Wednesday ORT: Tyler Twice, Pre-Season Ranks, Turbomax Trouble, Influencers Go Race, Global No Entry

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Good morning, friends. We probably have too many automotive topics today, so feel free to chime in with other ideas.

Fenders are free

As the paid subscribers know, we will now be discussing NASCAR in this section. Why? Because I have to watch it every weekend now. Why? Some of you know why.

This weekend’s Alabama race was the first one I’ve watched since Rodney and I went to the 2009 Brickyard 400. Toyota was the dominant manufacturer, and it seemed unlikely that anyone else could win it. Fan favorite and Chevrolet driver Carson Hocevar was begging his crew chief to find him someone to draft with. “Shake and bake, you know?” Apparently, this phenomenon of Hocevar getting up front and having no help from anyone is not a new one. Bereft of assistance, and with fellow Chevrolet front-runner Kyle Larson wiped off to the infield, Hocevar forced the issue in two successive restarts, eventually creating the conditions by which Bubba Wallace would fall back… and Tyler Reddick, who was missing an entire right front fender due to an earlier incident, would pull around to win it by a few feet.

I can see why Michael Jordan wants the teams to have more say in how the race runs. The competitive balance borders on the absurd — you can walk to the fridge and come back to find the front ten cars are completely different ones. The announcers are perpetually in reactive mode; the theorizing and in-depth discussion you get during the typical F1 race can’t happen here because there are more lead changes in the first 100 laps than F1 sees in a season.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the teams go to COTA. For now, however, the world is 23XI’s oyster. Winning the first two races of the season is something that doesn’t happen very much in modern NASCAR. Tyler Reddick is taking full advantage of his situation.

Why does this always happen to Alonso

The Bahrain data has been crunched and the conventional wisdom is that Mercedes has the leg up:

Mercedes → Ferrari → McLaren → Red Bull —> HAAS!

Aston Martin is in the middle of a disastrous start. You’d be unwise to bet against Honda or Adrian Newey but the fact is that both of those entities are occasionally prone to big mistakes and this might be a black swan event where both the engine and the aero are completely worthless.

If you’re a betting man, which I am not, you could do worse than to toss your money on Charles Leclerc to win the season opener. Ferrari is pretty good for pace and they have the best starting procedure by far. But the unfortunate fact is that the incomprehensible energy management strategies necessitated by the new powertrain layout will have the final say in the matter.

Much has been made of the fact that some cars are starting their fast laps at 60% throttle or thereabouts, apparently due to the hybrid system’s energy delivery. No one has anything good to say about the net effect of the rule changes. The good news is that F1 has shown itself willing to make big changes for the sake of competition, even in the mid-season. Let’s hope Australia teaches the correct lessons.

Let’s go racing, girls

a little dubai chocolate, if you catch my meaning

Here at Avoidable Contact Forever, we have little or zero patience with Performative Female “Racing”. The reason for this is simple. I live with two women who approach motorsports the same way I do, to wit: pay your own way, don’t ask for special favors, don’t act like a whore in public or wear slutty outfits¹, don’t yell I’M A GIRL WITH A VAGINA! at every opportunity, don’t engage with simps on social media to pay your bills, don’t make the whole fuckin’ car bright pink, and so on. About 75% of the people in our SCCA region have no idea that DG or MDG are, in fact, women, since they have traditionally male first names and they don’t stride around the paddock in their sportsbras. When MDG won SCCA Rookie Of The Year and went up to get her award at the banquet, there was a murmur of consternation; the guy who won Nelson Ledges this year is a woman!

Needless to say, this is not how most women go racing. The average chick competitor spends more time grifting on social media and engaging with lonely men online than she does going over data. Case in point: “Ms” Emelia Hartford.

That’s a totally natural photo and behavior, I’m always just casually rolling my nomex underwear up and down over my tummy while someone films me. This was the second year in a row where Hartford participated in the “Formula E EVO SESSIONS”, which amount to a kind of supervised experiential drive of the Formula E car in simulation and (to a lesser extent) on track in a noncompetitive environment. She was named the “Grand Champion” of the 2025 sessions, which perplexes me because I can’t understand how you can be the grand champion of an influencer-centric goof-around.

