Wednesday ORT: Monaco Parade, Indy Cheating, WHRRI Hates Kids, GM's V-8 Future, BMW's NISMO Mistake

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We have three critically important races to cover from the weekend, plus the Indy 500, so let’s get to it!

The one F1 race everyone wants to attend, but no one wants to watch

Formula One has a Monaco problem. It’s the most prestigious and most globally recognized venue at which the sport operates — something that has become increasingly critical to retain as more and more F1 dates go to various unsavory human-rights black holes like China, Bahrain, and the United States — but the racing itself has become embarrassing.

So it proved again in 2025. Mandating two pit stops did little to mix up the action. The cars are too big, and too torque-rich, for any actual wheel-to-wheel racing. As a spectacle, Monaco is hard to beat. As a race, you’d rather watch something at COTA, which is not a phrase I ever thought I’d write. Thoughts, in no particular order:

• I kinda thought Charles Leclerc was going to try something in the final laps of the race. Maybe I’m just too vulnerable to Alex Jacques and his continual, if mostly unwarranted, agitation. In Leclerc’s seat I ‘d have done something. The risk/reward ratio was entirely in his favor; Lando would have had to yield because finishing ahead of Oscar is his entire goal in life at the moment.

• Speaking of: I don’t think this signifies any “turnaround” for Lando’s WDC fortunes. He’s a great qualifier and Monaco is a zero-overtakes track. You couldn’t ask for better conditions. But he won’t get them again in 2026.

• How about James Vowles apologizing to Toto during the race for their strategy… and Albon publicly taking George Russell to dinner afterwards! Is this because JV and Alex are just that decent, or is this the kind of thing that leads to the loss of an engine contract? I’d like of like to see that, actually. Might lead to… a Williams-Honda, for which there is ample historical context.

• Just one race after being gifted his lone grand prix finish ahead of Leclerc, Sir Lewis is back to complaining on the radio. At one point, after a testy exchange with his race engineer, he asked “Are you upset with me?” To which Adami, the engineer in question, did not respond. I tell you, Sir Lewis is the typa brother to go to the bathroom at dinner during your first date and send you a text from the stall reading, “What are we?”

• The two battles to watch going into next weekend: Piastri v. Norris, and Mercedes vs. Red Bull. Nothing else is particularly close right now.

Back home again, in Indiana

When the idea of competing in the Indy 500 came up during a post-qualifying interview at Monaco, all three of the top drivers immediately dismissed it out of hand before discussing their mutual desire to win at LeMans. The prestige of America’s great race has never been lower. Having the owners cheat doesn’t help. Having a completely worthless hybrid system doesn’t help. I thought things were bad in the Buddy Rice and IRL days but at this point I have to wonder if Indycar wouldn’t be better off rebranding itself as “F2 America” and moving to a newer spec car.

Regardless, it was a great weekend for McLarens both constructed and merely badge-engineered. Alex Palou is clearly the driver of the moment, and if the race ended under caution without a lot of surprises along the way, that’s alright. More important is the fact that attendance was at a ten-year high. There’s some interest left, if the sport can be salvaged.

Of course, most of them were probably in attendance for the actual headliner, the Weinermobile race:

Prediction: Just like the baggers at MotoAmerica, this will quickly become the main event everywhere it happens.

In which Boomers lecture young racers, and the appropriate amount of discouragement happens

This weekend was the Waterford Hills (WHRRI) and SCCA crossover race. Danger Girl despises Waterford Hills but she needed to get two finishes here to defend her divisional championship for a third year. Running on her spare engine and in pain from a knee surgery that has taken longer to heal than she’d hoped, DG split the two available wins with some Chinese kid in an S2000 who normally wouldn’t have posed any difficulty. Her crew chief, Jon Shevel, borrowed the car to win E Production in a second race group on Saturday. The runner-up driver in that event, our own dannyp, secured the EP win on Sunday in his fire-breathing RX-7.

it’s the avoidable contact forever cup!

