Wednesday ORT: Suzuka, Martinsville, Markets, Vettes, MiUSA Roundup

All subscribers welcome

wait, you can’t get this stuff and some dumbass electric front axle?

Due to a failure of time management on my part, we will have our “Bombing for Quarters” guest article tomorrow. More houskeeping: There is no April Fools’ content below. Corporate social media has turned the date into a quagmire of faux-clever, soft-ass self-parody. If you want to read an April Fools’ article, however, I would be delighted to make one available to you. Let us continue.

Suzuka, we have a problem

The above video is worth watching if you want to see the ins and outs of the 50g Oliver Bearman crash, but the key number is: 52 km/h. That’s how much closing speed Bearman had on Colapinto. Thirty-two miles per hour. On the face of it… not super-scary, right? I mean, if I had a nickel for every time I had 32mph on someone during a club race, especially in my SR8 Radical, I could probably buy a really nice dinner somewhere. But when the difference is between 195mph and 163mph, as opposed to 150mph and 118mph, and both cars are under aero load… that’s a different kettle of fish.

To F1’s credit, I think they realize that the new regulations are kind of an existential threat. This is the worst possible time for such a thing to happen; fan and manufacturer involvement is at an all-time high and the teams have gone from being worth $100m or less to, in some cases, having a legitimate value of $3 billion or more. Some sort of fix needs to happen before a driver is killed or half of the TV audience disappears. Other thoughts on the Japanese GP:

• Has there ever been a more inconsequential modern-era world champion than Lando Norris? In his first race start of the year, Piastri has made Norris look positively useless. Without the Safety Car Shuffle, I think he might have won it. The McLaren looks pretty decent. In fact, has anyone considered that the Mercedes “domination” so far this year is maybe just a factor of… Oscar Piastri not being in the races?

• A tale of two Safety Car reshuffles, speaking of: Kimi Antonelli and Lewis Hamilton were the big winners from the Bearman crash, each reversing position with their teammates. Kimi drove off to win the race by twenty seconds or thereabouts, while SIR Lewis was quickly overtaken by his own teammate in an identical car. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to the F1TV commentators, who gushed about “Lewis Hamilton RETURNING TO FORM!” and “this amazing race that Lewis has had!” while, to my gobsmacked fooking surprise, taking a moment near the end of the race for Alex Jacques to vomit out, “With all due respect to Kimi… without this Safety Car situation, you have to wonder, ‘Does he move forward in the race’?” Well, you God-damned midget, who knows — but Kimi went FASTER after the shuffle, repeatedly resetting fast lap of the race on old hard-compound tires, while Lewis fell back multiple positions and got murked yet again by Leclerc!!!!!

• Speaking of F1 TV: It is infuriating to see the changes made by Apple TV from last year’s $79.95/year US-market TV product. The pre-race show is now shown with the race. There are advertisements on this paid subscription service, although at least you can fast-forward through them in the replay. Everything is just a bit worse. I don’t like it, no sir.

• Aston Martin finally finished a race, probably because Honda was going to execute the entire engine team if they didn’t. It really makes you feel sorry for Lawrence “Stroll”, doesn’t it? He finds himself in the same position as Lord Hesketh once held, minus the “rizz” or the occasional racing success. Also, Fernando Alonso will forever be remembered as the saddest combination of talent and bad luck since, I don’t know, Gilles Villeneuve.

• Time to demote Max to Racing Bulls so he can make Q3 on a consistent basis. Just imagine if he’d actually gone to Mercedes. He would have 90 championship points now.

• Princess George remains soft as butter. Watching him and Lando repeatedly flub their pass attempts at slower cars during the race made me want to be a Lewis Hamilton fan or something.

• I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I attended this race in person. Being at Suzuka for last year’s Verstappen win was the happiest I have ever been at a racetrack where I wasn’t personally on the timesheet. If you ever have the chance to go, you must NOT miss out. Even if it is in the era of stupid rules.

Meanwhile, in Martinsville

Finally, a race where 23XI isn’t the entire story. The immensely accomplished NASCAR team, which is well known for making the best possible hiring decisions for all its open positions during 2026, couldn’t get anyone up front in the race — but, on the other hand, the team owner, Denny Hamlin, looked like the class of the field all day. Meanwhile his employee, Bubba Wallace, simply drove into the #77 of Carson Hocevar due to an injudicious roll out of the corner. Wallace accepted responsibility, more or less. In the end, it was a matter of Chevrolets pushing each other up front so Chase Elliott could snatch victory from the proverbial jaws and deny Hamlin what would, I think, have been his seventh win at Martinsville.

As a relative NASCAR novice who has only attended three races in person, I have to say that the short track stuff looks awful on television. Like they’re just out there doing practice laps. Top speeds are in the 120mph range, which is basically what my wife’s Miata does on the back straight at Mid-Ohio, and less than my 16-year-old son does on the back straight at Nelson Ledges Road Course in his 2014 Accord. Something should be done, but what? At least people are running into eachother without the assistance of battery power.

