Wednesday ORT: Land-O-Luck, Oil Paranoia, Men I Trust, Cadillac Congratulates Itself

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come join us in the power rankings, lance

Years from now, expect F1 pundits to wax lyrical about the 2025 season and its titanic back-and-forth battle between two very different men in papaya. No, it’s not quite up to the level of Lewis v. Max in 2021, but there’s something purer about it. The cars are the same. They are supported equally — Zak Brown, to his eternal credit, is unwilling to two-tier his people the way Ron Dennis did with “them”, meaning Alonso, and “we”, meaning him and Hamiton — and the drivers are permitted to race.

This is what Indycar always promises to deliver but never does.

In a race weekend that was absolutely plagued with public displays of Wellbutrin-worthy depression, from LH’s characterization of himself as “useless” to Charles Leclerc’s existential collapse during the Grand Prix as the car simply fell apart beneath him, perhaps the saddest was Lando’s response to the one-stop suggestion from the pitwall. Having been gang-banged at the start by a pain-wracked but mentally perfect Fernando Alonso, Norris clearly felt he had once again failed the brass-balls test that Formula One periodically administers to would-be champions.

But the pitwall was right. Or lucky, anyway. And then, to keep this from being a mere victory on strategy, Lando demonstrated why he has long been so highly regarded. He’s easy on tires when he needs to be. He has good track sense and doesn’t defend unless it’s necessary. Last but not least, he failed to be rattled by Oscar’s final tire-smoking attempt at intimidation. Yes, the team gave Lando the win — but he kept it.

Other notes:

• Lawson up, Tsunoda down bad — but wait! Yuki ran closer to Max this weekend than he has in the past, and his poor finish was due to strategy calls. It’s also apparent, and I have no reason to think that this wasn’t also done to Liam, that RB will throw away Yuki’s race to gather data for Max.

• Speaking of Max: He’s staying with Red Bull for 2026. There are sound business reasons for doing that, but in his shoes I’d go hang out with Toto, who knows a lot more about winning championships than any non-recently-departed Red Bull employee.

• Fernando is aging a lot more gracefully than Lewis, who probably should have just retired after Princess George took him to school last year. Now, more than ever, the caustic in-race comment from the double world champion regarding the seven-time WDC — “This guy can only start and drive in first” — applies. And what is this big August 8th “follow the smoke” announcement? It can’t be that he is leaving Ferrari. It’s probably a music collaboration, unfortunately.

• What if Gabriel Bortoleto is just an average driver and the Sauber is secretly a first-rate car?

• I’m starting to think that Carlos Sainz will get on top of the Williams for real by the end of the year.

I still think Oscar Piastri is the 2025 WDC — but Lando has his hat squarely in the ring. Let’s hope he spends the summer break working on his mindset.

As if a million BobIsTheOilGuy forum posters cried out in triumph, and were *not* silenced

don’t hold your breath, robbie

I have a theory about all the people who post endlessly about oil selection and “paint correction” and the precise degree to which one needs to torque wheels of varying materials and construction: In the pre-emissions era, a significant percentage of men did their own automotive maintenance and repair. But as cars have gotten drastically more complex and men have gotten drastically more femininzed/citified/whatever, fewer and fewer of us are competent to do anything substantial on our own vehicles. So we’ve fetishized the few remaining things we can do, like rub the paint and change the oil. These are the only levers we can pull, so to speak — so we obsess over them. There are multiple industries built on this need to have some control over our vehicular destiny, from Griot’s Garage to Blackstone Labs. It’s all a joke, and it’s all a reflection of how pathetic we’ve become.

(The “we” doesn’t include me. I rebuilt a Lexus! Well, I watched it get rebuilt, and I carried the heavy parts, anyway.)

We should all take every opportunity to ridicule the oil-forum people whenever, and wherever, possible…

…except when they are right. Anxious to slow down the rate at which the premium-gas 6.2-liter V-8s in its only desirable vehicles are exploding, GM has officially told everyone with a potentially affected L87 to change their oil from the 0-20w commonly known as “EPA piss water” to… 0-40w. This does a better job of protecting the fragile rod bearings and other rotating components, especially under load.

Owners of GM 6.2-liters outside the recall window, and owners who have already had a replacement, are instructed to continue using 0-20w. Except you’d clearly be a fool to do that, wouldn’t you?

The hood rats and white-trash felons who own SRT 392 Apaches have always been instructed to use 0-40w. Just to make sure that the lesson is clear to even the densest Golden Goose (or Grey Goose) enjoyer, the oil I get for my car, and the oil filters it uses, have an SRT logo front and center on them. Because otherwise we’d use Mobil 1, the official partner of Hagerty Lifestyle Brands(tm), and everyone with a functioning frontal lobe knows you don’t use Mobil 1 if your local store has Red Line, Royal Purple, or Pennzoil UP in stock.

