Wednesday ORT: Un-Vetted, Hater Supreme, Rose Mist, What Drives Her To Mediocrity

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What a time to be alive! So much to cover and so little room in Substack’s email length limit, so:

Housekeeping: Loopy Made Bank

Last week I asked all of you to help Loopy The Cat. If you are a free subscriber who contributed and did not get your comped subscription notice, comment below or email me. As our paid readers know, Loopy received north of $1,600 from ACF readers. She will get all the help and affection she needs. You’re responsible for that. Thank you.

Classifieds: Ron Kirn Barnbuster

not for the busters

An ACF reader is selling his mint-condition, with-options Ron Kirn Barnbuster. If you’ve never played one, you are missing out. Find the general details here. This one is available at $1,500, which is $500 less than Ron charges for a new one with the upgrades, plus no sales tax and no wait. Comment below if you’re interested, or email me. I’m begging the readership to take this off his hands before I put it on a credit card.

Five new lap records, and two big firings, for the Corvette team

Nine years ago, certified madman and Formula Ford maestro Chris Winkler used the fifth-generation Viper ACR to set 13 “track records” at various road courses around the United States. His Road Atlanta time was 1:26.54. In 2019, Porsche eclipsed that time with a 1:24.88 in the GT2RS and 1:26.24 for the GT3RS. We now have a new “record” of 1:22.85, set by the 1,064-horsepower Corvette ZR1.

Allow me to be catty for a moment: Mike Skeen ran a 1:19.40 in a Radical SR8 that was gearing-limited to 155mph, during an open trackday, while working traffic. Raiden Nicol ran a pre-updates SR10 to 1:19.2 during a 22-car race last year, as well, with the same gearing limitation. A few fellows have run Stohrs with 140mph top speeds in the 1:17 range, as well. By contrast, the ZR1 easily hits 184mph on the back straight. So no matter what you read in the sycophantic press, it doesn’t really handle like a race car. It’s a two-ton dragster that can kinda turn.

Not that you’d expect it to. Not with that much mass. The real question is: How is this thousand-plus-horsepower car with computer-controlled boost only four seconds faster than a naturally aspirated 640-horsepower Viper on 2015-era Kumhos? I suspect the answer is: Chris Winkler. I have a lot of respect for the Corvette team and their development drivers, but I was able to beat their data at NCM in the 7th-generation ZR1, under identical conditions. By contrast, nobody who has ever watched Chris Winkler drive has thought “I can match that dude”, unless their last name was a Dutch exclamation.

If you want more information, Eric Weiner at Hagerty has a nice article about it.

Meanwhile, the cynics and haters among us have been openly wondering if the timing of this news hasn’t been, perhaps a bit suspect, because the Corvette community has been beside itself at the firing of two senior Corvette people. The rumor mill thinks that Harlan Charles was terminated for being too much of a consumer advocate. In particular, he was obsessed with keeping the base price of the C7 and C8 low, and he apparently wanted the resources that went into this “all-conquering” ZR1 to be put instead into a more affordable version of the C8 that would be the spiritual successor to the 1999 C5 hardtop car.

Another rumor thinks that Harlan was fired because of data and opinions he disclosed in another Hagerty piece, although that is simply a ridiculous idea. Imagine the idea of General Motors having someone terminated because of something they said or wrote in a Hagerty article! Why, that simply wouldn’t happen. No executive at General Motors is that thin-skinned. That would be like letting your ego get you into a situation where you crashed a car for no particular reason… on national sports television!

Here at Avoidable Contact Forever, we don’t know enough to speculate about what happened in Vettetown —but I’ll say for the record that if Chevrolet really did abandon a more affordable C8 to do this rather ridiculous ZR1, that’s an utter disgrace. When you charge $221,700 for a Corvette, you’re missing the whole point of the car — and you’re putting it into direct competition with vehicles that will always be more desirable than even the fastest ZR1. This moronic obsession with baseball-card-level facts figures was embarrassing when it led to advertisements comparing the Grand Am SE and BMW 318i based on lateral skidpad g, and it’s doubly so in 2025.

These pedophilia accusations brought to you by the NFL and Apple Music

“Say, Drake…” And with that, Kendrick Lamar officially ascended to the pantheon of rap greats. If he wasn’t there already. He didn’t actually say the word “pedophile” in the Super Bowl halftime show, likely because the NFL doesn’t want to be added as another defendant to the existing lawsuit filed by Aubrey “Drake” Graham in November regarding the song “Not Like Us”, but the crowd was happy to yell it on his behalf. (As did your humble author, watching the halftime show at Outback Steakhouse, to the consternation of the decent people around him.) We have covered the beef more than once here at ACF, but any nuanced discussion of who’s on top of it has now been obliterated the same way that the Enola Gay settled the question of who was winning the Second World War.