It’s Wednesday Night In America!

On Monday I told you about the astounding CAT Tools (not to be confused with CAT TALES) deals. Yesterday I picked up my sockets… yeah, it’s all Snap-On stuff, and a full 80-83% below tool-truck retail. Hell, they are cheaper than Williams-branded sockets online. Had I known about this deal a couple of years ago, we wouldn’t have anything but CAT Tools in the shop. The hex and 1/2” chrome sockets are particularly beautiful. I think the CAT logo looks nicer on them than the Snap-On logo does, even.

The CAT deal isn’t the only great Made in USA product or idea you’ve sent me lately. Here’s a quick roundup. If you don’t see what you sent me, then please re-send and accept my apologies.

• I missed the squid-themed “Shallows” Bolt Action, but there’s still some amazing stuff happening this month at Tactile Turn.

• Arnie McNair is doing limited drops of USA-made golf clothing that looks pretty fantastic. You have to get in line, like at the Rolex dealer, but the juice might be worth the squeeze.

• If you saw my instagram story with “The Wheels Of Steel” from Weight It Out, you know how cool these are. If you have limited storage space in your home gym, or if you just want to curl some cool-looking gold-steel weights, check them out. I’m completely satisfied with mine.

• Want a USA-made daily use knife delivered to your front door for $25? The Buck 284 Bantam is it. Don’t like Amazon? Your local Meijer might have it.

• Looking for a Detroit-based boutique brand? I’m hearing positive things about SoftGoods. They’re priced one level above American Giant, but you won’t see yourself coming and going in their stuff.

• Gustin has some bangers coming our way for the spring. The usual caveats apply: don’t buy their buttondown shirts, which never come out right. The jeans, trousers, and T-shirts are all brilliant. Want $15 off? Use my referral code.

• I have had a lot of luck in the past couple of years with exotic leather belts from Artifex and Jacob Hill. There’s a significant price difference between the two. Is there a quality difference? Not in the sense of basic construction — I don’t think you can kill an Artifex belt. However, Jacob Hill offers many more custom options, including the remarkable “Aurora Vice” finish. Looking for the best value? It’s the Artifex Python belts, which are between $99 and $199 depending on finish and buckle. I wore one in El Paso, which happens to be the home of Artifex, last week. The locals did not abuse or attack me, so it must have been alright!

Once again, it’s probably the best Vette

There are two big news items in the Corvette world lately. The first is some rather acerbic comments along the lines of “the manual didn’t sell in the C7, so we aren’t going to ever bother doing a C8 manual.” I could rebut that in half a dozen ways, but you already know what I’d say. From C/D:

Executive chief engineer Tadge Juechter told Car and Driver that part of the reason is the desire to not breach the mid-engine C8's central tunnel: "That tunnel is the backbone of the car, and if you break the backbone, you lose a lot of structural efficiency. With a shifter, you have to have a big hole in the tunnel for the linkage to go through."

Yeah, Tadge, nobody gives a shit. Some people want a clutch pedal, regardless of structural efficiency. What a joke. I am sick unto death of GM engineers who love to lecture the media about how they are soooo right and the customers are soooo stupid. The Lotus Evora, Elise, and Exige all had manual transmissions coming out of the central tunnel, and guess what? No living human being with an above-room-temperature IQ thinks a C8 is better to drive than an Exige.

The other bit of news: We are finally getting a Grand Sport. The C4, C6, and C7 Grand Sports were all arguably the finest everyday Corvettes made in their generations. The same might be true for this one. It has the new 535-hp, 6.7-liter V-8 that Chevrolet refuses to call a “409” for some Euro-boot-licking reason, but that’s not the big selling point because the C8 Stingray will also have that engine. The reason you get a Grand Sport is to have the widebody chassis without the Z06 or ZR1 power, thus enjoying the closest straight-speed-to-corner-speed ratio of any Corvette.

As was the case with the C7, there will be some exceptionally expensive option packs for the Grand Sport so the magazines can test what amounts to a ringer, a 535-horse Corvette for the price of a 670-horse one.

I have two complaints about the Grand Sport. The first is the existence of the “Grand Sport X”, which replaces the lame-ass E-Ray. It’s a Grand Sport with the heavy and wacky EV pack. Total system power is 721 horses, a significant bump from the E-Ray’s 655 horses. Nobody wants these hybrid Vettes, which are kind of like Acura NSXes with thyroid problems and worse styling. Odd how it was less of an engineering “challenge” to load the C8 up with a 500-pound Prius pack than it would have been to cut a hole in the thing for a stick shift.