What’s extra-frustrating, and what should be extra-illustrative to any GM customers, is that the company continues to demand that you use the 0-20w in everything but the recall-specific trucks. Because God knows they don’t care about those engines lasting a minute outside the warranty period — and God also knows that GM cares a lot more about appeasing its actual and primary customer, the bureaucratic side of the United States Government, more than they care about the simps and marks who buy their vehicles.

(Which, I hasten to add, includes me. Were it not for an errant deer, I’d be outside putting 0-40w in my Silverado LTZ as we speak.)

I’m no vehicle engineer, but several ACFers are vehicle engineers, so maybe they’ll confirm or deny. As far as I can tell, the only real issue with putting a higher weight oil in your modern engine is fuel economy. I ran 15w-50 in my 3.2-liter Boxster S for more than 12,000 ON-TRACK miles, and although I burned a fair amount of it, the car ran reliably for that entire tire.

From time to time I hear about how very fine-tolerance engines need lighter oil. Yet the 11,000-rpm V-8 in my Radical SR8 is factory-specified for Motul 15w50. The people who run the jewel-like 17,000-rpm 400cc mini-superbikes use heavy weight oil. As far as I can tell, the only reason to use 0-20w anywhere is to pass an EPA test.

Which is frustrating, because the only two things I can do on the pair of Z-cars at the house is correct their paint and change their oil… and I just put 0-20w in both!

Let’s just get all the GM dogpiling over with

someone’s getting paid off, yeah

I adore young Mack Hogan, I liked working with him at R&T, and I think he truly loves cars. Which is why I’m extra-sad that he’s been tasked with writing this awful piece of State propaganda on behalf of the world’s worst-run captive automaker.

The brand's goal was to become a leader in EV sales, and, according to Cadillac Vice President John Roth, it's already done so. Cadillac was the best-selling luxury EV brand in the country last quarter.

That's a big deal both for Cadillac and the EV landscape. For Cadillac, it's a much-needed reset after a decades-long identity crisis. The company's name was more associated with its past glory days than its current products, which have long struggled to capture consumers' imagination (except the Escalade). But it has now delivered a full slate of compelling, stylish EVs packed with technology.

In other words, the brand's executives say, Cadillac is finally winning again.

When a GM bigwig decided to crow about another InsideEVs puff piece on this topic — two in thirty days! — I lost my mind.

unfortunately, the rival brand is a used altima

That 71% figure isn’t something about which Cadillac should brag. You see, in the normal world of automotive marketplace competition, conquest sales are highly valued. If you could get a Lexus LS460 owner to trade in for a Cadillac CT6, that would be fantastic, just like it was fantastic in 1990 when every Lexus dealership in America had a used-car row filled with BMW 7-Series and W126 Benzes. If you can get people who are already involved with other brands to move to your brand, you’re doing great work…

…wth one exception, and we will call it the “Infiniti J30 Exception”.

Throughout most of 1994 and 1995, Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp. leased the new J30 for $399/month over 36 months, and the J30t for $439/month over 36 months. With $2000 down, but that could disappear if the dealership wanted to eat it. So Infiniti did an astounding amount of “conquest” business. But if you actually looked at what people were trading in… they weren’t trading two-year-old Lexuses or Benzes. They were trading in Nissans and 12-year-old 5-Series Bimmers and minvans.

In other words, they were poor, and they were showing up for the deal. Mitsubishi did the same thing with the Diamante, which was a showroom paperweight at MSRP but did tolerably well when you could lease it for Civic money. Audi did it with the post-60 Minutes cars that otherwise got flat spots on their tires from sitting so long in dealer stock. (This was confirmed on LinkedIn by Joseph Folz, a former Audi and GM employee who is bewildered by what his former employer is currently doing.)

If GM was doing conquest sales at full MSRP, that would be worth crowing about. But we all know they aren’t. Let me show you today’s hard Cadillac numbers:

That’s $0 down and $449/month for 24 months on a $64k MSRP vehicle. Compare it to their ‘Slade lease:

$4995 down and $1649/month over 36 months on a $128k MSRP vehicle. You pay more than four times as much for a vehicle with just double the MSRP — because people would rather drive an Escalade with a hand grenade under the hood than drive any Cadill-ICK. My eagle-eyed readers will note that the Lyriq deal is for a “courtesy transport vehicle”. I’ve looked through Cadillac dealer stock and seen an astounding number of Lyriqs registered as courtesy cars, often with just 500 miles on them. They aren’t courtesy cars. It’s a hack to get extra incentive money from GM.

You want to see what Lexus will do for you on an SUV that costs almost exactly the MSRP of the Lyriq?

$6599 out of pocket, $699 over 36 on $63,890 MSRP.

