Good afternoon, friends. I’m trying to shorten the Wednesday posts a bit in favor of more content throughout the week. If you want to read more, you know what to do — subscribe!
In which Max shines and Lewis suffers
Objectively speaking, this was a successful weekend for Lewis, as F1 announced an African GP in Rwanda starting with the 2030 season. Lewis, whose mother is a white broad from Birmingham and whose father is an English-born man with parents from the Caribbean, has long demanded an African GP, for reasons known only to him. If nothing else, this will test Liberty Media’s ability to control reality on the ground. They should definitely hire Lao Yang to do the buildout.
As anyone who has ever been there knows, however, Singapore is the polar opposite of Rwanda, and in the world’s most civilized major city Sir Lewis was well and truly adrift. His Sprint race was actually quite good; having been dusted by Leclerc in quali, Lewis drove a disciplined and rapid race to get past his teammate and take a second behind an untouchable Max. In GP qualifying, the F1TV announcers experienced multiple top-volume orgasms at Sir’s single-lap pace (at one point, I think Alex Jaques just started yelling “HE’S DOING ITTTTT!") right up to the moment that Leclerc easily outqualified him. Come race day, Lewis looked better on the mediums than Charles looked on the softs… but then there was a VSC period.
Radio comms were not good in Singapore, especially for Red Bull, but everyone now agrees that Lewis was explicitly told to pit directly behind Charles. Instead, he either missed the pit or decided to stay out. Probably the latter. He then made the independent decision to run soft tires for 44 laps. This looked brilliant… for a while. Then his race fell apart. Kimi Antonelli passed him with maximum disrespect then the McLarens hunted him down. At weigh-in after the race, Lewis was visibly sobbing. Listen, I understand being competitive no matter what, but the man has seven world championships and he is crying about finishing 6th during one race of a season where he is earning $100 million? The FIA allowed him to skip the post-race media pen due to distress, and he issued a statement afterwards apologizing to the team. Wild stuff. It seems obvious that Max will pass him in the driver’s standings, and likely that Charles will as well. Quite a turnaround for a man who was briefly a legit contender for the WDC.
Other notes:
McLaren’s car isn’t working and their drivers are crashing into each other, again. This would be a good time to refocus on fundamentals.
Pierre Gasly is having a season for the ages. He’s thirty years old but appears to be improving in real time. If the Alpine continues to improve under Briatore’s iron hand, we could be talking about a championship. Stranger things have happened.
The debut of the IWC Singapore Chronograph wasn’t exactly matched by on-track domination, but Kimi looked solid enough and of course he will win the championship, as early as Austin even, making him just the second wheel-to-wheel racer to win a championship wearing the IWC Singapore Chronograph. Meanwhile, it’s come out that Mercedes is actively guinea-pigging poor George Russell, making him run engines to failure and try alternate bodywork to gather data for 2027. He still looked pretty good in the race, but as a reader messaged me after the race, he’s become “Daniel Russellcardo”. Prediction: he’s back at Williams eventually.
A reminder: if you watched Max stamp his authority on the last two Grands Prix, you are watching the finest race driver in human history. It’s worth cherishing.
Generation(al) Tobacco (ban)
It’s like the recently-passed “Leno’s Law”, but in reverse. The California regulation will gradually make 1976 to 1983 model year cars exempt from emissions. Rather hilariously, and demonstrating how corrupt California is even when they do the right thing, it will be mandatory to have collector car insurance on your 1976-1983 car to make it eligible. Hmm. Wonder who could be behind that part of the law? By contrast, New York is going to stop something, or someone, from smoking…. forever. Assembly Bill 11509 will ban the use of tobacco, in perpetuity, for anyone born after December 31, 2007.
Britain’s already doing it, by the way. On January 1 of 2027, it will become permanently illegal for anyone born after January 1, 2009 to consume tobacco. Doesn’t matter how old they are. The clock stops. Bad news for my son, who is just past the line, but utterly irrelevant to me. Which is how this “generational” law got passed, by the way. They’ve finally figured out a way for old people to permanently screw over the next generation, in permanent law.
Next stop for generational legislation, obviously: Social Security. It will simply become impossible for anyone born after 1970 (maybe) or 1980 (for sure) to collect Social Security.
In some respects, the law just follows reality. Cigarette smoking has not been this unpopular in a century — in over-25 Americans, just 7.2% of men and 5.1% of women smoke cigarettes. For cigars, the numbers are lower, with just 4.1% of adults smoking and they are overwhelmingly male. So it’s easy legislation to write and pass.
At the same time, however, we are at an all-time high for marijuana smoking. Not just use, but actually lighting up. 25% of Americans age 30 to 49 regularly smoke weed.
Here’s the wild part. While cigars are not without health risks, they are significantly better than filtered tobacco cigarettes… which, in turn, are much safer than smoking marijuana. Unfiltered joints are murder on your lungs, even if you forget about all the other known health problems associated with marijuana use. So why is America criminalizing tobacco at warp speed — because as soon as NYC does it, California will follow, and the dominoes will fall — while encouraging the more dangerous pastime of THC smoking?