The second complaint: the “rookie stripes”, which are now on the back fender. These stripes, also called “hash marks”, have a very short and fairly dubious motorsports history — the most famous and cited example, that of the 1963 Grand Sport race cars, were supposedly single stripes, not double — but they have had an unpleasantly dorky run lately as a signifier of “racing spirit”. Dodge changed its logo to incorporate the hash mark, which was embarrassing but at least Dodge was going racing at the time. A famous insurance agency pretending to be an insurer automotive lifestyle destination brand decided to make a hash-mark pair their logo, with the two hash marks in different colors. This “racing logo” was fairly ironic for an insurance agency that will not cover you during any kind of actual wheel-to-wheel race, let alone LeMans; it would be like GEICO’s logo being an image of a Bay Area home breaking in half during an earthquake. Recently, said logo has been changed into something that vaguely suggests an “H”, which is a mid-cycle update about equal to what the Fiat Multipla got in 2004.

Anyway: hash marks are stupid and goofy. They belong with Gulf liveries on street Porsches, Martini liveries on street Porsches, Steve McQueen movie quotes, Pink Pig sneakers, non-Nomex “racing sneakers”, and the entire written oeuvre of Burt “B.S.” Levy¹ in a future Museum Of “Racing” Stuff That Has Nothing To Do With Actual Racing. Naturally, the Museum will be located on the grounds of a Porsche Experience Center(tm). When you walk in, you will be issued a Gulf Blue $5000 Stand21 suit with which to pose in front of various historically important non-competitive items like Justin Bell’s maxed-out Amex Optima, Emelia Hartford’s completely sealed and mint-condition rolling toolbox, and the Porsche GT2RS. In the gift shop you’ll have a chance to purchase a replica of the combination bedpan/hand-pumped-bidet that Doug DeMuro chickened out of riding during Ed Bolian’s Cannonball “record”.

If you’re counting along at home, I am aware of at least the following major Corvette models for 2027:

• Stingray

• Stingray Z51

• E-Ray (DEAD!)

• Grand Sport

• Grand Sport X

• Z06

• ZR1

• ZR1X

These cars use a total of five different powertrains. Which also happens to be the number of different powertrains available across the entire five-nameplate unibody Chevrolet passenger-car lineup apart from the Corvette: (1.2 Turbo, 1.3 Turbo, 1.5 Turbo, 2.0 Turbo, 2.5 Turbo). That is slightly deceptive, however, because only the Trailblazer offers a choice of engine, and that choice is really a choice of FWD or AWD, each of which is supplied with a single engine.

Listen, I think the C8 is a great car. But it has become the alpha example of GM’s ironclad determination to detest and ignore its own customers. You cannot tell me that adding a shifter to the C8 and maintaining the existing torsional rigidity would have cost anything near the price of developing the E-Ray powertrain that, as far as I can tell, no one in the whole world really wants. How much lighter and smaller could the C8 have been without the mandatory hybrid provisions?

It also seems obvious to me that some major percentage of the various funky engine/motor setups fitted to the C8 will blow up eventually. It used to be that you could buy a stick-shift C7 without AFM and have a nice reliable car. I don’t know how many C8s will eventually fall prey to broken lifter or failed bearing issues. Maybe it would be a better idea to have one reliable powertrain instead of five interesting ones.

Chevrolet has told the media that the Grand Sport is the final C8 development, which makes sense as the submodel held that position in C4, C6, and C7 as well. So what will the C9 look like? Maybe GM should get some external advice on that.

All the world’s a market

With the obvious exception of John Van Stry, “ACF’s Own”, I don’t have much use for the current crop of science fiction writers. I think most of them would rather be writing about social justice for the Atlantic, the same way the average Jalopnik contributor would rather be writing about social justice for the Atlantic and the average Avoidable Contact Forever proprietor would rather be hunting human beings for sport on a remote jungle island, preferably with a fancy pair of gold-plated Desert Eagles.

Cory Doctorow is just such a person… kind of. He might look like the prototype of the famous “Soyjack” image, you probably don’t want him on your side in a street fight, and much of his prose is perceptibly limp, but he is far from a stupid person and therefore he occasionally says something worthy of further consideration. Such is the case with his latest piece, “Market participation is exhausting”. I’ll excerpt the most relevant parts below:

For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it’s humiliating. It’s always exhausting. But for my agents, it’s invigorating… These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is always bargaining to the last breath in order to “maximize their utility.”

This ideology isn’t just an observation (“society is a market”), it’s also a demand (“society should be a market”). People who find aggressive haggling invigorating have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert everything to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:

In Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, there’s a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can’t go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn’t even sick! She’s just offended that this hypothetical situation wouldn’t be resolved by bargaining…

For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like “revealed preferences,” the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a “revealed preference” for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a “revealed preference” for having only one kidney — and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a “revealed preference” for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook…

Running the world on “caveat emptor” isn’t just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it’s a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it…

For them, bargaining isn’t a cognitive demand, it’s a cognitive invigorator. To the extent that they understand this, they think it’s just a sign that they are born to rule. Caveat emptor. Revealed preferences. That makes me smart.