My friends at The Free Press laughingly suggested that Kendrick’s performance was in support of the “trade war” against Canada — Drake, of course, is from Toronto — but I see it as part of the general 2025 American attitude that, for the first time in a while, hating is hip. I don’t mean “hate” the way CNN defines it, although maybe that is back, too. Rather, I mean that we are all now allowed to revile, and criticize, and dismantle, even the largest and most (unjustly) venerated institutions. The era of toxic positivity, where it was mandatory to say fawning things about whatever person, idea, or entity was on top of the food chain, is over. It’s all to play for now. Use the Super Bowl to openly accuse a biracial Canadian of child sex abuse? Furlough or fire as many federal workers as you can find? Peel the cap of a healthcare CEO in broad daylight? Rename the Gulf of Mexico? In the words of Tame Impala — let it happen! Nothing is too angry, too uncouth, too petty for us to consider now. The Dog Star rages.

Kendrick Lamar is now the greatest musical “hater” of all time. (Prior to this, the title was held by Bob Dylan, whose “Idiot Wind” is perhaps the most venomous song ever written about a former spouse.) K-Dot’s public triumph is the opening salvo in an era where anyone and anything can be brought low, and possibly will. Will this attitude bring us to a new Dark Ages — or are we on the cusp of true Enlightenment?

And since hating is back in style…

caption...

To the same beat as above:

What’s up with these jabroni-ass writers tryna see Bedard?

The industry can hate me, fuck ‘em all and their tame PR

Say Scotty, I hear you like em ‘dumb

You better never try Mid-Ohio Turn One

To any PR person who read this and they in love —

Just make sure you hide your lunch buffet from ‘em

They tell me Rawlins the only one that get the loaner cars

Elana Scherr on a Viper wing bending the spars

And Emme never won a race, why is she around?

Certified Ally Award? Certified talentless.

I lean on you half-wits like a hammer hitting meat

Yeah I’m giving Side Glances and I’m’a send it up to Pete…

They not like us.

Okay, I apologize for that, but only to DJ Mustard for misusing the “Not Like Us” beat, not to any of the people mentioned in this thoroughly risible group of “awards”. There is nothing, nothing more pathetic in the automotive business than giving participation trophies to fourth-rate writers solely because they were assigned female at birth. They act like Denise McCluggage never existed, like there’s something inherently inferior about women’s ability to write about cars. I can name a half-dozen women who put out better work in this game than Elana, Nicole, and Emme — and the only reason I won’t write their names here is because I don’t want them to be labeled guilty by association with me. I could also tell a story about a brilliant and talented female author who was driven into clinical depression by the horrifying actions of a “women in motorsports” grifter from the above award list, but you get the idea. This whole thing is a bad joke, and the most delightful aspect about the collapse of automotive media is that it will eventually put every name above back to where they should be, namely: writing LinkedIn “reviews” for an audience of three Twitter bots.

Rose Mist, come to me — Snake Mary’s gone to bed

From S-tier ACF contributor Tom Klockau comes this remarkable Facebook Marketplace listing, since sold, for a pristine low-mileage 1996 Taurus LX. Largely thanks to Mary Walton’s excellent and insightful business book CAR, the ‘96 Taurus has been ossified in history as the car that lost the mid-sized sales race, knocked Ford out of the passenger-car game, and offered customers anything but what they wanted.

All of that is true — but now that we are thirty years away from its debut, I think it’s worth paying a little respect to the oval Taurus in general and the 1996 LX in particular. To begin with — look at the color! This is Rose Mist, a rare color in any Taurus but especially in the end-of-year V8 SHO, where it adorned just eighty-six examples. It was a high-quality paintjob that looked exotic when new. The interior is fully color-matched, including the plastics, which must have cost Ford dearly.

My dealership got a Rose Mist LX in as our very first 24-valve Taurus; that’s right, with the LX you got a quad-cam Duratec 3.0-liter. It was space-aged by the standards of the domestic industry and truly it was a bit ahead of what Honda and Toyota had to offer at the time as well. My father had a pair of Infiniti J30s at the time, largely because the pixie-cut, mid-thirties sales manager at the dealership really liked him and gave him both cars for net minus holdback, and I remember thinking that the LX Taurus was about 90% of the car for 60% of the money. The sound system was really good, and it had to be, because it was baked into the ovoid center console.

You really can’t point to anywhere Ford skimped in the ‘96 LX, or in that Taurus as a whole. I mean, my God, they had two different rear windows for that and the Sable. Imagine doing that today! The headlamps were an engineering feat, as was the interior packaging. It really did behave just like a proper luxury car.

Unfortunately it was also priced like one: $24,500 or thereabouts at a time when the Camry XLE was $22,600 and the Lexus ES300 was $32,500. Worse yet, Ford wrote the lease programs to focus on the GL model, so I was often put in the unpleasant situation of saying “The GL is $289/month and the LX, which has the equipment you say you really want… is $520/month.” It made no sense to the buyers and most of them decided to go get a Camry instead.

Ford panicked and started cutting costs out of the cars before the 1997 model year was well and truly started. When the Taurus got an early revamp for MY2000 it went from swan to ugly duckling with generic styling, a cheaper interior, and the big trunk that everybody said they wanted in consumer clinics but which turned the elegant Jaguaresque profile of the 1996 into a generic wedge that recalled the W-body GM sedans.

No, history won’t venerate the 1996 Taurus — but look at the Hyundai IONIQ6; someone out there got the message, and is keeping the ovoid faith. Remember that the next time you don’t feel like your particular message is getting through.