Wednesday ORT: Oscar Sulks, Pigeon Forged, Porsche Quits, Ram Blows, What Bubble?

making nerds fatter is more profitable than making sluts thinner

It’s been a fascinating week in the auto business — so much so that we kind of need another OT just for industry news and various pronouncements. If time permits, I’ll do just that, later in the week. Oh, and let’s once again congratulate my occasional employer Bari Weiss on her continued ascendancy and The Free Press for its sale to Paramount. Rumor has it that the deal was contingent on retaining my services for the occasional op-ed.

In which Mr. Norris decides to go motor racing

Sometimes F1 puts on a race that sounds boring from the recap but is actually quite exciting. This was the reverse. Serious racing at the start, various mechanical drama, alternate strategies proving their worth at the end of the race… but despite all that, the actual race was a bit of a snoozer.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important, because it finally appears that Lando Norris wants to win a world championship. His opening lap was borderline unhinged — he hit both of his immediate competitors! — but after that he put in a good solid race to keep third place and close the gap on Piastri, who sounded unusually resigned, if not downright despondent. (After the rumor went out that Oscar unplugged his radio during Zak Brown’s end-of-race message, McLaren PR reassured everyone that he’d unplugged the radio before the message.) He is now within the psychologically important win/DNF gap; if he wins a race and Oscar doesn’t finish, he pulls ahead. Hold onto your hats, kids — and Max isn’t even mathematically eliminated yet!

Other notes:

• Princess George continues to mature as a driver, while Kimi continues to settle down. You just know Lewis watched Antonelli go by and thought, “that was my seat.” The problem is that Toto wouldn’t make the switch back at gunpoint nowadays. After his previous failures at Singapore, it was wonderful to see Russell command the race from start to finish. I don’t think he is a great racer, but he is a great driver, if that makes sense.

• Alonso had a great race and fully deserved his Driver Of The Day. Has anyone ever worked harder to bring worse cars up the order? Uncomfortable thought: he might be the #1 driver at Ferrari right now, were he there.

• The British commentators and media continue to prop Sir Lewis up beyond all reason. Surely he was affected by the loss of his longtime friend Roscoe — but when he fell so far to the back of the pack that Ferrari two-stopped him, the mild resurgence afterwards was hailed as affirmation of his continued prowess. Want to see someone who made the two-stopper really work? Carlos Sainz, who continues to eclipse an increasingly frustrated Albon.

• Speaking of Lewis and Charles — apparently Charles was instructed to “LICO”, aka lift and coast, up to 200 meters before the brake zone all race. Lewis didn’t get the same instructions until he had almost cooked his brakes in their entirety.

• I was frustrated to see Yuki refuse to make a hard move on Hadjar, but there were no points on offer and there was a real chance that Max’s race would have been compromised in the ensuing drama. At least he beat Lawson again.

• The modern F1 entertainment and competitive package is hard to criticize. Six cars in the top minute, with no safety cars. You barely get that in Spec Miata 20-minute sprints.

Also amusing: Max and Lewis were mercilessly trolling the opposition on Instagram after the fact. Max posted a picture of him creating a wake for Lando — per his “will be remembered” comment —while Lewis posted a story of a British actor repeatedly saying “I cannot believe it”, which is what Alonso had said on the radio after their final-laps tussle.

Racing, like Tosca, isn’t for everyone

Here’s the funny thing about selling out: it almost never solves your problems. Those of us who were Porsche owners and fans twenty years ago often talked ourselves into believing that the firm’s thousand injuries to its faithful had some higher, worthwhile purpose. Yes, the cars had to become watercooled pieces of shit with Play-Skool interiors — to save the company! Yes, Porsche had to become an SUV manufacturer — to save the company! — Yes, Porsche had to go all-in on sucking the EV diz-nick — to save the company!

Yet when all was said and done, the only Porsches that command markup or genuine interest are the cars that are closest (but not very close) to the 993, namely the go-fast versions of the 911. Everything else is lease fodder.

So here we are in 2025. Last year, Porsche sold 310,718 cars. 50,941 of them were Nine Elevens. Compare that to 1995, when Porsche sold about 31,000 cars with all but a handful being Nine Elevens. Since the late Nineties we’ve been told that it’s necessary to produce entry-level cars, sedans, EVs, SUVs, crossovers, and whatever else makes up that 260,000 extra units so… the company can be saved!