What’s more, for people on the losing side of this trade, losing the bargain means being poorer, and being poorer means more cognitive demands — rationing out your pennies and eeling through the impossibly narrow gaps between payday and the day the bills are due. This produces a winner-take-all dynamic in which the losers of the bargaining game have less energy and wherewithal to bargain the next time around.

There is a sort of man in modern society who is (there is no nice way to say this, I apologize) is a total pussy who would be on his knees within the early seconds of any serious real-world conflict, but who adores the jungle metaphors and faux-battle of “business” and “markets” and whatnot. These people are omnipresent on both coasts, and they are so much the standard-equipment human in those environments that the proposed jujitsu matchup between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg had them all viscerally upset.

(For the record, I think that’s Elon in three rounds but not without difficulty.)

Now, you might point out that one mark of civilization is the removal of physical threat, and I agree. A world in which you can’t get a fast-food meal without being Anthony Joshua is not a world in which anyone wants to live, even Anthony Joshua. Some of you have read about the exchange in which Bob Lutz threatened to kill a fellow GM board member. I admire the spirit of that exchange, and I like Bob quite a bit, but… doesn’t that slightly mark him as an unserious person? The battles within GM can’t be won by killing someone, or beating them up. As I once wrote, if you’re a bad-ass cage fighter who can’t pay his rent or feed his kids… it doesn’t mean much that you’re a bad-ass cafe fighter.

The same is true for business. I’m not proposing that we change American society to resolve everything via competitive deadlifting; that makes Hafthor Bjornsson the head curator of the Guggenheim.

(Actually, I might be in favor of that.)

What I’m suggesting, rather, is that we have done something just as bad as making Terry Crews the President. Worse, actually. We have created a society in which physical violence is rare but institutional and corporate violence is omnipresent. This violence is executed against Cory Doctorow’s crew of non-hagglers on a daily basis through avenues as diverse as the Software License Agreement and the Dollar General operations handbook.

In other words, we reward people who are emotionally aggressive much the same way as we punish people who are physically aggressive. Which is an odd way to run a society.

If you’re a member of Gen X or older, you remember a world with far fewer tiers of service. I grew up in neighborhoods where some dads had an S-Class and some had a Ford Maverick, but generally they ate in the same places, patronized the same stores, received the same level of service. There were just a few banks, just a few locksmiths, and so on.

Today, poor people and rich people are completely separated. Matt Farah drives a $200,000 Meyers Manx to scarf down fresh fruit at Erewhon and the folks in the trailer parks take a gypsy cab to get Lucky Charms from Dollar General. Poor people pay far more for basic services and goods from banking to furniture. And every single interaction you have with a corporation now has some form of haggling or competition to it. I’m currently in the middle of a knock-down drag-out negotiation with DTLR, a shoe retailer that mailed me a box containing one shoe. We are on Day 44 of this argument. I will probably win in the end because I am pretty good at this stuff, but I don’t always win; I am in Year 2 of squabbling with Amex and Expedia about charging me $580 for a rental suite with an absentee owner, no way to check in, and no way to use the building on the appointed date.

I can fight these battles because I have time, education, resources, and ability. But if DTLR ships one shoe to a 92-IQ kid in downtown Columbus, well… that kid now has one shoe, in perpetuity.

Right now we are in the Age of Hagglers, the era in which intangible goods and services offer the greatest rewards. When I worked for Ford Credit, my bosses would brag that we were more profitable than Ford itself. That’s not something about which anyone should brag. Rent-seeking, financing, advising, consulting… none of those should pay like building. You might not like Elon being the world’s richest man but if you look at the list he heads, you will see a builder on top of service providers, and that is as it should be.

There is a real argument to be made for de-marketizing society in some fashion or another. Surely this would lead to lower total rewards or productivity, but it would also reduce variance. Which, in the long run, would increase social cohesion and prevent the descent of variance into violence. One thing Cory Doctorow doesn’t say, because his mind doesn’t work this way, but mine does: If you presume upon our mutual civility and decency to force a market on me, to force negotiation on me, then it places you outside the safety of moral constraints. Oe Kenzaburo’s brilliant The Silent Cry details just such a rise of violent youth against a mercantile “emperor”, by the way. And there is blood.

You’ve surely noticed the epidemic of “teens” rioting in malls, shopping areas, downtown gentrified Disneyworlds. There are two ways to see this, and both can be correct:

0. This violent, ungovernable behavior against businesses and institutions is a sign of poor parenting, morally vacant mass media, and social degradation;

1. It didn’t begin in a vacuum, or without provocation.

1. this is perhaps harsh, plenty of people like those stories.