My theory: nicotine supercharges your mental and fine motor skills while weed makes you a lazy, sex-obsessed moron. The state of New York, just like the United Kingdom, is not interested in you being any smarter and/or more aggressive. You might, as the kids say, start noticing.
DG wins her championship, MDG does not
Going into this final race of the year at Mid-Ohio, Danger Girl was a lock for her divisional championship. She merely had to start both races and complete one lap in each. Which was not a certainty, given that she has had two engine failures this season and is currently racing on a 2.0 MZR stolen out of her street NC Club. Also, the weather was awful and there were many possibilities for mayhem. She was conservative on Day One, finishing near the back of the order. Then she elected to start from dead last on Day Two, knowing that she needed to safely complete one lap. Once that was done, she went from 26th to 9th pretty quickly just for the joy of doing it.
Mini Danger Girl arrived at the finals one point down, thanks to a dipshit 70-ish-year-old steward who had simply vacated one of her wins on the grounds that she had hurt the feelings (but not the car, or person) of a male racer. So she needed to beat her closest competitor both days. On Day One, she lost a plug wire and finished 5th of 6th. Her competitor was running 4th, but two drivers ahead of him, also from Michigan, moved over and let him by so he finished second.
This meant that we needed a miracle on Sunday. And we had it — in the form of heavy rain. MDG qualified second in class and her competitor took fourth. There were a dozen cars from the (nominally faster) SRF3 class between her and this guy, so she would be free to hunt down the win while this fellow struggled to get up to her. That’s about what had happened in opposite fashion on Saturday, when she’d started seven out-of-class cars behind him. On Sunday, however, the stewards declared a split start per class, so she would be just two spots ahead of 13 spots. It was a complete nightmare ruling and appeared to be done for no reason other than to harm her race. Then the third-qualified driver withdrew so he wouldn’t be a blocker between MDG and the other driver. (More Michigan bitch-ass-ed-ness. Imagine doing all this to beat a woman who is faster than you.) Despite that, MDG dusted the fellow pretty quickly and started hunting for first place in class. Then there was a multi-car incident in the other class. So the stewards shut down the race after three green flag laps and handed the championship to her competitor.
I didn’t know what to say to her, other than: “I’d rather you win on track and have it taken away by old men than have you lose it on track then have it given to you by old men.” She was the class of the field this year, showing she could win in any conditions and beat everything from mechanical adversity to coordinated effort against her on track. What she could not do was override a few ancient stewards who have made no secret of the fact that they find her success annoying. Your humble author has put a fellow driver on the LifeFlight and I’ve racked up probably fifty contact incidents in the past two decades but I have fewer points on my license, lifetime, than MDG has been given in 2026 for such crimes as “bumping in a spec series”. At one point, a Michigan driver deliberately spun her out of the lead of a race then announced plans to protest her for holding him up. Happily, he and I had a short conversation that changed his mind.
I’m infinitely proud of MDG. Years ago, God saw that I’d been cursed with a son who would never have enough free time to win a regional championship and He gave me this extra child in consolation. We’d like to thank Mike O Racing for supporting her efforts, and Tommy Byrne (seen below with your humble author) for coaching her to a nearly flawless performance on Sunday.
Sadly, my daughter will have to miss most of the Spec Racer Ford championship next year due to her new role in NASCAR. I’m hoping she will leave me her car to enter in a few races so I can amuse myself the way I like to.
As for my races: I had about 12th-place pace in my 26-car mixed class, but poor track conditions on Sat morning let me start 7th. I was then able to jump to third on the start:
I didn’t have the raw pace to hold on so I finished 6/26 overall, 3/6 in a class where I am the slowest car by 4-5s a lap under normal conditions. Sunday was a monsoon rainstorm so I qualified third overall and finished the race 4/26 overall, 3/6 in class. It was a real joy to race at all this year, but I’ll be back in a Radical for 2027.
Racing the Neon is very different from racing a prototype; both cars give you different bad habits. I still feel I was about 0.4-0.6 seconds off maximum pace this weekend because I’m taking too many “aero lines” and also being slow to get the steering unwound at corner exits. The good news is I know what I’m doing wrong and if I had another season of sedan racing ahead of me I’d get it fixed.
Oh, and a small bit of bragging: I was the only one of 26 cars not on full rain tires this past Sunday. I was on 2024-vintage Bridgestone RE-71S street tires at 50% tread remaining. So I was full sideways in a lot of corners. Tommy Byrne, who was watching my Sunday race, said “When I saw you go through Turn One like that in the first lap, I knew… you were fucked.” But not so fucked that I couldn’t hold on to 4th!
The raw evil of false equivalence
Columbus Day was this past week. It’s become quite chic to gripe about Christopher Columbus, as mid talent/mid broad Kasey Musgraves did at her Dallas concert.
“Obviously fuck Columbus,” she said. “Literally the lamest person to probably ever exist. Like for real. What a loser.”