Now the company is walking away from WEC racing to focus on… “development” in Formula E. What do they “develop” in Formula E? Well, Wikipedia notes that “Spark Racing Technology builds the chassis and supplies the front axle MGU, Williams Advanced Engineering supplies the battery, and Hankook supplies all-weather tyres incorporating bio-material and sustainable rubber.” I don’t see the word Porsche in there. So all they are “developing” is… a narrative.

Obviously, this isn’t the end of Porsche as a sports-car racing player. They are committed to IMSA at every level and they maintain GT3 programs around the world. Still, one has to wonder: They were able to race prototypes at the highest level in the Sixties and Seventies based solely on the revenue from selling a tiny number of mostly handbuilt sports cars. Now they’re an SUV-slop pusher who can’t afford to run in the WEC?

Maybe giving another handjob to Morris Dees would fix it?

police deez nuts, pal

Never change, GRM. Forget for a moment that the Suddards have somehow managed to make racing on the cheap deeply uncool, which no one thought was possible before they did it. And forget that GRM in general is the equivalent of your Oberlin-grad wine aunt in terms of understanding even the most basic political concepts. Lastly, forget that the magazine sucks balls and has sucked balls for at least a decade.

Ask yourself: What good does it do for a Lemons-nerd car magazine to demand that a street-car scene “police itself”? Other than generating some warm-and-fuzzy authoritarian-adjacent, teacher’s-little-pet, run-to-mommy feelings on the part of the people who work there, what effect could it possibly have? Imagine you’re some young part-time meth dealer with between four and nine side bitches who drives around Sevierville in a slammed R34 with a carbine-kit Glock 17 sitting in the passenger seat for all to see. (Maybe not many such cases, but definitely at least one, based on the video I saw.) You’re going to open Instagram and see a bunch of fat dorks lecturing you about your behavior from the safety of their $149 Kirkey race seats turning 1:57s around Mid-Ohio Pro Course and think… oh yeah, it’s definitely time to police myself?

This kind of feel-good fake-adulting is half of what will kill the “car scene”.

Now, to be fair, the other half of what will kill it is… what’s going on at shows like “Slammedenuff”. You had people running each other down, totaling a dozen or more cars, getting into fights, vandalizing stuff…

“i promise, no more revving”

Over 1,400 calls were made to the local cops during the event. Let’s be real: car meets have always been trouble. If you’re under 60 years old, put aside your opinion of how hokey the Beach Boys were and listen to the actual songs. They’re about breaking the law and causing trouble. A lifetime ago.

I see two primary differences between the car scene as it was and the car scene as it is:

0. There is vastly more wealth concentrated in relatively fewer hands, and a lot of those hands are idle ones. Look at the YouTube recaps of Slammed… you will see HUNDREDS of mid-six-figure cars, generally driven by people who aren’t old enough to rent those cars in Vegas. When you give Lamborghinis and GT-Rs and Porky GT-whatevers to kids, they are going to cause trouble. You’d have done the same. When I was young and I could get my hands on something fast, I did the same. At 17 years of age, as a parts driver for David Hobbs, I was running customer 750iLs to 150mph in the downtown sections of I-70 in Columbus. If you think today’s young people are any more responsible than Gen X kids were, you’re crazy. The difference is we were largely in Toyota Tercels and these kids are in AMG Biturbos.

1. I had no way of knowing I would eventually have 3,700 readers to whom I could yap about running 150mph in a 750iL. I was doing it purely for the love of mischief and because I wanted to imitate Brock Yates. But today’s car-show attendees are painfully conscious of the fact that the online audience for antics at places like Slammedenuf is much larger than the actual physical audience. The right kind of stupidity could get a million YouTube views. It could make you rich enough to buy an Aventador, or buy a second Aventador if your parents gave you the first one. So everyone is performing for a global audience. This drastically affects their risk tolerance, their choices, and their behavior after the fact.

Under no circumstances is “the car scene” going to “police itself”. The policing will have to be done by the police. Which sucks because the hand of justice will fall unevenly on people. You’ll be touring Route 129 on a certain weekend and find yourself caught up and ticketed for little to no reason. But it has ever been thus. Here’s the biggest problem, and one that you cannot police: In a world where experiences are increasingly fake, dorky, and “virtual”, getting your elbows out and causing drama at a show like Slammedenuf is an increasingly precious and vital experience to have. Which means the demand will only continue to climb.

