Wednesday ORT: Lucky Lewis, Lucky Nithya, Big Block Vette, Unlucky Park, The CB is F-ed

Good afternoon, friends. A Housekeeping note: I’m not commenting on the Karmelo Anthony decision because, frankly, watching some of the discourse on the subject has made me lose a measurable amount of hope for our continued American co-existence. If you want to talk about it here, please be respectful to everyone involved. One child is dead. Another child is doomed. Another housekeeping note: I forgot to put in my order for the PRS SE Rock Lady until the end of the day yesterday, so I’m not guaranteed an allocation. Therefore any discussion of this guitar will result in immediate sobbing on my part.

You’re the guy who hasn’t made a pass in months, right?

Alright, now Sir Lewis is second in the championship — I said it last week but I’d done the math wrong. The media is very excited about this, of course. Let’s discuss the ways Lewis was lucky and the ways he was smart.

Lucky:

• Ferrari was the favorite for Monaco, due to their low-speed grip and their obviously superior launches. Both Lewis and Charles underperformed in qualifying, but Charles managed to push just a little too hard in Q3, which left Lewis ahead. Meanwhile, Max Verstappen dragged the RB up to 2nd with his bare hands, but…

• The Red Bull has started badly all season but now it’s not starting at all. This was doubly lucky for Lewis, because not only did he not have to pass an unpassable Verstappen, he also gapped Charles who had to drive around Verstappen.

• Lewis ignored the FIA guidance about cutting the corner before pit lane, because still he rises, so he was hit with the same 5-second penalty as everyone else who was too special to follow Race Control. When Leclerc effortlessly dtove up to 2.4s behind him after the last stops, the scene was set for Lewis to take 3rd place from 2nd, but Ferrari chose to double-stack their pitstop, thus forcing Leclerc to also serve Hamilton’s 5s penalty. This so infuriated Leclerc that he promptly drove into the wall at the restart.

So. A race where his competition broke at the start and his teammate had to serve his penalty with him. Lucky. But what was smart? Well, when Ferrari offered a different brake system to both him and Charles, he was the only one to take it. Leclerc, who has effortlessly outqualified him pretty much everywhere for more than a year, probably figured it was safer to drive a brake system he disliked but knew well. Turns out that was a mistake.

Somehow the Hamilton Hype O’ The Week has largely overshadowed the fact that Kimi Antonelli turned in a genuinely legendary weekend performance. Without the fastest car, he still qualified up front. Then, when the FIA took his half-lap lead away and decided to make him do a standing restart next to the Ferrari, he brushed Sir Lewis away like a fruit fly and won the race decisively. Toto Wolff looks like the cat who ate the canary. Antonelli is effortlessly toasting the driver — Princess George — who has been making Hamilton look awful for years now. For the record:

• Kimi Antonelli salary: $2 million. He is beating

• George Russell salary: $34 million. He regularly beat

• Lewis Hamilton salary: $60 million.

Toto Wolff, like Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton, has been part of seven World Driver’s Championship trophies. Here’s how he is different: at the end of this year, he will have eight.

Other notes:

• The FIA has determined that Red Bull has the best F1 engine, which means Mercedes will get one upgrade and Ferrari will get two. This decision seems somewhere between “quite stupid” and “openly corrupt”.

• After a race where their suspension collapsed for no reason, Cadillac now has drivers making avoidable error after avoidable error…

• …which is why Alonso, and Aston Martin, are now somehow not dead last despite having a car that is literally painful to operate.

• The Liam Lawson hype train, which is like the slower and more developmentally handicapped version of the Sir Lewis hype train, is under full steam right now based on Lawson’s luck-based wandering up to fifth place. This is a driver who has been beaten like a rug by everyone who has ever sat next to him. Send him home already.

• Alex Albon is such a whiner I don’t know what to say any more. Williams worked like hell to create a strategy that put him in the points; he moaned the whole time and almost ruined it.

• Princess George is maximally, totally, cooked. He will go down in history as the biggest choker since the Elway-era Denver Broncos.