My race was pretty boring. The new (to me) tires I’d ordered didn’t get delivered on time. On Saturday I qualified 3rd of 14, behind two Formula Continentals but ahead of the single Formula Atlantic in the race, and finished the same way. The first lap is vaguely interesting because I made a couple of mistakes to which I’m not normally suspect:

Post-race inspection showed I’d cracked a suspension upright at some point. I have three spares… for the other three corners of the car. So I didn’t run on Sunday.

That leaves Mini Danger Girl, who struggled for dry-track pace all weekend. Her Saturday race was ruined by the stewards; she was one of four cars that passed a disabled vehicle under a yellow flag during qualify, which is permitted. The other three cars were WHRRI locals and they weren’t penalized, but she was sent to the back of the grid. Having been shown the video afterwards, the stewards apologized for the discrepancy but it was, of course, too late. And, of course, everyone ignored the fact that the locals got a pass for this “situation” but the young woman who had beaten them all in the first Sunday race of the year did not.

On this Sunday, she made a strong start from near the back of the pace but almost immediately a solid punt from a retirement-age driver which put her off track. She finished two laps down. Afterwards, while I was in my truck catching up on my day job, MDG was confronted by a group of WHRRI Boomers who told her that she need to leave “generous racing room” for them. I would be personally humiliated to have to ask a 22-year-old girl in her rookie year to, ya know, stop racing me so hard, but shame wasn’t on the menu for these folks.

It would be an understatement to say that I’m angry about this. Not just because a group of tired old men got together first to run my stepdaughter off the track then to bully her about it after the fact, but because this attitude is precisely why SCCA has trouble attracting and retaining young racers. On the same day, I watched Frank Schwartz, an old fossil who looks like a community-theater version of “Greg” from “The White Lotus”, bully and harass a young MR2 driver for “ruining his race”. This kid built his own Improved Touring B race car on a blue-collar salary, runs it on his own dime, and is doing the best he can. But since Frank wasn’t able to pass him during their mixed-class race while other, younger B-Spec racers were able to pass, Frank decided to lecture the kid about getting out of his way, like he was Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari instead of a retiree in a mostly stock 121-horsepower Mini being balked by a 112-horsepower, 39-year-old, Toyota.

Afterwards, the MR2 driver showed me the holes in his bumper where Frank had rammed him out of agitation. “It’s not the first time,” he noted. “But I’m here to race. I’m not discouraged.” His racing suit, which hadn’t been expensive to begin with, bore the signs of also being a mechanic’s suit, stained and worn at every stress point. His parents were there, supportive but also slightly flummoxed: why is one of our peers still out there causing trouble?

In any sane club-racing universe, Frank Schwartz and Alan Cameron, the drivers being discussed here, would be volunteering at the track instead of competing. They’d be helping young racers, rather than bullying them. At the very least, they would do what I did while racing BMX in my final years: stay out of the way of the kids so as not to ruin their race. But these eternal narcissists are still the main characters of their stories — so they’ll stay on center stage until misfortune or Alzheimer’s drag them off. Kicking and screaming, of course. And the young people will continue to gravitate towards second-rate organizations like NASA and GridLife because while those groups are rife with everything from rampant cheating to moronic rulesets, they want new drivers and they walk the walk.

I can’t speak for the young MR2 kid, but I can attest that Mini Danger Girl is in no way inclined to start treating these talentless time-servers with kid gloves, or even her regular Stand 21 gloves. On our way to pick up her new Nissan Z the day after the race, I offered what I thought was some consolation.

“Five years from now,” I said, “you’ll be in a formula car, maybe a lovely Atlantic like that one I handily beat yesterday for no reason that is apparent to me besides my own luminous talent, and these buffoons will still be loafing their 100-horsepower bathtubs around Waterford Hills. You won’t even remember their names.”

“They’ll remember mine,” she snapped, “because I’ll beat them all, again and again, before I leave them behind.”

GM makes a blind squirrel decision

General Motors announced this week that it would invest $888 million in the Tonawanda, NY engine plant. Ostensibly this is to facilitate a “Gen 6” V-8 that will be more fuel efficient and maybe less likely to explode than the Gen 5 small-block. Practically speaking, GM has a massive backlog of failing and about-to-fail engines in its most prestigious vehicles, and providing the replacements for those engines will keep Tonawanda busy for some time to come.

