Wednesday ORT: Miami F1, Clapton Drops, Hostages, Worstford Hills, The Xioa-mi State

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photo credit: the commander

Isn’t it nice to be back into the swing of racing once more? Your humble author is taking the season off, but F1 is very much back on and the three other members of my household will all see their share of green flags this year. In other news, we set another comment record in Sunday’s paid thread. If you’re not a paid member, maybe now’s the time to see why these threads are so popular. Or don’t, see if I care, couldn’t matter less to me, I don’t need your money.¹ Off we go.

The lion does not concern himself with direction

There’s still plenty to criticize about the goofy battery-powered aspects of Formula 1 in 2026, but the changes made for the Miami GP go a long way towards addressing the worst parts of the sport’s virtue-signaling powertrain decisions. There’s a lot to discuss so I’ll bullet-point it:

• Alright, so we are back to taking McLaren seriously in general and taking Lando seriously in particular. He’s kind of starting to look like a world champion, actually. Consistent in qualifying and in the actual racing, relatively unflappable, making all possible moves without flopping on the impossible ones. There is every chance he will join Jenson Button in the ranks of British WDCs Who More Or Less Deserved To Win.

• That being said, the finest driver on the grid is still Max Verstappen and he proved it at least three different ways on Sunday. With any other driver, that born-from-ambition spin in the first lap would have caused utter havoc in the field. With Max, it just meant… a change in pit strategy that was only a few slowed-down wet laps from getting him something between a podium and a win. Meanwhile, poor Hadjar appeared to be crying in his car after clipping a barrier. Can you blame him? Being Max Verstappen’s teammate is no different than finding yourself in a hotel room with the late Kobe Bryant. You know what’s going to happen, you don’t have a lot of say in the matter, and the only real question is how much it will hurt.

• There is no greater injustice in Formula 1 at the moment than the impression you would get just from reading the race results… “Ah, Charles beat Lewis in the sprint then lost in the GP!” Well, it’s more like “Charles had a half decent chance to win the GP but his car broke, while Lewis drove touring laps all weekend.” Leclerc is proving to be a master of battery racing, likely because he is exceptionally intelligent and can spare the processing power that some of his competitors cannot.

• Alpine used to be split into “the car guys” and “the engine guys”. Now that Alpine has Mercedes power under Briatore, we can see where to credibly blame fault for some lackluster seasons. Pierre Gasly is 9th in the driver standings and second in the official F1 Power Rankings.

• Liam Lawson, your career is over, please see yourself out before anyone else gets hurt.

• Sainz > Albon and it will only get worse.

• Perez > Bottas, but will that continue? Does anyone care? Watching the F1TV crew try to work up enthusiasm for Cadillac F1 was like watching a stripper smile at a 400-pound customer. Meanwhile, Haas is securely in the midfield using the same powerplant. How long will a tool-and-die maker beat the Mark of Excellence? As long as Gene Haas wants.

• Who in the business is smarter than Toto Wolff? Anyone? He’s put together the best car for at least nine of the last fourteen years and his gamble on having a literal child drive the thing has been the best idea since Ali G invented the Playstation 3. Sir Lewis must be crying in Angela Cullen’s nursing bra over his decision to leave for Ferrari. Not that he could have beaten Princess George like this broccoli-headed moppet is doing, but he probably believes he could have.

• It has perhaps not escaped everyone’s notice that the “Red Bull finally delivers vaguely competitive car” plot line is happening much earlier in 2026 than it did in 2025. There would be something genuinely funny about Max winning his fifth WDC in a car he despises.

A complete unknown, like a rolling stone

I’m not sure why this is getting traction now, but it appears that a while ago Rolling Stone re-ranked Eric Clapton from the #2 Guitarist Of All Time to #35 overall, beind one-trick ponies like (the beloved) Nile Rodgers, outright commie jagoffs like Tom Morello, and journeymen like Tony Iommi. Oh, he’s also behind Jack White and Neil Young, neither of whom play guitar above the novice level. While RS doesn’t exactly say why, they appear to be upset about Clapton’s COVID-vaccine stance. Which is kind of odd, because to gripe nowadays about how Clapton regarded the vaccine is like saying, “I can’t believe anyone voted against the Iraq War.”

