Wednesday ORT: The Clerk, MidIRL, Topolino, CW, Polymarket, Brad Books Ranked

All readers welcome

the netflix version

Good afternoon, friends. Thank you for being patient with me as I catch up from eight days spent out of the house. The good news is I have six reviews to bring you in the next couple of weeks. As is usually the case, they’ll be for paid subscribers only. It’s never been a better time to give me some of your money — and Trackday Club members will receive the exclusive hardcover of the upcoming Rodney Redux and other Dealership Yarns before the fall, so definitely consider that as well.

You gotta slow down to go faster

hahahaha someone saw the race and then reserved the watch, talk about win on sunday and sell on monday

The Gen Z phrase “you’re doing too much” is not one of my favorites, but in the case of Charles Leclerc’s recent misfortune, it precisely applies. As Ferrari continued to adjust their car towards the preferences of Sir Lewis Hamilton, including switching his brake pads and discs to Carbon Industries from Brembo and re-optimizing the rest of the system accordingly, Leclerc responded by simply driving harder and pushing the limits more often. That has led to multiple crashes and a laptime deficit. So this weekend, Leclerc pushed the panic button. He started by turning off his phone. He switched to Hamilton’s brakes. And after a Sprint race where he was ten seconds adrift of his teammate, he reduced his throttle application in the final corners of Silverstone.

Side-by-side traces of Leclerc and Hamilton showed that Leclerc was consistently using more throttle and more aggressive steering. Last year’s Ferrari responded positively to this, but the current one is rebalanced for the way Lewis drives, which is less deliberately on-the-limit. So Leclerc decided to drive the same way, but with greater delicacy of touch. The result: he shaded Lewis and won his first race since 2024 thanks to Kimi Antonelli’s brake-duct issues.

Meanwhile, Sir Lewis had his first bad luck in years when Ferrari’s end-of-race strategy was undone by a lack of time to restart the race and give him one lap to pass George on new tires — a reverse Abu Dhabi, if you will. So he finished behind a rather confused-looking George Russell, who now leads him in the championship once more. In postrace interviews, he was explicit about the fact that Leclerc is now mirroring his approach to the car. This is probably bad news for Lewis’s hopes of beating his teammate over the course of the entire year, but let’s face it: the only hope anyone seems to have of being anything besides a footnote to this season is if Kimi Antonelli’s car continues to malfunction. Without that brake duct issue he would be fifty points away from second place. Other notes:

• Betcha everyone at Red Bull wishes Christian Horny were back in charge. This multiple failure of the “macarena” wing is the sort of thing that simply didn’t happen under his watch. Imagine if Adrian Newey hadn’t been such a baby about things; we would have a Horner-led team with (supposedly) the strongest engine and first-rate aero. Max would have five championships now and would be in the running for a sixth. Instead, people are fleeing Red Bull like the proverbial maritime rats while Verstappen’s management meets with… McLaren, of all teams.

• Princess George continues to look absolutely miserable in the Mercedes, despite two race wins. At least he is more willing to race hard than he was at the beginning of his career, and is no longer a free pass for anyone coming up to his rear wing.

• Speaking of Adrian Newey — a few wags have pointed out that Aston Martin does worse on tracks where engine performance is less important. So maybe this continual throwing-Honda-under-the-bus is a distraction from the core issue of Newey designing a bad car. And it truly is a bad car; I just read someone on Instagram saying “The Cadillac catches on fire, loses wheels, spins for no reason, and can’t always leave the garage. The Aston is worse than that.”

Meanwhile, in Spec Vintage Dallara

I will admit that I didn’t bother to walk 1100 feet to watch the IndyCar race at MidO — instead, I sent Roving Reporter Rodney to check it out. He reported a hot day and an enthusiastic crowd. Pato O’Ward took the lead over his Arrow McLaren teammate via a move in the esses that would be highly familiar to any Spec Miata racer with any time here at MidO; just stay to the left through Madness until you can take advantage of the longer, straighter run to the final right.

Truthfully, I wish I’d gone, but I had a few tasks to accomplish ahead of what will be multiple race weekends in a row for my wife and daughter. The good news is that the famous MidOhio rain waited until after the race. And Rodney? Some nice white folks gave them a ride back to the house in their Sierra HD Denali. He can be charming when he wants to be, ya know.