She is having to remind the people who she is, because no one seems to know

There comes a time in every man’s life when he simply needs to stand up and be the person who speaks truth, regardless of what others think. I’ll try to be that person today and say: what you are seeing in the chart above is a stolen election, it is fraud, it is evil. I know, I know, I know that talking about “stolen elections” is the sort of thing that simply removes you from the discourse in this country. Thanks to a six-year-long campaign of media bombardment, the average normie in America views “election fraud” with the same OK-Boomer disgust he assigns to people who claim to have been anally probed by aliens. (Aliens from outer space, I mean. I know plenty of people who have been anally probed by just regular aliens.)

Look at the chart above, and ignore Spencer Pratt. Compare Bass and Raman. Bass went from 36% of the vote to 35% of the vote during the batshit insane period of ballot harvesting and invention that characterizes California’s Forever Elections. Meanwhile Raman went from 21% to 27%. I have been reading reports that she was beating Bass two to one in the harvested ballots.

Normally I would couch my observations about this in some sort of moderate language like, “This is probably not fraud, but it has the appearance of fraud and therefore the system should be revised.” In this case, however, the mask has slipped too far. There is no way that late mail-in voters prefer a particular candidate by two to one over early mail-in voters. That is ridiculous. It is fraud. And unless something major happens in the next few days, it will go unchallenged.

Note, as well, that Raman got the absolute minimum of votes she needed to knock Spencer Pratt out of the final election. Anything above that, and she might have started to look electable. The machine clearly wants Karen Bass to continue running Los Angeles into the ground. You can say whatever you want about Zohran Mamdani, but I have zero doubt that he was elected in a free and fair election. The same cannot be said about Karen Bass, when she wins.

Let us take an additional moment to wonder at the fact that Spencer Pratt’s platform, which amounted to “Maybe we shouldn’t have 50,000 homeless people running wild and stabbing folks despite being the recipients of over a billion dollars’ worth of corrupt, frequently-diverted funding,” was successfully marginalized as “extreme” by the California media. Despite that, about a third of Angelenos turned out for the man… or maybe it was a quarter of them. We’ll never know; California doesn’t permit any external oversight of their elections. Raise a glass to Karen Bass, possibly the worst mayor in America. Long may she reign.

We didn’t know we needed it, but we do

The big-block Corvette had a relatively short existence — 1965 to 1974, across two visually different but mechanically similar platforms — but it has always exercised an unhealthy fascination on the marque’s fans. Like Sullivan, the enigmatic older-woman artist sketched lightly throughout Dom DeLillo’s Americana, it lives in the hearts of men. Chevrolet was fantastically unsubtle about this when they extended the LS small-block to a (nominal) 427 cubic inches of displacement for the C6 Z06 and (my favorite) 427 Convertible, but calling a small-block a “427” is like the phrase “Van Halen singer Gary Cherone”; no one wants to hear that.

If you are like me, you probably struggle with your attraction to what I can only call unnecessary technological obfuscation. It is why I own a Honda VFR800, for example. On paper it’s a dog. In real life it sounds wild, plus I have the enjoyable knowledge that it is a delightfully complex V-Four with gear-driven cams. Some machines are delightful just because they are unusual, or difficult somehow, or evocative of a previously important emotion. The racer in me could not care less about this; I know that the 2.7-liter, 10,500-rpm RPE-V8 in my Radical is a hand-built masterpiece of complexity but if I could shave one second a lap by replacing it with the K20 from a junkyard Honda CR-V I’d do it in a heartbeat. But the man, the human, in me is endlessly fascinated by dual-impulse escapements and titanium valve springs and electrostatic loudspeakers.

Which brings us to the 8.1-liter Corvette C8. This in no way needs to exist. Small-block Vettes are capable of making a thousand horsepower as easy as breathing (deeply before ordering the turbo kit). The 496-cubic-inch engine at its heart is the Vortec 8.1 that used to be an option in 2500 Chevrolets. (Younger people often ask me why there are so few 8.1 Vortecs out there, and the reason is because Chevrolet drastically curtailed allocation. The dealers had to beg, borrow, and steal for them.) It’s just a plain-Jane truck engine, really. It didn’t make a ton of power.

Well, in the hands of Larry Hofer, it’s going to make power. Because he has re-engineered it to feature direct injection, variable valve timing, and — get this, fam — eight individual throttle bodies. Yeah, it weighs 200 pounds more, but Hofer isn’t going to run this thing around road courses. He simply wants a proper big-block Corvette, and he’s going to get one. He has been working at this for three and a half years, with what looks like a fairly unrestricted budget.

