Wednesday ORT: Spain, Robert K, USA-Made Cars, Zora-Ish, Jobs And Divorce

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Housekeeping note: I won’t censor or be difficult about any Iran War content, but I don’t want to discuss it myself at the moment. I’ll say this: when it comes to sending young Americans into combat, the bar for that decision should be sky-high and almost impossible to clear. Alright, on with the show.

Lando’s deal is getting worse all the time

If this wasn’t the weekend that Oscar Piastri became the world champion, it isn’t not the weekend, if you get the idea. I was heartbroken for Lando Norris after their collision, especially after hearing the many and varied ways in which he apologized to Oscar, the team, the fans… My God, man! Just say it was a racing incident and try to put some worry in your teammate’s head that you’ll do it again! Stop apologizing! Senna would not have apologized, and Jenson Button didn’t!

Honestly, the game was probably over for Lando the minute Oscar figured out how to qualify well in the McLaren… it was the “Happy learned to putt!” moment of 2025. Lando is still probably the faster driver by some metrics, but his superiorities are becoming increasingly irrelevant. As for Oscar, I’m sure he will be thrilled to finish within six points of Max, or better, for the rest of the season. He can take a lot of races like that. Other observations:

• Surely the only reason Princess George is bereft of a contract is because Toto plans to add a fellow Austrian to the team in 2026, right? (Edit: Dutchman with Austrian employers!) You can’t say that Russell is leaving a single bit of potential on the table. That was a brilliant bit of qualifying and a masterful win. Can you imagine how unhappy Sir Lewis would be if he had to sit next to the current version of George?

• For that matter, what does it say that Ferrari literally can’t prevent Leclerc from making Hamilton look bad nowadays? They messed up his strategy, gaslit him on the radio… and he still beats the 7-time WDC with ease. This was predicted by quite a few people before the season, including your humble author, but it is still breathtaking to witness.

• Is Hulkenberg doing miracles with the Stake car, or has it just been under-driven to this point?

• We keep hearing about how Alex Albon is a “leader” at Williams, but his petulant, unhelpful, and demotivating radio talk isn’t supporting those claims.

• I think Yuki is cooked — but I also think he’s being quite open to gathering data for Max in a way that Liam and Sainz were not, and that’s valuable.

• Speaking of Max: hard to criticize his race. One solid update and he might be back in the hunt. Prediction: at the very least, McLaren will be giving team orders in the second half of the season for the purpose of preserving Oscar’s title.

Meanwhile, in Michigan

this post brought to you by the gs9 club!

Mini Danger Girl and I went to Grattan this past weekend to race SCCA with the Great Lakes Division. She’d never seen the track at all, while I’ve been there just twice in twenty years, so we had our work cut out for us. While we both left some time on the table for sure, I was by far the fastest fendered car at the event and I turned about fifteen individual laps that each could have set the all-time NASA record for Grattan.

SCCA, of course, has faster players than NASA so on Sunday I was pleased to take an overall fifth place behind four very competent Formula Continentals, one of which reset the FC lap record. I’d had concerns about keeping pace with the two absolutely flawless Sakers that showed up in a stacker trailer… but with the exception of three laps on Sunday when I struggled to get my $85-a-corner used enduro-compound Hoosiers “switched on” at the start, I never saw the back of the Dutch mini-hypercars. They’re very quick in a straight line but in the fast corners they’re not gripping.

By contrast: We’ve put a lot of work in on the little Radical so although it’s still not always willing to select 4th and 5th gear under load, the handling is fantastic. I was regularly seeing up to 2.2g of cornering load, and on the slow corners I could put two wheels in the air like a Ford Fiesta trying autocross for the first time. Top speed was a modest 128mph although it always feels a touch more dramatic in this open car. Brief video:

You can see a Formula Continental play pretty rough with a Formula Enterprises… and after hearing the FC driver describe the parts of the interaction you can’t see, I was sympathetic to his move.

Overall, it was a good time and while it’s not too late for a Stohr or Staudacher to show up and ruin my divisional three-peat championship, they’d have to be fast and reliable, which is not a combination of qualities often observed in SCCA Prototype 2.

The real sports racers were LeMans!

I’m sure that one of our expert viewers here can offer a better LeMans wrap-up than I can — I was doing 11 hours of towing in addition to my own race — but I was pleased as punch to see Robert Kubica take the win. Like many of you, I’ve been quietly crossing my fingers for him since nearly the beginning of the century. He’s made mistakes and he’s suffered for them, but he has yet to give up. Well done.

The Most USA-made car is…

The nice people at Cars.com have their American-Made Vehicle Index out and… is anyone surprised? The most seriously USA-focused automaker is, of course, Tesla; their four mass-produced vehicles are the top four. Then it’s Honda, which has eight of the next twelve. Toledo’s Jeep plant throws two Wranglers in the mix, and Kia has the EV6.

The first GM car appears at #19 (Colorado), then at #29 (Corvette) and #38-41 (full-sized SUVs). Ford isn’t much better, but since they do the full-sized trucks in the USA they are likely the #1 USA automaker by actual volume. The most hilarious entry, of course, is #113, the Mercedes-Benz Maybach GLS600… aka the car that does the weird sand dancing.

This will infuriate a few of you, but I just want to point out that my former employers at Honda are the most “American” internal-combustion company out there… and they never needed a President to give them a handout. GM and Ford should be ashamed.

