Wednesday ORT: Max Attack, Meet Rex, Bugatti Dash, A Really Big Racer, A Really Big Plane

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“Sainz got a podium with Williams before Lewis got one with Ferrari”

If only the compliant Bottas had sat in for Princess George! Russell’s flu was bad enough to affect his driving, and Toto was ready to Finnish him — but at the last minute, the British driver decided he was up to the mark. In this case, “up to the mark” meant ruining the Smooth Operator’s chance to take an overall second place. It hardly mattered, really; at Williams in this era, a podium is a win.

And how ironic it is that Sainz pulled through and got it while Albon relentlessly blotted his copybook through an awful qualifying and an overaggressive race. Ten years from now, they’ll look at the points and conclude that Albon was better than Sainz this year — but was he, really? I’d suggest not.

Other notes:

• Everybody get excited about the prospect of Max winning his fifth championship! The stage is set for a Kimi-vs-McLaren-in-2007 showdown once again. What if Oscar and Lando are as shambolic in the next couple races as they were this past weekend? Wouldn’t this be the single greatest championship effort in the modern era? I mean, the Red Bull isn’t even as good as the Racing Bull!

• Speaking of: I was massively disappointed that Yuki didn’t pass Liam at the end, but this was a 14-month high mark for Red Bull’s second driver.

• Listening to the F1TV commentators (sans Coulthard) enthuse about Sir Hamilton’s performance all weekend was more than a bit embarrassing. Any day now he’s gonna… do something! Still he rises! He beat Leclerc! (Because the team swapped them!) Lewis is earning six (6) times what Sainz earns at Williams. Is there anyone who thinks that Carlos would be doing worse than The Chosen One at Ferrari this year?

• Aston Martin needs to get their act together. As does Alpine. I’ll admit to being confused by the latter situation. I really thought Flavio was going to turn the team around, whether by hook or by, uh, crook.

Wacky conspiracy time: McLaren is pulling a “Ron Dennis” and is under-serving Oscar Piastri so Lando can win the championship. Oscar’s barrier hit at the beginning of the race looked like a bad car, not a bad choice. On the other hand… how do you explain Lando’s pitstops?

Speaking of bad cars, this isn’t one

“economy sedan 300” and “lazy sedan 400”

Two months ago, I talked about my outrageously stupid decision to spend nearly eleven thousand dollars on the purchase and rehabilitation of a 2001 Lexus ES300. Well, my fingers are crossed as I say this but nowadays I’m not sure it was such a bad idea. The fancy Camry has covered five thousand miles with no issues. It’s a joy to drive, really. Quiet and trouble-free. I can park it anywhere without agitating over door dings. It carries four people in comfort. If I get another fifteen thousand miles out of it with no serious additional costs, I’ll count the whole episode as a win.

I’m not sure its new stablemate will be quite as placid to own and operate.

I didn’t buy this car. Buying a second Lexus would have been deranged. Here’s the story: Thirty-five years ago, the mother of Danger Girl’s childhood friend wanted a new car. Everyone was talking about Lexus, and there was a brand-new dealership in Albuquerque. So she walked in and got an early build 1990 LS400 with a middling options load in a rather rare color combination. In the first ten years, she put 101,000 miles on it, mostly trouble-free. Then the pace of her driving slowed considerably, adding just 69,000 miles in the next twenty-five years.

DG’s friend has now buried both of her parents, which is hard when you are still relatively young. Prepping and selling Mom’s car, which had sat outside for years, was more than she wanted to do. So she sent it to us. Today I cleaned it up, which was no small task. The interior was filled with tree sap and some sort of resin. The front seats are beyond recovery, the radio is dead, and the climate control no longer shows any working display. New Mexico’s unrelenting sun has burned the paint, and nearly every panel is dented or scratched. The power steering needs immediate service.

And yet… my God this is a charming car. When the LS400 debuted, I had nothing but contempt for it. I thought the Infiniti Q45 was a much more ambitious and sporting vehicle with a unique and admirable design. Plus the Q had power. The LS400? It was a soap-bar fake S-Class for people too timid (read: trashy, nouveau) to encompass the Puritan punishment of dark and dismal Mercedes-Benz service lounges. Back then, owning a “luxury car” was supposed to entail a certain amount of discomfort and effort. The 1988 BMW 750il was a perfect example of that. Finicky as a Ferrari, and with an interior that had all the upscale charm of an Ikea “Billy” bookshelf. You bought it because it was gorgeous and powerful, trying to ignore the fact that it could surprise you at any moment with a five-figure service bill.

Our friend’s mother would have hated the 750il — but she loved the LS400. Thirty-five years later, now that my pretensions to the higher bourgeoisie have been decapitated by age, illness, and my own irresistible impulses to self-destruction, I can see “Circle-F” for what it truly is: a car designed and built with the customer’s desires, rather than the auto executive’s whims, foremost in mind. The big Germans and the Jag XJ6, like a BPD art hoe, insisted that if you couldn’t handle them at their unreliable worst you didn’t deserve them at their freeway-crushing best. But the LS400 did everything they could do, with less fuss and more quiet satisfaction. Literally quiet. This car is still grave-like at speed, though surely every piece of every rubber seal in its body has crumbled to nothing.

