Wednesday ORT: VSC for LEC, Autopian Begs, Podcast, Club Clown,The Gooneral

All subscribers welcome

danger girl is hot; the car behind her is hotter

We should have something for almost everyone today — but I want to warn the readers up front: the last topic is a fairly disturbing discussion about the awful sexual practice detailed in Harper’s Magazine this month. I think it’s too important to ignore, but if you are put off by that stuff, and who could blame you, please skip it and continue to the comments.

Live by the Williams-caused Safety Car, die by it

plenty of room, at least by spec miata standards

It’s a plot twist too outrageous and ironic to comfortably exist anywhere but real life. In 2021, Williams driver Nicholas “GOATifi” Latifi crashed in the final laps of the race, causing a safety car period that led to Max Verstappen’s victory and first WDC. Fast-forward four years, and Carlos Sainz pulls his Williams off track at just about the same time, relatively speaking, causing a Virtual Safety Car that prevents Max from passing Charles Leclerc in the last two laps of the race. If Max loses the championship by three points… this is how it happened. And it should not have happened. There was general agreement during and after the race that the VSC was both unnecessary and anti-competitive.

Worse yet, it put a damp ending on what would otherwise be remembered as one of the finest drives in F1 history. Verstappen was perfect to literal hundredths of a second, lap after lap, as he eliminated a 21.9-second gap to Leclerc. Surely no one still doubts that Max is the finest driver of the modern era — which, given the major changes in coaching and driver science since the Nineties, makes him the objectively best motorcar racer in human history. The man is dragging a Kubota tractor to the world championship. Did you see his qualifying? The car was tankslapping at 160mph. Every single lap. And his pitch-perfect command of nearly everything was obvious in the difference between his off-track incident, which was both a car-control clinic and within the rules, and Lewis’s exit-lane departure a few laps later, which was both panicky and illegal.

What a great race otherwise. F1 is more competitive than any of the professional spec series or the professional BoP series. I don’t know what the 2026 rules are going to be, exactly, but maybe it’s not too late to back away from them. This is peak Formula One. Other notes:

• I thought Yuki had a fine drive, and he handled the Checo Perez “Minister Of Defense” role against Piastri quite adroitly. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s probably as good as gone.

• Oscar Piastri continues to fall apart, while Lando continues to improve. I do not believe this is entirely organic, so to speak. It seems to be an open secret that McLaren wants Lando to win, the same way it was obvious that McLaren generally favored Lewis over Fernando in 2007. We all remember what happened back then, right?

• Sorry, broadcasters: even if Lewis hadn’t gotten the penalty he would have finished behind Leclerc. Again. It’s now 13-5 in Grand Prix finishes for 2025. To put it in perspective, Alonso v. Stroll is 12-8.

• Just as cooked as Hamilton, but without the consolation of being a zillionaire superstar fashionista: Liam Lawson. Go home, dude.

• Princess George was in rare form, demanding a position swap with his much younger co-driver late in the race… but he was also entirely correct. By the time the team caught up to him, he’d lost his tire advantage and his ability to bring the fight to Ollie Bearman.

• Speaking of young Oliver: We all know the kid is the real deal, right? But Haas is also the real deal at the moment. If this momentum continues, they will be in 6th place by the end of the year. Not bad for a privately owned effort that runs on a shoestring.

• Can’t wait to see how the season ends. What a brilliant year. There’s really no disappointing way it could conclude, other than “team orders in Lando’s favor starting… now.”

In retrospect, the sweater vest was a bad choice

I can’t recommend you listen to any podcast, and I should warn you up front that this is nothing like my infamous 2013 Smoking Tire appearance, but just in case you are suffering from insomnia: You can find my appearance with Motoman here. You can also find it on: Spotify | Apple | Amazon.

Let the record show I was 203.4 pounds when I left home, but my cherished lime vintage Brooks Brothers sweater vest does tend to put a few visual kilos on a brother. I’m also wearing Sherman McCoy’s favorite shoe, the Golden Goose Ball Star Limited, with a gold-and-crystal heart-shaped sneaker charm for all (one of) the ladies out there. The socks are the astoundingly durable American Trench Retros. Shirt and pants are American Giant — there’s a funny part in the podcast where George talks about no one making an American T-shirt and I get indignant. Watch is Grand’s Seiko’s “Urban Bamboo” 36000vph with GMT complication.