Could Chevrolet take a page from Hofer’s book? Well, they do still make the big block as an aftermarket item, most spectacularly as the 1,000-plus-horse ZZ632. Dart makes an aluminum big block, as do a few others. We already have too many different Corvettes, but this is an additional complexity I would welcome.

The real opportunity, here, is for Ford. Everyone knows that a Godzilla Mustang would sell like Labubus. We even know what it needs to be called: Boss. If the heritage crowd needs to be pacified, they could de-stroke it a tiny bit and call it the Boss 429, but I’d be just as pleased with a Boss 445.

F them kids

Back in 1999, 87 acres of land in Taylor, Texas, was donated (nominal fee $10) to the city by a farmer, with a condition in the deed that it would be used for community parkland. In 2025, the land was sold for $10M to a data center developer, who has won several legal battles against the nearby residents who are trying to stop the massive construction project, reports 404 Media. Now, the disgruntled locals are planning to take their case to an appeals court.

Bland [the farmer in question] once said… “I see the kids don’t really have nowhere to play.” He continued, “I’m thinking about giving this land for parkland because these kids need somewhere to play…”

July 7, 1999 – Bland granted the land to the Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a public trust, for $10 on the condition it be used as a park,

2003 - Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation granted the land to another non-profit called the Williamson County Park Foundation,

2003, one month later, Williamson County Park Foundation gave the land to the City of Taylor,

2008 - the city of Taylor sold the land to the Taylor Economic Development Corporation (TEDC) for $15,000,

2025 – TEDC sold the land to data center developers Blueprint for $10 million.

Absolutely astounding, and every detail just makes it worse. What I find most fascinating is how the data center, like the electric vehicle, is brutally catapulted past every possible legislative or social hurdle facing it. We always hear about how you can’t get anything built in modern cities due to NIMBYism and endless environmental interference — but a 69,000 sqft data center next to the Nashville Zoo was given an immediate building permit with no red tape whatsoever. The builder’s response to public pushback was… to add another one more than three times as large next to it. You can’t make this stuff up.

My township has passed a data center moratorium, as have several other townships in the area. Mostly, this has been the same as me deciding I won’t sleep with Olivia Wilde — she never asked — but there have been a few attempts to get something done in the county. I doubt they will succeed. Somehow, our local hicks have a better sense of the environment and what’s right in general than, say, the enlightened zillionaires of Nashville, TN or even the corrupt cowards of Taylor, TX.

If there is any justice in the world, the survivors of that farmer who donated the 87 acres will wait until the DC is built… then get a court to award it to them.

Finally, some good news

The base price for Honda’s parallel-twin CB750 Hornet is $7,999. For just three grand more you can replace the weedy 83-horse parallel twin with a 129-horse 998cc inline-four; that is the delightful CB1000 Hornet that appeared in the States last year. (It can be retuned to 155hp if you swap the exhaust!) It’s even made in Japan. The only thing you could say against it was that, well, it’s not perfectly handsome.

Well, the new CB1000F is perfectly handsome, it’s four hundred bucks cheaper, and it’s just ducky.

This looks like a motorcycle. It is reportedly retuned for 115 or so horsepower but more low-end response, which is a must for those of us spoiled by the V-twins out there. First and second gear are lower than in the Hornet, but the others are higher. Truthfully, this is the motorcycle I wanted when I bought my 2014 CB1100, which turned out to be more of a deliberately-engineered air-cooled evocation of Seventies Hondas, kind of a Grand Seiko 44GS Tribute on two wheels. Don’t get me wrong, I still put 12,000 all-weather commuter miles on it, and I still have it, but I would have enjoyed this faster, more purposeful motorcycle more. I am of the opinion that every motorcycle should have at least one hundred horsepower, and that one fifty would be better, and that 208 seems just right.

My 2014 CB1100 had an MSRP of $10,399. So the $10,599 price of this CB1000F amounts to an astounding discount. I’m going to go look at one. I’m not in a position to make the trade right now, but if I had the requisite four or five thousand bucks sitting around I would do it without thinking. In fact, if any of you out there are disgusted by the fact that this new CB1000F is water-cooled, and you want a real air-cooled Honda retro, let’s talk. I’m your huckleberry — because the new Honda is my huckleberry, no doubt.