I’ve nicknamed the car “Rex”, both to describe what it is — a red Lexus — and in backhanded acknowledgement of a scene in John Updike’s 1990 novel Rabbit At Rest where, after suspending the protagonist’s Toyota dealership for fraudulent floorplan paperwork, the thick-accented Japanese regional manager tells him, “Good ruck with many probrems. Perhaps before too rate should buy Rexus at dealer price.”

Ah, what a ride this life has been, dear readers! To think that I once owned three Porsches, but now I own three ancient Lexus sedans! How the mighty have fallen!

Wait.

Two ancient Lexus sedans.

Sorry.

That was a typo. I totally promise it was. Anyway. I love Rex. He needs quite a bit of love and care, and he will get it, once I have a couple extra bucks in the hopper. If you want to support that effort, feel free to subscribe.

Say it with me: screens are for proles

Last week I had the privilege of sitting in on an hour-long presentation by Achim Anscheidt, Bugatti’s recently retired Director of Design. He discussed the fact that no modern Bugatti has much in the way of LCD display screens. In this, he is echoing the decision made in 1988 or thereabouts by LS400 chief designer Michikazu Masu, who saw the increasing popularity of digital dashboards — think 1984 Corvette for the most extreme example, but the flickering LCDs in the 1988 Reatta were also a good example — and chose instead to develop the now-famous “Optitron” analog gauges.

What Anscheidt and Masu inherently understood is that screens are cheap and getting cheaper all the time. It can be a temporary advantage to spend more money on a bigger screen — think of the current Ram pickup, which shocked buyers with its laptop-sized center screen in 2019 — but next generation’s economy car will absolutely have more pixels than this generation’s flagship. You’d have to be a moron, or someone who doesn’t care at all about what happens to your product five years down the road, not to understand that.

General Motors, of course, is largely staffed by people who are both. So here’s the current Escalade:

Last time I was in Las Vegas I caught a ride in one of these. Not gonna lie, as the kids say: It’s fairly impressive to see the dash in operation. Lincoln’s new Nautilus has something similar. But there’s just one problem with making “full-width LCD screen” the standard of luxury:

There’s a $21,000 Chinese sedan with the same thing. And in three or four years, every Chinese car will have a full-width LCD dash. Because it’s the cheapest thing to do. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been television shopping in the past decade.

We’ve already seen the depressing outcome of fitting a 10” LCD in place of pretty much every instrument panel in every car for sale nowadays. It doesn’t matter if you buy a Chevy truck or a Hyundai sedan or a new S-Class. You’re going to be looking at exactly the same thing, only with different graphics. It makes cars feel disposable and generic.

Which is why Bugatti designed a massively complex, and fully metal-gear-mechanical, instrument panel for the new Tourbillon. Even the name of the thing drives home a point: the rotating-cage tourbillon escapement has long been one of the most difficult and expensive mechanical-watch complications to make.

The first automaker to follow Bugatti back from the brink and install a proper mechanical dash in their upscale models will, I think, reap some benefits.

Apparently they wouldn’t let him race a Hayabusa

This is easily one of the coolest stories I’ve heard in years. MotoAmerica has a new rookie racer: 40-year-old Tony Ugoh, riding a BMW M1000 RR in the Stock 1000 class. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he won two Super Bowls as an offensive tackle. Now he’s trying a new sport. Look at the photo above. That’s a big man on a little bike. Not in the Fat Brad sense of “obese monkey molesting a football”:

image is a parody, but that really *is* what he looks like

but in the sense of “Six foot five professional athlete slims down to take the best possible shot at this.” He was 301 pounds when he played in the NFL. Rumor says he is damned close to 200 now. Which is still far too heavy to win; JD Beach is probably the most successful full-sized MotoAm racer at six-two and 170. But the discipline of it! The desire! My God, what are the rest of us doing with our lives?

I have never bothered or spoken to a single MotoAmerica racer during my time as a safety-car driver with the organization. I didn’t even go find Keanu when he was in the Mid-Ohio garages. But this guy? I’ll be looking for an autograph.

It’s the Tony Ugoh of cargo planes

I absolutely adore the Radia Windrunner, even though it doesn’t yet exist. There is something quintessentially American about trying to build the world’s largest plane for the single goofy task of carrying a wind turbine blade to unpaved runways. It’s the sort of thing we did in this country before we had the blessings of a largely imported engineering workforce and all these daycare jobs for girlbosses. (It’s also quintessentially German; the Windrunner is basically the Me323 Gigant.)

While the WindRunner is still being targeted at renewable energy installations, Radia has decided to pitch a decidedly more serious, and deep-pocketed, customer: the US Air Force.

The “Windrunner Defense” will do wonderful things. Like carry a C-17 fuselage. Or six Chinook helicopters. Or four F-35s. Or twenty Lexus ES300s. Or Brad on a LiveWire. (I don’t actually know it will be able to do that.) It won’t be fast — 450mph at best — but it will be faster than the Airlander, which is another way to do this work.

Between this and the Boom Supersonic private jet, it’s nice to see some genuinely new aircraft in progress. Let’s not forget that the F-47 is already being built! Sometimes it feels like we live in a world that is already dead, one where everything gets slightly worse and slightly more expensive each year, one where all the big innovations have already happened. The first time you see a Windrunner in the air, you will know that’s not the case…

…and if it is truly ready in 2031 or thereabouts, I know just the man to fly it.