A new version of USA-made car #29…

Everything you read about the “Zora” will have been sourced from this release, which makes the bones of it plain: it’s an E-Ray with a ZR1 powertrain. So the lineup is now:

• Stingray, the normal one, from $68,300

• E-Ray, the one you can’t give away, from $106,900

• Z06, the one that will probably blow up, from $112,100

• ZR1, the fastest one in most situations, from $173,300

• ZR1X, the 150-plus trap speed quarter-mile car, from… ??

ACF readers know I have zero affection for Corvettes priced at McLaren levels, but the ZR1X does make a sort of rude business sense. Everyone knows that the E-Ray is showroom poison even at $15K off sticker, so re-purposing the hardware for ZR1X will help recoup some some costs and maybe even give the Ray some after-the-fact credibility.

Chevrolet should also be given some credit for playing the acceleration game to win. That’s really important to a lot of Corvette owners. My brother once famously said, on the tail end of a long National SCCA Solo season, that “Corvette owners only care about two things: how to detail the Corvettes, and how fast the magazines say they are in a straight line.” The ZR1X is tailor-made for those people — and while it would certainly take a loss to the Air Fryer 9000 in any real-world quarter-mile drag, you can expect to hear the phrase “ 8-second quarter mile” at every Cars and Coffee — excuse me, that’s trademarked, I meant “caffeine and octane” — from now until the heat death of the universe.

I’ll say it one more time and then shut up: instead of all these dopey lottery-winner fantasy cars, it sure would be cool to have a $65,000 manual-shift C8 with decent brakes. I don’t know how many they’d sell, but I know two female Nissan Z owners who would be Corvette owners if they could have gotten the things with a little more clutch pedal and a little less dealer attitude.

Speaking of what women want…

actually, I’m six foot two, friendo, and I had three Porsches

Is AI coming for your job? The great Scott Lockin points out that, most of the time, “AI really means ‘aliens and immigrants’.” Sometimes that’s literally true, as with the hot “AI” startup that was actually 700 Indian coders working behind the scenes in “Mechanical Turk” mode. (There’s some discussion to whether or not this was true, by the way.)

Regardless, those of us who are risk to lose our gigs should be aware that there’s more at stake than just having to answer the inevitable dinner-party “What do you do?” with “Uh, I have a Substack blog.” Men who lose their jobs are 33% more likely to divorce in the year after the fact. According to Time, it was previously the case that unemployed men were less likely to divorce, and in The Old Days it’s easy to see why: divorce is expensive and it used to be the province of successful men looking to swap a secretary or younger mistress in for one’s increasingly thick-necked wife. (Tom Wolfe was merciless on that trope: the “linebacker spouse”.)

In 2025, on the other hand, divorce is what your wife does to you so she can Eat, Pray, and Love to her heart’s content while you acquire proficiency in the video game of your choice in between OnlyFans-fueled sessions of self-gratification and binge-watching whatever subscriptions you can still afford. (Make ACF one of those!)

Hilariously, it doesn’t always work that way. Many years ago — forgive me, those of you who have heard this story before — I knew a thirty-something professional couple of almost indescribable mutual attractiveness. Things got rough between them after the second kid. While on a week-long West Coast trip, she fell under the spell of a handsome older scoundrel who “spoiled her” and taught her all sorts of stuff to do in bed. (Not me. I was 32 years old and not a scoundrel at all.)

When she came home she got ultra-depressed and tearfully confessed it all to her husband, who said he forgave her but after a Brady Bill’s worth of waiting period went and took revenge by hooking up with some high-school-equivalency chick at his office in one of those awful power-disparity situations that can make at least temporary feminists out of the most bigoted authors, such as myself. The girl got pregnant, because they were both idiots. The kid, of course, was his. He started drinking. He lost his job, both for being a drunk and for the adultery. (This was 2005, you could still have that happen.) Then the wife left him, obviously.

Except. The blue-collar girl had started the child support case while the marriage was still valid. So the judge handed down the decree on both the husband and the wife. The husband was unemployed, and stayed that way. So, for the next eighteen years, this beautiful executive woman was 100% on the hook for the child-support payments from her ex-husband’s affair. Cedar Point never had a lollercoaster that tall!

She did the obvious thing, by the way: paid the bill without complaint for a couple of years then found some fat bald fellow executive who adored her beautiful-but-no-longer-perfect ass and married her the minute she vaguely allowed that it might be permitted. So then he was on the hook for the child support. Which was cool for him, because judging by the last photo I saw of them together back in the 2010s, the attractiveness differential between the two of them would have cost at least a G per night on Seeking Arrangement.

Of course, now she is, like, 58 years old, and no longer hot, but… handsome! As Tom Wolfe would say.

In the end, I guess, the heart wants what it wants. But the female heart wants you out there working. So if you have time or effort to spare in your life, reach out to your friends and make sure they’re doing okay with their jobs. There’s potentially more at stake than just whether or not they have to do the TPS reports this week. And you never know why someone will lose a job. It’s not always AI in either sense of the term. Heck, if I had a nickel for every time I got fired over an April Fool’s prank… well, I’d have ten cents, but it’s odd that it’s happened twice. So I’d like to personally thank the women who didn’t file for divorce in either of those situations, and I’d like to pre-emptively apologize for whatever happens in April of 2026!