In the first two years, the lessor of the “$64,000” Cadillac spends $10,776 plus tax. The lessor of the $64,000 Lexus will spend $23,375 — and she won’t even be done with the lease!

Would you like to know how people are responding to having to pay 2.3x the price of a Cadillac to drive a Lexus?

In 2025 so far, Cadillac moved 9,317 Lyriqs. Lexus moved 25,147 TXes. Overall, Lexus outsells Cadillac 178,966 to 86,104.

For the record, I tried to find a Lexus LX or even GX lease to compare to the Escalade deal, but I couldn't, because the LX and GX don’t need a lease program any more than the GMT-Master II needs Affirm financing at point of sale. There is a full-MSRP buyer anxiously awaiting the arrival of every single LX and GX that can possibly be made this year, and three more behind her if she doesn’t answer her phone.

Some of you are reading this and secretly thinking, “It’s not fair to compare Cadillac to Lexus.” You’re right! Lexus has had a full 35 model years to establish itself in this country, (Cadillac has had just 121 model years), they have a full lineup of desirable hybrid vehicles instead of IQ-mobiles, and they don’t have Mark Reuss. You might as well compare Ralf Schumacher to Max Verstappen, in terms of general fairness.

Thankfully, it’s not just my little blog holding GM accountable. Let’s look at the media coverage:

this is bad, and you should feel bad

Alright, so it is just this little blog. Which makes sense, because that’s how automotive journalism works now. Everyone has to write these awful EV puff-pieces because the ownership of all these media organizations is so desperately progressive — then they all have to put on the kneepads for Cadillac because General Motors still spends tens of millions of dollars every year pampering the media with free trips, free gifts, cooperative advertising money, and every other bribe-by-another-means possible.

Which is how the biggest act of self-sabotage in modern automotive history, the forced and unwelcome “EV transition” at Cadillac, is being spun as a victory. Trust me, they’ll brag about it all the way to the end. I can’t want to read the last headline at InsideEVs:

Cadillac Leads All Competition In Factory Closures And Dealership Principal Suicides!

In which the author sees a manic pixie dream girl, surrounded by manic-depressive down-bad cucks and possibly a ‘throuple’

“How do you feel about going to see ‘Men I Trust’ in Detroit?” Mini Danger Girl asked me.

“I feel excellent about it. And let’s get pit tickets, so Emma can sweat on me.”

“You,” she replied, “are disgusting. She’s like half your age.”

“Thirty-two,” I replied with all the indignation I can muster, “is not half of fifty-three. Also, Emma is Canadian. They look at things differently. I distinctly remember spending some intimate time with a 20-year-old Canadian blonde when I was about 41 years old, which if you do the math —”

“Please stop talking,” MDG replied. So last night we drove the mighty ES300 to Detroit’s Masonic Temple to see MiT. If you know Detroit, you know the venue in question is definitely in the “burned-out crack house” section of the city. Whoever books this band should be horsewhipped. If you had a dreamy jazz-pop band masterminded by a Romanian classical pianist with a frontwoman who whispers into the microphone, would you have them play somewhere in Ann Arbor or… next to the Motor City Casino, where I was once almost murdered by a 350-pound Lizzo clone?

Perhaps that explains why the 4,400-person venue was only three-quarters full, even at the 1995-vintage ticket prices of $25 for GA and $35 for pit. In an era where idiots are paying $532 each to sit in the fourth row of a Laufey concert this upcoming month, just to come up with a random example that is definitely not me, Emma Proulx and Men I Trust should command more than $35 to stand up front.

They have two new albums, released almost together for the same egotistical and self-defeating reasons that led Axl to put both Use Your Illusions in the store at the same time before taking a 17-year nap. Equus Caballus is the immediately charming one, and they basically played all of it last night. (Equus Asinus is the collection of B-sides and odd ideas, complete with French lyrics.)

MDG and I arrived half an hour after the official door time to find that nothing had yet happened. Two thousand people stood in line to get in… and readers, it was an awful sight.

“Is this what today’s concert audience looks like?” I asked MDG, who was wearing a very sassy but modest outfit from Aritzia and a full face of makeup that made her look remarkably unlike the woman who leads the Spec Racer Ford divisional standings from behind a mirrored-visor Impact Champ.

“Yeah, this is about it.” Most of the men were wearing thrift-shop finds and porn-star facial hair. They had bad posture and what they lacked in upper body strength they also lacked in lower body strength. I was easily 20 years older than every dude there and I would have fought any of them for money. The women were… well, there were some stunners mixed in, but the majority of them were between two and three bills.

“Men I Trust is… lesbian-coded,” MDG explained. “Like Crane Wives and Billie.”