This whole thing is quite fascinating to me because I have zero respect for any of the entities involved: Porsche, Formula E, or Emelia Hartford. All of this stuff just makes life harder on female racers who don’t want to strip down in public. Credentialed, competent racers like Amy Ruman and Michele Abbate suffer by association with this clownish behavior. You want to see something real? Here’s Abbate getting out of a car that is on fire… with a shattered ankle:

Oddly enough, even though I’ve sat next to Abbate at dinner I have no idea what her body looks like. She never wears anything in public that a male racer wouldn’t wear. Alright, I’ll get off my soapbox now…

well, not quite. This week, noted simp-magnet and jorts-wearer Alanis King bought herself a race car:

Some of the comments were predictable:

I’m pretty sure this is an Outlaw Kart. They are serious machines, putting 100hp into a 500-pound package including driver. If they are anything like the sprint car I drove at Ventura several years ago, they are intolerant of sloppy corner entry or throttle position. In theory, if you can win in Outlaw Kart you can consider running midgets, which are much more expensive and dangerous.

Naturally, Mrs. King’s announcement post contains an email for simps to send her money and “opportunities”. She works very hard to cultivate parasocial relationships with a lot of men online, so I presume she won’t lack for funding in her debut season. Who knows. Maybe she will make the influencer-to-racer transition. You will know she is serious about it when, as with the female racers in my house, her presence on the Internet dwindles to published race results. But I’m not holding my breath on that.

Mary and Mark need you to bail them out this time

I didn’t think it was a great idea when Ford decided to make the two EcoBoost V-6 engines the default and/or encouraged choice in the F-150. Turbochargers and pickup trucks are, in my opinion, a bad mix. (I used to have an exception in my mind for turbodiesels, but in the EPA/DEF/de-rating era, even those are experiencing a lot of issues.) My initial suspicion has been somewhat borne out in the sense that, at least according to the information I can get, the EcoBoost trucks are less reliable than their naturally-aspirated counterparts.

If the EcoBoost six is a bad idea, however, how much more so was it to put a long-stroke paint-shaker of a four-cylinder into a full-sized truck? The last time someone did that was with the naturally-aspirated 2.7 in the Toyota T100, a product that wasn’t really considered full-sized when it debuted and by modern standards barely qualifies as a Chevrolet Colorado competitor. Putting a turbo on the thing might help it make 5.3-liter power but it does nothing for reliability. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the “Turbomax” is no worse than the 5.3 in short-term repair cost, but that’s like saying “I’m not snorting any more coke than Stevie Nicks.”

It seems obvious that every single one of these vehicles will need significant expenditure by the 150k mark. This is a problem with which General Motors has historically not concerned itself. And as long as the COVID supply issues made any pickup truck a lucky purchase, the General did okay with the four-banger. But now the party is over and these things are being given away. $7,350 of factory assistance. On top of the fact that no Turbomax in dealer inventory is likely to fetch a penny over invoice.

The lack of stewardship by Barra and Reuss in the crucial area of full-sized pickups would be difficult to overstate. The current truck comes off as a mild rework/cheapening of the 2014 model. They don’t offer a single powertrain with a reputation for reliability. I don’t think the current Silverado is necessarily a bad vehicle. With the right equipment and with a reliable variant of the 6.2, it would still be a compelling choice for certain tasks. The plain fact, however, is that the Silverado is more than just another product for GM. It is the only thing keeping the firm from sliding into a Mazda-ish position on the sales charts. And right now, it’s not good enough.

You can’t touch the airport people

Back when I had a respectable career — uh, a semi-respectable career — I used to be present for a lot of discussions about what is upscale and what is luxury and what is aspirational and so on. During those conversations, I learned something interesting, namely: If you can only ask someone one question to determine their socioeconomic status in America, a good one to ask is

How many times did you fly last year?

While there are plenty of exceptions to this — people who never leave Manhattan, sex workers who fly back and forth between LAX and LAS every week — one’s frequent-flier status is a good key to how much you matter to the lizards who sell things and also run the country.

As the country goes through yet another kayfabe shutdown, the status of PreCheck and Global Entry programs are being constantly re-evaluated. It’s worth noting that nobody ever really complains about shutting down national parks or not paying soldiers during these convulsions — but turning off PreCheck? Making the Real People remove their shoes and get their laptops out for security? My God, we will have guillotines on the National Mall!

(Remember that every “popular” revolution is actually a revolution by disenfranchised wealthy or powerful folks, using the “people” as cannon fodder.)

Right now, Global Entry is shutdown, but PreCheck is still running. Apparently this was due to President Trump’s direct command. I can see where he’s coming from — he doesn’t want to upset the Real People — but one could argue that 500,000 pissed-off frequent-flier Democrats might be just the lever required to fund immigration enforcement and homeland security. In my experience, most of the progressive Illuminati are absolutely steadfast on the “Fuck Having Borders And Laws And Shit” platform… right up to the moment that it causes them some inconvenience.

I’m not worried in any event; I have CLEAR!

1. alright, i’ve struggled with both of those conditions, but the girls are much better than me in that regard