking of unnecessary stops: Why take a guaranteed fifth place away from George Russell like that? What purpose does that serve, other than to further demotivate a driver who probably feels abandoned by his team at the moment? Russell is 11-4 against Hamilton in qualifying, yet every week they use him as a guinea pig for the greater glory of Sir Lewis.

• Replacing Logan Sergeant with a mid-pack F2 driver was about as strong a rebuke as Williams could give, I suppose.

• Sergio Perez is going to cost Red Bull the constructors’ championship. Is selling 65% of your merch to Mexico really worth losing that? I’ve read that the difference between first and second is about $10 million of payout from Formula One, so the answer is… maybe?

Stop, hey, what’s that sound

photo: wyatt bowman, and do you see that landau top over there?

NASA was racing at Mid-Ohio this weekend!. I’ve been banned from NASA for reasons they won’t disclose but probably have to do with my posting video of an incident where a backmarker Spec Iron Mustang deliberately wiped my Radical off the track and gave me a five-figure damage bill. More to come on that, but it explains why we decided to leave town and run the Detroit SCCA event at Waterford Hills.

Most of the excitement that followed had nothing to do with me. Danger Girl was on the top step of the podium both days, but Sunday’s race was genuinely interesting: in pursuit of a personal best laptime she looped off the fastest turn on the track, hit the tire wall backwards, knocked her rear bumper off, immediately rejoined the race, and hunted down the 944 S2 of Tyler Cook for the class win.

Mini Danger Girl took her first-ever race start, in a rented Spec Miata. Saturday was tough but on Sunday she was running 3rd from last for most of the race before she wore out a little bit in the 93-degree heat and fell back. Her closest competitor came by to recap the race and was very surprised to find a female college student under the gloss-black Impact Champ helmet.

As for the #31 Green Baron Motorsports / Mike O Racing Radical SR8… well, we fell afoul of the Waterford Hills sound meter and were kicked out of qualifying. We packed the mufflers and added “Laguna bends” to the exhaust, courtesy of a real old-school Detroit muffler-shop owner who stayed open to help. If you’re ever near Pontiac, MI, try Callahan’s. Unfortunately for us, the changes actually increased our margin over Waterford’s minimum, to a full 6 decibels, kicking us out of the Saturday race. And I’d been lifting on the back straight! At that point, we all wanted to just put the car on the trailer and get home a couple of hours earlier.

Except. Based on my early qualifying laps, it seemed pretty certain that we could set the GTX class record, which stood at 1:08.697. I’d turned a 1:08.8 in my fifth lap, lifting on the back straight. The SR8 was miserable at Waterford; I had the wrong gear set in the car, meaning that even second gear was too high for five of the eight turns. Scott Hoerr, who was supporting a wickedly fast one-off P1 car using one of his $60,000-plus custom carbon-fiber bodies, came by to explain to me why the SR8 was hopeless at this little jewel box of a track where laptimes are often the same as Nelson Ledges despite being just 3/4 of the length.

“You need high downforce, and light weight. You’ve got…” and he waved dismissively at my car, which has the opposite. What could I say in response to the man who built the IMSA-winning Oldsmobiles and whose cars took all 3 spots of the Runoffs podium last year? Mr. Hoerr did allow that he would be happy to come up with a championship-winning P1 car for me, if I could come up with the money. Think maybe $200-250k to start, plus some more to develop the setup. Well, if I could get a few thousand more readers.

In the meantime, however, we needed a plan that accounted for all of the following.

0. The only way the lap record would count would be if I set it in the Sunday race…

1. …and was not then disqualified from that race. In theory, the stewards could ignore one noise violation per day. Which meant that if I could set the record in one lap, I was golden, but…

2. …I also needed to complete 2/3rds of the race distance. Without blowing sound a second time.

So I’d need to drive at least seven legal laps, then take just one shot at it, then go back to cruising at legal sound whether or not I’d succeeded. Because I also needed to finish this race to win the divisional championship. Last but not least, it was hot as hell, which made both me and the SR8 very unhappy. Under the direction of Wade Hachey, my college-student crew member on loan from Radical Canada, new muffler internals were fashioned from ACE Hardware chicken wire and FMF 2-stroke packing. We figured this would at least get us through the off-throttle laps at the beginning.

For two-thirds of the race I let the field pass me while I circled at idling pace. (Which, most of the time, would have led Spec Miata.) When I started my one run, I immediately realized that my tires were way too cold for this idea. The nose was all over the place and I couldn’t get traction under power. By exercising maximum patience and taking an early shift to fourth gear on the last corner, I crossed the line a lot slower than I felt I could have gone… but it was 1:07.528, and that was enough.