Top(olino) of the Pops

How much would you pay to do 19mph on private roads? If the answer if “At least fourteen grand” then the new FIAT Topolino, in closed-top or rollback-top-with-ropes-in-place-of-doors form is for you. It’s intended to be the most stylish way possible for Boomers to terrorize their retirement communities; right now the main player in this space is Club Car, which charges $12,099 for a two-seat golf car with lithium-ion batteries. In street-legal form, with the speed bumped from 19mph to 26mph, the Club Car is $16,699. FIAT will offer an LSV kit to match that capability, but no one yet knows the pricing.

This is not how I’d choose to spend that kind of money, at least not in a world where the Kawasaki Ninja 1100SX continues to offer a 130mph trap speed for $13,699, but let’s face it, we would all feel better if our eighty-something parents bought one of these Topolinos and gave us their bright-red ES350 with white interior so we could drive to the diner in style. Or maybe that’s just me. Realistically, however, I don’t see my father ever deciding to downgrade from a Lexus to a FIAT of any sort. Not between now and the end of the second Mamdani presidency, anyway¹.

It was all a scam

Of all the addictions to which a man can become a slave, including the one that bothered poor Wade Boggs all the way through his career, gambling is perhaps the most pernicious, because it offers the most hope. If you’re a drug addict, you intrinsically know that the next high won’t solve your issues, but for the gambling addict there is always the promise of a payday that makes all the problems disappear. All you have to do is be smarter than everyone else, about just one thing.

Gambling was a big enough problem when you had to fly somewhere to do it but now you can bankrupt yourself from the casino in your phone. This is an overwhelmingly popular thing for our young men, by the way. You can bet on anything now, thanks to apps like Polymarket. Plenty of young men are essentially addicted to Polymarket. Seventy percent of users are net losers, and over 100,000 of them have lost more than a thousand dollars to the app.

And now it turns out that Polymarket used a network of influencers and faked results to set the hook even deeper. In a rare digression from publishing social-media porn for the proverbial childless cat ladies, the WSJ investigated Polymarket and its influencer army. What they found was horrifying:

Makihara, who declined to comment, is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company.

On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket.

Well. It’s obvious that everyone involved — everyone — should go directly to jail. Will that happen? Of course not. But this would be a good time to take a checkpoint with the under-30 fellows in your life and remind them that online “prediction” is, generally speaking, a sucker’s bet.

The end of the affair

Pour one out for Cycle World. I will miss the magazine, and not just because I did a few articles for them half a decade ago. During the reign of EIC Mark Hoyer and an ever-tightening circle of part-time contributors, CW continued to provide decent, ethical information on motorcycles. They were like a Csaba-era Car and Driver. Nothing flashy, and no oxen gored for reader amusement or edification, but you could generally rely on what you read to be both true and straightforward.

What’s next for motorcycle journalism? Not much. Which is worrisome, because unlike new cars, motorcycles are difficult to test drive/ride and evaluate fairly on one’s own. I suppose we have the Revzilla “Common Tread” site, which has the business model of “let’s tell the truth about new vehicles because we make our money in a slightly different part of the business.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because I wasted four years of my life trying to do something along those lines, only to find out that even rich people are cowards if they’re truly afraid of being disliked.

Hey, maybe I’ll win ten million bucks on Polymarket somehow and I’ll set up my own motorcycle magazine: The Journal Of ZX-14R Stupidity And Overloaded Rear Shocks.

You’ll want to rest them all gently in bleach for up to twelve years before reading

From time to time, ACF readers chastise me about being too mean to people like Wes Senator and Fat Brad. What they don’t see are all the times that those people are mean to me! Why, just last week Wes ran a truly hurtful Instagram story that implied I was ugly. This came as a tremendous surprise to me, because the only people who have ever called me ugly before were my mom, my classmates, my first wife, various co-workers, thousands of randos on the Internet, and an ad-hoc committee of blind people who were provided, to their considerable dismay after the fact, with a bas-relief 3-D printing of my face with which to make the judgment.