Oh, and the magazine mentioned the thing about his kid falling out of a 53rd-floor window in Manhattan. Which, it should be reiterated, was his baby momma’s fault. Clapton wasn’t even there.²

This activist approach rankles even more when you see Tom Morello on the list at all. This moron puts the hammer and sickle on his guitars, paying tribute to an ideology that killed twenty people for every one Hitler put underground. He is literally a mass murder enthusiast who sells merch based on the idea.

Oh well. The music press has always been fake and lame. Never more so than now.

Well qualified

mess with the, uh, cow? and you get the, uh, elsie horns?

As some of you know, Mini Danger Girl won’t be racing her own cars for much of this year because she’s off to work in the NASCAR game. So we dragged up to Waterford Hills for their first local series race of the year. I am of two minds about Waterford: I enjoy the kart-track, jewel-box nature of the place and I am pleased to be the GTX-class record holder there, but there is so much about Michigan racing culture in general and WH race culture in particular that I despise. There is no track in America that works harder to make visitors feel less welcome. MDG’s mother won’t go there any more, period point blank — so the support crew this weekend was just me and The Commander.

To everyone’s surprise and almost no one’s pleasure, MDG worked the Saturday qualifying session very well and finished as polesitter in a 20-car field with 13 cars in her class. This did not sit well with everyone so she was protested off the top spot on the grounds that the grid workers should have let a local driver go out for the session before her. Then she was restored to the top spot, but other people got moved around. It was all very wacky and this stuff only happens at Waterford. Someone else got ejected from qualifying for passing under yellow, but then they pled ignorance and were put right back. What can you do.

Prior to the race, a few other drivers warned us to expect some immediate aggressive action from the #2 qualified driver. We know and love this fellow, but he takes his Waterford racing very seriously. Like I would take racing my Radical at a full-sized track for adults like, say, Mid-Ohio. “He is going to test you,” everyone said. I advised MDG to keep her foot in it.

Well, after the first two turns this driver squeezed MDG and she refused to yield, which was great. But then they hit a bump on the track and they both went off. The other driver immediately re-entered and finished fourth. MDG waited until it was safe, re-entered 16th, and finished 7th. After the race the other driver and I had a conversation that eventually worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. I’m not naming him because I sympathize with his agitation. It is no fun being a recognized top talent locally and having some rookie-ish woman out-qualify you. It’s never happened to me in a 21-year wheel-to-wheel career, but if it did I would probably be agitated.

For the rest of the weekend MDG was mired in the midfield, playing bump-and-thump with other spec-class drivers. In the end she was the fifth-fastest of 13 cars in class, losing the chance to podium in the final race because the Brazilian driver ahead of her took an exceptionally bad start and she was stuck while the field cruised by. That’s the end of her race season for now.

And that is where we could end the story, except I want to give my son a hard time. We sent him out for “lunch laps” so he could learn both the Spec Racer Ford and the Waterford Hills track. You’re not supposed to do more than “street pace” during the lunch laps. He repeatedly zipped up to full speed and tossed MDG’s car — on her only set of race tires — at corners with hilarious abandon, including this entry to turn 1:

This was his third-ever lap of the track, and third-ever lap in a single-seat race car. “Yeah, when it locked up I realized I needed to release and trail it out,” he offered, by way of non-apology. Over the course of the weekend, we saw six fully qualified Waterford locals head into the gravel, or the wall, in identical situations. The Commander was unruffled. “There is no reason to go off in that situation,” he opined. “You just have to catch the slide.” His utter lack of concern about operating anything without a full suite of avionics is a constant source of joy (and worry) for me.