You know what? I kind of wish I’d been there. In a rental car. Rented in someone else’s name.

However, this would be a GREAT truck to take to the next event like that

I have to admit that I was not aware of Fox Factory’s adventures in truck modification. Of course, I’d seen the Rocky Ridge and Black Widow stuff out there, but it never caught too much of my attention; I might not exactly be an amateur porn star, but I’m not enough of an “innie” to have real interest in a $90,000 lifted half-ton truck that doesn’t tow or haul as well as it did before the mods.

Well, now Fox has a product for my brand of fragile masculinity: the 650-horsepower supercharged RAM DC650. The DC is for… wait for it… oh, you’re going to love this, I know you will because I love it too…

I’m willing to pay real money to have this embroidered into my Chrysler 300C’s seats, right now. What a brilliant nod to the past.

You can get the DC650 “Lowered” as RWD or 4WD. It’s low as hell. Massive tires on 22-inch wheels. And guess what? 11,320 pounds tow and 1,910 pound payload. The price is stout: $89,995 plus options. But what does that get you in Benz-land nowadays? A four-cylinder E-Class? I would absolutely love to have one of these trucks… except for the fact that I’d feel awful running it through the 3-foot-tall undergrowth that covers my back acres. Well. Find me another thousand subscribers, and I’ll get one just to pull the Radicals.

Can a bubble-pop be willed into existence?

Everyone’s talking about an AI bubble. Which is odd, because while your humble author has long compared this dip-shitted misunderstanding of token-throwing auto-complete engines to the Dutch tulip mania, as recently as a week ago every gleeful chugger of the conventional-wisdom horse-phallus out there was assuring us that AI would usher in an age of endless abundance with zero employment but maximum fun. Why, AI could and would do anything! The only concern we needed to have was how it would treat humanity when it took over!

Then one day everyone woke up and realized that the AI companies are collectively valued at more than they would truly be worth even if they came up with faster-than-light travel. Virtually all the “growth” in the market economy over the past few years has been in “AI”.

It’s not really that simple, but it’s also not that simple.

Speaking as someone who was working with machine learning ten years ago, and also as someone who literally works in the “AI” space on a daily basis, albeit on the janitorial/hardware side: This tech can do a lot, and it will mature in a way that lets it do more. But it was always obvious to everyone above a pure normie that there was a ceiling to it. Yes, AI is good at pattern recognition. Yes, it’s also good at generating media based on the media it has previously consumed. But that is very far away from being a general-purpose intelligence tool. And since it is fundamentally non-deterministic, you will always need to check its work in any field where its work has consequences besides some bored college student getting an A- instead of an A+.

The “bubble” never needed to happen. The tech could have been advanced reasonably and usefully over time. The value of the companies involved could have grown in accordance with what the value they can provide. Unfortunately, we live in a “market economy” where the value of everything from a Patek Nautilus to a share of Mag7 stock is set with all the intelligence, wisdom, and consideration of a binge-drinking gamer nerd blowing his product-manager bonus on Pokemon cards. It is a human centipede of people with very little general intelligence of their own making billion-dollar choices based on crude approximations of their five nearest peers on the trading floor.

Which, ironically, is how “AI” makes a lot of decisions.

The usual suspects in all of this have already prepared their escape hatch into quantum computing, another pure-woo play with no practical future or roadmap to match its extravagant claims. As Scott Locklin noted, an early death blow to those hopes has already been delivered by researchers who have matched the most “groundbreaking” quantum performance experiments with… a VIC-20.

For God’s sake, they didn’t even need a C64! (For the record, the researchers used a VIC-20 emulator, presumably because nobody wanted to operate a cassette storage drive all night.) Hard to imagine that 2048-bit encryption is gonna be broken by anything you can run on a 5k-RAM Commodore, am I right?

The collapse of the “AI bubble” will probably put me out of work for a while, but on the positive side it will put a lot of even worse people than me out of work, and for longer. But here’s the interesting thing: this is the first time we are seeing the Internet collectively will a bubble-pop into existence. The more stories people see about the “AI bubble”, the less they will want to invest in said bubble providers. There’s something very Schrodingerian about this. The bubble is both real and fake… until you decide.

If consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, which I believe it to be, then there’s no small share of irony in that. The “quantum bubble” will launch based on the collapse of a global quantum waveform titled, basically, “Do we believe in AI?”

Hold on. It will be a ride.