“But I also love Crane Wives and Billie!” I responded. She narrowed her eyes and pretended to be interested in some aspect of the Lexus interior. When we finally got through the door, which entailed resetting my password with the despicable AXS Ticket phone app, I insisted that we sit in back for the opening band, ‘Strongboi’. I didn’t want to wear out my knees ahead of time, just in case Emma collapsed from exhaustion during the concert and needed a grown man to carry her to the safety of my guest bedroom.

this was actually what she wore

It took us about eight songs to realize that “Strongboi” is in fact the side project of Alice Phoebe Lou, whom I adore. We just couldn’t reconcile the dignified South African woman who strums and sings “Angel” with the hyperactive chick who was shaking her ass and grinding for the audience in an outfit best described as “My mom thinks I’m at soccer practice”. And her voice was shot so that wasn’t a clue either.

The music was fun, however. And the crowd, as they say, went wild for it. Strongboi is recommended. My Gen-X and older readers will dig the track “honey thighs” which is an unashamed callback to the best of Motown girl-group music.

We made our way up front for the main event, right in the midst of the Zoomers.

oh, my love, i enjoy watching you pretend to play the guitar so much

MDG was repeatedly bumped by dancers, but I have my Ugly Man Gaijin Perimeter that keeps anyone from touching me. Almost anyone; a lithe blonde girl in a skimpy outfit kept leaning back on me then over-apologizing. “Look at her and the two guys — it’s a throuple,” MDG noted. And she was probably right. The girl had her hands all over the five-foot-five crew-cut kid next to her, but he kept touching and nuzzling the ironic-mullet five-foot-nine dude next to him.

Reader, I have never felt so old. I understand the idea of being gay, and I have enough gay friends that no aspect of it bewilders me. But to have some fine-ass broad grinding against you, with whom you are clearly in some sort of situationship, yet to be more interested in the 5/8s-scale Danny McBride clone who also came to the concert with you… Like, how are you interested in both, but more interested in the guy? Feel free to laugh. I laughed at myself.

But then I got angry, because the two 300-pound women in front of me were very obviously singing "Come Back Down” to each other. This song, which Emma specifically wrote to refer to some emotionally traumatic long-distance relationships in my past, apparently had meaning to this pair of wild hippos in the pit. Thankfully, they got tired from having to stand up without the support of an African river beneath them and were out of my vision before Emma launched into “Seven”, which is the single dirtiest song anyone has ever written about anything. The subject is… watching your friends have sex, and being upset by the superiority of their kink:

In the shadows, he saw four eyes lit by fire
Fire
He'd never done that with a lover before
Before
Meanwhile everyone else got lost in quiet
By the river
Seeking for more, of course he found better

He saw them, they saw him
But everyone just kept on going
What he saw was different

Two reasonably fine and completely underdressed young women next to me configured an iPhone to read “I’LL SHOW YOU MORE… AND BETTER!” in big block letters before turning it toward the stage and waving it frantically at Emma. Lesbian-coded, indeed.

The throuple got in an argument, about what I couldn’t tell, and dispersed. Emma continued to sing. And by the time the band got to the dreamy and reflective “Show Me How”, also written by Emma specifically for me and a quick version of which I’d knocked out on my ‘66 Jazzmaster earlier in the day, I found myself dissociating from the concert until I could see my own face and body at a distance, like a spectator. Old, tired, sick in a couple different ways. Out of date. A frowny-faced caveman throwback in a room full of young men and women who have largely abandoned anything I believe or even understand. There’s some kind of massive joke going on here, some undercurrent of understanding, and I’m not in on it.

Which is entirely alright. It’s their time now, not mine. I worry about my daughter and son, however. These competition-oriented kids, earnest and strong, eerily competent behind stick and rudder or wheel and pedal. I worry that they want to push against the world so hard and it will react like they’re striking water from the high dive board, while the dissipated and lachymorose weakings all around them will float happily through a meaningless existence of weak connections and app-delivered morality. In the group of young people I saw last night, MDG and The Commander are royalty. Tall, forceful, accomplished, able to shake your hand and look you in the eye. What if that’s not enough? What if it’s the wrong thing? What have I done?

Like Liam Neeson, however, I do have a particular set of skills. Which is how we managed to park in the nearly empty lot a hundred feet from the front door, and why we were out a service entrance before the crowd stopped cheering for the second encore song. The Lexus woke up its old-school cold-cathode Optitron dash and was humming down 75 before most of our fellow concert-goers managed to indifferently mill out of the main entrance. Goes to show. If you have to be old and tired, at least be competent.

MiT opens every set in this tour with “To Ease You,” which simply ends with Emma repeating, over and over again, for thirty seconds or more,

Fine, you'll be fine, fine, fine, fine

Let’s hope. For the kids, for everyone who has ever stood next to me at a concert before disappearing into the grave or mere death by distance. Maybe even for me.