We now have the GTX lap records for Mid-Ohio, Nelson Ledges, and Waterford Hills — which are the only 3 tracks at which we’ve run the SR8. To put things in perspective, however, the P1 car built by the Hoerrs turned a 1:03.573, and Sean Gennari’s Formula Continental was a 1:04.041. I was only third fastest in my own race group! Some of the mystery was solved when we all went across the scales and I rang the gong for 1,930 pounds against the 1,110 of the P1 car, which has wider and grippier tires. Oh well. Radical never intended for this car to be run against optimized SCCA prototypes — but I fully intend to keep trying.

Made In The USA: New Tactile Turns

It’s no secret that we’re fans of TactileTurn here at ACF, although I greatly prefer their “bolt action” to their “side click” mechanism. Now there’s a third kind of Tactile pen, and I was able to buy one from the first run. It’s called “Switch” and it uses a little bronze sequential-shifter mechanism to advance or retract the Schmidt EasyFlow 9000 refill. Tactile didn’t invent this; they licensed it, and improved it for series production.

I think the bolt-action pens have greater “fidget” potential, but this is a really nice and tangibly precise mechanism that is hugely gratifying to operate. If you prefer the Schmidt refill to the Pilot refills of the standard pen, it’s worth a look.

There was a second pen in the package. It doesn’t break any new ground mechanically, but I had to buy it for sentimental reasons:

That’s right, it’s the “VICE” pen in Night livery. There’s also a Day pen for those of you who prefer that sort of Miami vibe. I don’t expect my younger readers to understand the allure of this, but maybe watching a modern “trailer” for the single finest hour of television in human history will help:

We used to be a proper country. Speaking of that…

The Lieutenant Colonel Turns

Putting Tulsi Gabbard on a TSA watchlist and harassing her for Party disloyalty was probably not a great idea. She has now endorsed Donald Trump for president and is actively helping him prep for debates, an area in which she is razor-sharp competent. This news came right after RFK Jr. also endorsed Trump, at which point two swing states decided that the best way to save The Our Democracy is to ensure that people have to stay on the ballot even if they aren’t running.

The irony here is that a Democratic ticket with Tulsi as the candidate and any warm body as would-be VP could have won a voted Democratic nomination, and a general election, by Ronald Reagan margins. A lot of Americans really want to vote for a woman, and they want to vote for someone in the approximate political center. Many of them will hold their noses and vote for Selected Kamala, but others will just stay home, or pull the other lever.

All that combat training is making him combative

If you have not read the Mark Zuckerberg letter to Jim Jordan, you really should:

What is the purpose of this letter, one wonders? The idiots at Vox were quick to launch an explainer on the subject, which follows the usual Corporate Hyper-Left Media Pattern regarding stuff like this:

• Say it’s a conspiracy theory, and you’d have to be insane to believe it, then:

• Say it’s racist or anti-democratic to even talk about the matter in public, then:

• Say that it’s been debunked, or that there are insufficient facts for it to be completely true, then:

• Admit that it was true, and always well-supported, but that it’s old news that nobody really cares about now anyway.

The nice people at The Daily Beast called the letter “groveling to MAGA”, although I’m not sure it’s groveling if you’re just repeating the facts of the matter. My interpretation goes like so: Zuckerberg has been deep into jiu-jitsu for a while now, and he likely has adapted some of the mindset to his interactions with others. This letter is a little grappling feint that doesn’t admit anything beyond what was generally acknowledged to be true in D.C., but more importantly it serves as a warning that Zuck has bigger secrets in store, and those secrets might no longer be safe.

Finally, he punishes the Democrats by announcing that he will not be repeating his decision to give $400 million to a pair of nonprofits that worked to increase mail-in voting for the 2020 election. Why is this a particular punishment for Team Blue?

A brief note on this graphic: it represents the results of a voter survey, not an actual breakdown of how mail-in ballots voted. Whether or not you believe that there was considerable mail-in fraud for Mr. Biden, this survey isn’t capable of indicating or contraindicating that. My opinion is that even if mail-in balloting was, in fact, necessary in 2020, it is no longer necessary in 2024, and it should be eliminated except in the case of veterans serving overseas. Also, I don’t see why the DNC required identification to participate but voting shouldn’t need to. Maybe I’m just stupid that way.

Whether this letter is meant to be a pistol held at the head of the upcoming Harris Administration and its potential for antitrust action, or a genuine statement of regret at allowing the government to bully it, Zuck’s decision to write it at this moment is surely anything but random. Maybe there’s a three-way battle coming between the insane Left, the grifting Right, and the aggrieved Lizard People. What a shame they can’t all lose that one, eh?