There have been a lot of similar sentiments on my social media feeds, so I posted a comment to the effect of “no culture where they build pyramids of children’s skulls is worth defending.” I got a variety of responses, the sanest of which was probably this one:
This fellow is experiencing a subset of what they call Jedi Brain. He has been (mis)educated to see everything through the lens of either “movies for kids” or “The Current Year”. In our conversation, he tried to equate the crimes of “Europeans” to the degenerate, murderous, eternal (until forcibly stopped) nightmare society of the Aztecs. This is also common behavior from the “Fuck Christopher Columbus” crowd. It is the mindset of a child whose entire world is controlled by parental authority and whose idea of everything from justice to triumph exists in a frame of “Does Mommy like what I’m saying to her? I love Mommy.” If the “Europeans” are the worst people in history, it’s quite comforting, isn’t it? Because that means:
You can do something about it;
There’s nothing worse out there in the shadows waiting for us.
The latter is clearly wishful thinking. Yesterday I had a conversation with an ACF reader, a decent and moral man, who told me he hadn’t been sleeping well since he read about the “Cow Cat” torture incident. I don’t blame him, because it keeps me up, too. To be fair, not all the Chinese are on board with this stuff. There is a group of Chinese men who have attacked and harmed cat torturers in the past. I’ve also heard a report, not yet verified to any real extent, that a young woman stabbed the Cow Cat torturer then committed suicide to spare her family the shame of her imprisonment. Feline Guardians works in China to prevent more of these incidents, with the help of many Chinese.
In the final analysis, however, it boils down to:
Animal abuse is both criminally punished and considered morally degenerate in Christian America;
China does not operate the same way.
Some cultures are morally superior to others. I wouldn’t say I have a precise handle on how they stack up; for example, do you give Islam points for controlling sexual degeneracy or deduct points for restricting liberty? Do you give America points for trying to keep homeless people fed, or do you deduct points for permitting no-fault divorce? The precise resolution of such issues is the domain of philosophy and the labor of statecraft.
But this difficulty in making precise determinations should not blind us to the fact that some cultures are simply better than others. The Christianity of Spain was, by turns, capricious and cruel. But the Aztecs lived under a system where it was no big deal to kill 20,000 innocents for a single ceremony. They thought…
cough
that if they created enough human misery and suffering, the gods would change the climate in their favor
cough
so they lined up the children, the women, the slaves, and anyone else they could get for a bit of the old live heart removal.
There is nothing racist about deploring this behavior, any more that it was racist to disapprove of the Final Solution or racist to quibble about Stalin’s cheerful murder of perhaps fifty million people. The people who most loudly and joyfully proclaim their hatred of Christopher Columbus are the direct genetic descendants of his countrymen. They have no genuine idea of what racism is.
You can quibble about Columbus and the conquistadors and the Pilgrims and the US Army’s battles against the Native Americans. Much of what they did was deplorable. And you can quibble about them because you happen to live in a moral and ethical system built by Columbus and the conquistadors and the US Army. You have the luxury of being able to quibble.
In a world where cross-ocean navigation never happened, the “Americans” might still be slaughtering people by the tens of thousands every festival day. There is nothing to say that it would have ever stopped. The intellectual children among us won’t like hearing it, but King’s famous “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” was smoothbrain nonsense. The Chinese have been around just as long as the French have been. Their arc didn’t bend the same way. It is childish and ignorant to think that people will just naturally become moral in the same way that you are moral. Your morality was built on the shoulders of giants. Even the most strident atheist of the west owes his entire “morality” to Saul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo. The “effective altruists” are doing math based on what the Jewish scholars of two thousand years ago believed.
Civilization is a thin veneer. It is the surface of a soap bubble. Anything can break it. I’m not talking about “the Boogaloo” or anything like that. I’m talking about waking up some day and finding that, without you noticing any particular change, we have just transitioned into a nation that believes in child sacrifice.
Assuming that hasn’t already happened.
Anyway. If you want to argue the side of the Aztecs, do it in the comments. Expect to be rebuked — but, because we are civilized people, this rebuke won’t come in the form of simply zeroing out your entire bloodline. That was common practice before the conquistadors, too.
Housekeeping
We will have the “AI Discussion” for which many readers have been asking either late tomorrow or early Friday. I have one more car test to throw at you as well, and maybe a guest post.
Amen to the racist part. And just don‘t think the native Indians were all peacefully smoking pipes all day long. According to the seminal work (book) about the history of Texas I‘m going through, some tribes murdered and slaughtered other tribes fully, decimated them or pushed them out of their territory. Sure, they were pushed out by the whites eventually, but they weren’t really any better… Not all of them, just like not all whites are bad people.
About being racist: did you hear about BMW revoking a lease offer to a newly appointed AfD minister? Supposedly the North Korean family drove BMWs (hearsay, I don‘t know for sure) and probably other despots drove them, too. But now they think a democratically chosen candidate from Germany‘s biggest (!) party can‘t have a BMW. What utter morons!
0-“My theory: nicotine supercharges your mental and fine motor skills”
Why do you think I smoke 50 cigars a week?
1-I hope Tommy Byrne was able to get Jack Baruth’s autograph.
2-I have figured out what the Jaguar Type 01 really is: A poor man’s Cadillac Celestiq!