Naturally, the media is eerily silent on the role of Presidential tariffs in this investment decision. Which is odd, because every single article about Dodge’s decision to postpone Charger R/T EV production mentions tariffs in the headline. Oh no! What will we do without more EV sedans?

(Side note: I saw a Hurricane Charger on Woodward this past Saturday night. Gives me real hope for the future.)

It’s nice to see GM investing in America for once, even if it took near-dictatorial behavior from the country’s CEO to light a fire under Ms. Barra’s ample fundament. Just to put this in context, however: Ten years ago, General Motors invested a combined $4.8 billion in Toluca, Mexico. Last month, GM announced additional investments — but not in the plant. Rather, the investments are in security, crowd control, and neighborhood policing. Because the cartels are just doing public executions in Toluca.

Who could have predicted that putting billions of dollars into a Mexican village could lead to uncontrollable violence? I think they should just send Mark Reuss down to handle it himself. He could call the cartel bosses and get all the bad dudes fired, or something like that.

In the meantime, you can thank our ultra-evil President for this $888 million. Because GM’s demonstrated history shows that they would rather invest in China, Mexico, or other planets before they’ll voluntarily invest in the United States. We’re just the pigeons to be plucked, you see.

Speaking of Mexican production

BMW is about to ask you, the American consumer, to drop $99,775 on the M2 Clubsport. It will be viciously quick, with 523 horsepower and plenty of racing-adjacent hardware sprinkled throughout. It will be made in Mexico, because it’s simply impossible for BMW to profit on a $99,755 subcompact car unless it’s assembled inside an armed camp by the lowest-cost labor possible.

I’m kind of charmed by the M2 in general, although I have to wonder if charging a hundred grand for one is missing the point of the original 2-Series coupe just a little bit. What confuses me is this: the M2CS will have a mandatory automatic transmission.

Not a DCT.

A ZF8, just like the one in my Chrysler 300C.

From a certain point of view, as Ben Kenobi once said, this is a good thing. Ask any IMSA mechanic, and he will tell you that the ZF8 is absolutely pay-driver resistant, able to shrug off the worst abuse under racing conditions and smile in the process. It’s certainly a superstar in my Chrysler, where it executes low-lift shifts almost instantaneously.

Yet I have to wonder if perhaps the “enthusiast-first” narrative of the M2CS isn’t slightly undermined by the decision to make the automatic mandatory. Yeah, it will be a hit in Connecticut, California, and Dubai — but it’s a finger in the eye of whatever True Faithful remain on the BMWCCA membership rolls.

It’s also bad for business. Ask me how I know, and I’ll tell you. As ACF’s paid subscribers are aware, we are now a two-Z household, as both DG and MDG own manual-transmission Nissan Z Performance coupes. (They also both own NC Miatas, which have been strangely immobile since The Arrival Of The Fairladies. Don’t confuse any of this with my personal economic situation, which is extremely dire and more so since I decided to buy a 2001 Lexus ES300 as a daily driver.)

Anyway, in the course of sourcing these two manual Zs I kept coming across screaming deals like these:

The NISMO Z is not a tape and stripe package. It offers real advantages, including massive brakes, RAYS wheels that are an upgrade on the ones fitted on the Performance model, additional power, and a fully braced chassis. Plus it looks super cool.

Unfortunately, it’s only ever been available with an automatic transmission. Nobody really knows why. Some say it’s due to Nissan wanting it to have the best possible quarter-mile time — but surely that’s not it, the Z isn’t defined by straight line speed, the same money gets you a Tesla that will smoke it.

What is clear is that nobody wants to buy one. So they are all going for massive discounts. Kind of makes me want to get a Z myself. I would absolutely get the Nismo. I am perfectly willing to drive an automatic transmission, and I rarely drive fast at all nowadays. But the average Z customer feels differently.

Will the M2CS fail to find homes at $100,000 due to its torque converter? To answer that question, go see what a manual transmission adds to the resale value of any BMW that could have had one when it was built.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to jakebunny, dannyp, drunkonunleaded, and Wyatt LCB who came out to help crew our efforts at Waterford Hills. Without you we’d have been nowhere at all.