I don’t really dislike the Waterford people that much. But if I did, I’d buy John a Spec Racer Ford and let him murder the field with complete disdain in his rookie year. If they hate his sister — and they kind of do — they would despise him.

Hey yo, Griff, hold ‘em hostage!

During the discussions on the Sunday thread, one of our commenters said something to effect of

We are held hostage by the lowest 20% of society far more than we are by the top 1%.

Or something to that effect — when you have over 1,000 comments in the Substack system, it basically responds to all queries with a random podcast. If the original poster wants to speak up, he is invited to do so.

I think I’m a bit to the left of most ACF readers in the sense that I don’t have any patience with pure “invisible hand” economics or lolbertarian philosophy. My opinion is that America works best when we have a safe regulatory environment that enables business to flourish. There is a happy medium between “pour mercury into the elementary school groundwater” and “you can’t build anything here, someone saw a snail in a ditch 50 years ago”. Too often, even the smartest of us handle our political discourse in full beard-fallacy mode: “WHAT? YOU WANT TO PREVENT CABLE MONOPOLIES? WHAT’S NEXT, GOVERNMENT ISSUED JUMPSUITS?” or “EVERYTHING ABOVE MY PERSONAL INCOME LEVEL SHOULD BE TAXED AT 96% LIKE FDR DID.”

Similarly, I think we have a bit of a false dichotomy in our conversations sometimes when we talk about “the one percent” or “the EBT crowd” or whatever. As if you need to align yourself with one or the other. And indeed our mass media is very good at fostering this attitude. Ask yourself the following question:

Who are the real welfare cheats?

Some of you will answer “the Somalis who scam us with Learing Centers” and some of you will say “JP Morgan Chase and BlackRock”.

What I want to suggest to you is that the oft-discussed danger or horribleness of the lowest 20% is a direct product of decisions made by the 1%. In particular, what Rob Henderson calls “the luxury beliefs” of the one percent have made living in the lowest twenty percent utter hell.

The mostly commonly cited example is family stability: Divorce and pleasure-seeking has been glorified in our media since “Peyton Place”. The vast majority of what you see on TV or social media today advocates everything from “Eat, Pray, Love” to “serial monogamy”. This media is funded, produced, and approved by the one percent — yet they get married and stay married, regardless of their professed beliefs. Meanwhile, the poor and middle-class people who take those media-provided beliefs seriously get divorced more and more often:

Any idiot knows that broken homes are harder on children and more likely to lead to personal tragedy. Which is why the wealthy don’t have them.

Next example: Jia Tolentino, who is a worthless human being from a family populated almost entirely by worthless human beings, has been advocating “microlooting” in print:

Appearing alongside far-left agitator Hasan Piker for a New York Times podcast, Jia admitted to repeated acts of shoplifting against Whole Foods, before encouraging her readership to go out and commit theft: ‘‘Everyone, try it. See what happens.’’

Jia encouraged people to steal from the Louvre, before effortlessly pivoting to endorse Luigi Mangione’s infamous murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

She described the brutal, cold-blooded killing of a father of two as an ‘‘effective act of political consciousness-raising.’’ She expressed frustration that the Democrats failed to fully capitalise on the murder - she called it ‘‘one of the most egregious missed opportunities that we have seen in recent political history.’’

Tolentino reportedly lives in a $2.5 million Brooklyn home. If she gets caught “microlooting”, it will be treated as a joke. The cop will let her go. If Whole Foods actually has her arrested, they will end up apologizing because the New Yorker can do more harm to them with a single sentence than Tolentino can do with a lifetime’s worth of shoplifting.