Let the record state that Wes Siler is much better-looking than I am, which is a characteristic he shares with 97.5 percent of the population. However, let the record also state that if I ever need lunch money I’m 100% confident I can take it from Wes without so much as mussing my bewildering, Metheny-esque halo of unconditioned hair.

Anyway. Let’s do something nice and promote the commercial endeavors of my distinguished colleague Bradley, who is selling books on eBay. He sure seems to have a lot of books for someone who, frankly, doesn’t come off as someone who has ever read a book of any sort cover to cover. It also worries me that he was fired from an automotive museum a while ago and now he seems to have a lot of automotive-museum-style books to sell. A remarkable percentage of the books list as “signed”, too. I’ve been collecting books for thirty-five years, I have literally thousands of them, many of which are first editions or other rarities, and somehow I don’t have as many signed books in total as Brad is offering for sale right now. Oh well. If you’re an emptor, you should caveat. I’ve ranked the top five items for sale below; tell him Jack sent you.

#5: 2022 Audrain Concours Bonhams Auction Catalog Featuring BMW 507, $18.99 plus $6.68 shipping. If you were not at the 2022 Audrain Concours Bonhams Auction, you missed out. Relive those magic moments now by paying $25 for something that was handed out free at the time. Contains photos of a 1994 Diablo VT.

#4: Porsche Belt Buckle Made In USA Solid Pewter, $80 plus $5.70 shipping. Strictly speaking, this is not a book. But a book probably should be written about this belt buckle. Consider, if you will, the AustriAlpin COBRA Pro buckle, which is rated for 2,000 pounds of tensile strength. Now think about what Brad’s belt buckle has had to deal with. Impressive, right? You’re damned right. Short of a General Products hull by Larry Niven’s “Puppeteers”, this might be the most indestructible material in Known Space. You could probably use it to recover a Subaru Wilderness.

#3: The Official Ford Mustang 5.0: Technical Reference & Performance Handbook, 1979-1993, Signed. $100 plus $4.47 shipping. Now, you might say to yourself, “This book is $23 on AbeBooks and probably less in every flea market from Cleveland to Cincinnati. What makes it worth $100?” Well, dummy, it’s signed by Al Kirschenbaum. Who is Al Kirschenbaum? Google tells me that he is mostly notable for writing “The Official Ford Mustang 5.0: Technical Reference & Performance Handbook, 1979-1993.”

#2: Porsche Rennsport, 1949-2004, $700 plus $5.22 shipping. This book is available for $100 pretty much everywhere, but Brad’s copy has been signed by the late Jeff Zwart. “Late” in the sense that he got to the top of Pikes Peak about twenty seconds after JR Hildebrand. He’s very much alive and, one suspects, quite willing to sign a book for less than $600.

#1: Animorphs Series, #1-54, price varies. Truthfully, dear friends, I don’t think Brad read most of the books he is selling. Especially not the Peter Egan ones or the ones about architecture or the ones about racing. The Animorphs books, on the other hand… well, the Gemini summary is “a popular science fiction book series by K.A. Applegate (Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant) about a group of teenagers who gain the power to morph into any animal they touch, allowing them to fight a secret alien invasion by parasitic Yeerks. The series, known for its dark themes of war, trauma, and morality, follows the "Animorphs" as they balance normal teenage life with a brutal, secret guerilla war for Earth, with each book narrated by a different main character.” Brad absolutely read these books. Everything about his public persona and his work product basically screams “I lie in bed at night and imagine that my soft-skinned, supple, female, newly-developing teen body can morph into any animal I touch.” Every single person I have ever seen who is deeply into this sort of thing looks exactly like Brad. If you pulled the fire alarm at the Animorphs convention you would immediately be overrun by a buffalo stampede of 350-pound beardos sobbing in terror. Most typical Animorphs cover:

he can only fap to four of these five transition stages btw

If I owned any of this stuff I would deny its presence in a way that would make the Apostle Peter clench his fists in righteous anger. Brad’s selling it on eBay and promoting it on Twitter. This is shamelessness right up there with the people who sell used sex toys on Craigslist. “Fleshlight GT3RS Pro, used six times, still finger tight.”

Anyway. Go buy a book from the nice man, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.

1. I know, I know, he isn’t eligible, stop being so upright. They’re gonna change the rules about that anyway.