There’s nothing that coddled rich people love more than the attitude of slight disrespectability generated by advocating theft or, in the recent case of Ann Arbor, taking down all the Neighborhood Watch signs. Every time I read some criminality-adjacent piece by an Ivy League graduate whose O-ring would be forcibly blown out within their first three hours in a Midwest prison, I think of this:

It’s harmless cosplay for them — but when this permissiveness filters down to people who actually have something to lose, the consequences are real. If my kid steals from a store, he won’t get the Tolentino treatment. Instead, his military career will be over before it starts. If a low-income teenager is caught “microlooting” something that is more valuable than he realizes, he might be sent to something like the “gladiator school” youth corrections facilities in California. At which point he is effectively a dead man walking.

When two Ivy League attorneys firebombed an NYPD car, they got slaps on the wrist while the NYT cried over their missed career opportunities. If I threw a Molotov into a cop car tomorrow, they would lock me up until the end of the third Ocasio-Cortez administration or noted ACFer Sherman McCoy’s wedding day, whichever is later.

Yeah, we might be “held hostage by the 20%”, although that’s more applicable to major cities than, say, in my township; the only observable difference between me and the genuinely poor people in this community is that most of them are driving something nicer than a 2001 Toyota that groans in reverse like Elana Scherr being asked to wash her hands after using the bathroom.³ The question is: Where do the 20% get their ideas for behavior? Who told them to stop getting married? Who told them to steal and misbehave as they like? Who told them it was okay to brawl at the Spirit Airlines counter?

I think that if you trace most socially poisonous ideas back to their source, you will not find that source in the low-opportunity communities. Even in the occasions that the core idea does come from the poor, you’ll find it amplified and glorified in everything from music to movies to Instagram.

In other words, America is like the original “Saw” movie: you’re being held hostage by someone who is taking his direction from someone else.

Well, it worked for Genesis, right?

This past weekend, while MDG was making grown men cry in Spec Racer Ford, the folks at Superlap/THAZE were racing in a very special Nurburgring 24h event that wasn’t real. It was a 24-hour iRace. The Superlap folks on Woodward Avenue had a whole setup for pit changes and everything.

One thing I noticed as I watched them, er, race was the amount of Xiaomi advertising on the imaginary Nurburgring. Turns out they have a banner on the real thing, too:

The merits of the SU7 aside, it’s obvious that Xiaomi intends to obtain credibility in Europe the hard, and expensive way. Now they have a raft of new hires to help them do that:

It’s funny how some variant of this path has been trod by Asian manufacturers for more than sixty years now. Whether it’s “Richie Ginther races for Honda” or “Luc Donckerwolke styles the Genesis G90”, the path to respectability on the world market always runs through hiring some Western window dressing for your Eastern product. Sometimes the results are extraordinary beyond measure. Most of the time they are forgettable.

I do think it’s exceptionally interesting that this time, the positions are operational and customer-oriented as much as they are high-profile and design-centric. You can look at this one of two ways:

0. Xiaomi realizes they need to improve the customer experience more than they need to make the already absurd-fast cars even more so;

1. They looked at the styling of German cars from the past decade and said “Uh, we have nothing to learn from stuff like the BMW XM and Porsche Macan.”

Now before you think this Substack is the kind of bagel company where the man in charge writes a pro-Chinese-cars article to keep his job and therefore keep his mancave separate from his mommy’s, er, wife’s budget, think again. I think the Xiaomi people are fearsomely smart and ambitious. I also think they are tilting at the wrong windmill. We are only one more sea change in European and American leadership away from dispensing with the 1000-horsepower electric car entirely. Either because we are back on the yellow brick road of burning actual fuel, or because the Party will be restricting horsepower in the name of Tom Morello and solidarity.

That’s all, folks. Come back tomorrow and see our newest feature: Shreddin’ For Harambe!

1. however, my credit card issuers do need the money and we should band together to help them out before things get too dire.

2. It did lead to the cruelest rock joke in history: What’s the difference between a four-year-old boy and a four-ounce bag of cocaine? Eric Clapton wouldn’t let a four-ounce bag of coke fall out of an apartment window.

3. This is a joke. I’ve never actually seen Elana wash her hands. Also, I’m different from poor people because I’m wearing a really convincing Watchdives Aquanaut.