George puts a ton of effort into these and it was a pleasure to chat with him. Honestly, I still don’t understand the appeal of the format. It’s just two people talking about stuff. I think I’m either too autistic to enjoy consuming this media, or not autistic enough. Maybe George will have me back on. Who knows? It’s more likely than me getting another shot at “BidNerds”, I’ll tell you that.

You’d better take your wallet out before Galpin puts theirs away

I think ACF in general knows how fond I am of The Autopian. Torchy is a brilliant and engaging writer. Adrian Clarke is a force of nature. Matt Hardigree is one of the most perceptive and thoughtful people to ever work in automotive media. Heck, even Mercedes Streeter has done real, valuable autojournalism of the kind you never see anymore. But I had to shake my head at their latest article in which Matt gripes about Google’s changes to their inbound traffic. The nutshell:

• Google Discover used to bring them over one million clicks a week.

• Something changed and now it only brings them 400,000 clicks a week.

• Insofar as the site is not exactly a lean operation, that’s not enough to keep their gang of full-timers going.

• So you, the reader, should pony up some cash.

I just want to put Matt’s numbers in perspective. I once worked at a bagel company that had a video channel. It was really important to our bagel CEO that the videos were watched by a lot of people. Especially the ones in which some pear-shaped dork with no bagel-cooking experience said “curmudgeonly” things about bagels. So the bagel company had their social media staff buy clicks via Facebook and Instagram promotions — at up to ten cents per. Ten cents per. And that was how they spent north of 3 million dollars a year to get $250,000 worth of YouTube revenue and make a loser think, and act, like he was a superstar.

By contrast, Matt and his friend are getting $40,000 a week worth of inbound clicks. For free. Google Discover is still bringing them ten times as many clicks as Google Search ever brought TTAC. If Google Discover brought me that many clicks, I could quit my day job. (That I don’t currently have anyway, thanks.) It’s no trick at all, even in the current depressed Web economy, to translate that sort of traffic into two or three grand a week’s worth of income.

The only problem, of course, is that The Autopian has much more in the way of expenses than I do. While I would love to have Matt manage this Substack, and I am dead certain he could improve the site, I can’t afford a fraction of what he earns. We don’t have room at ACF for management. We barely have room for cats. Every penny you send me is fed directly into the raging dumpster fire called SCCA Club Racing. (A few pennies occasionally go into the other raging dumpster fire called My 16-Year-Old Son Needs $245/Hour To Fly.)

Now, Matt, Torchy, and David Tracy have something I do not have. They have a patron: the Galpin Automotive Group, America’s #1 Ford Dealer. It’s my understanding that Galpin provides the majority of revenue. There’s just one problem with that: Car dealerships exist to make money, and the bigger they are — rather paradoxically — the more money they need to make per sale, and the less they can afford to spend per unit by way of promotion. I am sure that The Autopian was originally sold to Galpin as “We are gonna sell some cars for you.” What happened instead, if I may be permitted to light-heartedly Photoshop a famous cartoon, was:

In my opinion, The Autopian is worth saving. Here’s how I would save it:

0. Everybody — everybody — goes out and gets a full-time real day job.

1. Writers are paid per post at a sliding scale something like ($TOTAL_INCOME divided by $YOUR_CLICKS multiplied by $X_FACTOR), where $X_FACTOR takes into account that quality investigative journalism can take more time and effort than hot takes.

2. Every effort is made to grow the site.

If they handled it that way, the site would be revenue-positive by design, and it could grow. I don’t think that anyone needs to be a full-timer on a car website. I used to do TTAC in my spare hours, as did everyone but Derek, our sole “employee”. Most of the time I write ACF and do all my freelance in the spare hours. Having several full-timers on a site that isn’t really any bigger than TTAC circa 2011 is like the episode of “Friends” where Joey bought the dog sculpture. It’s absurdly extravagant.

I want nothing but the best for The Autopian, and I would be sorry to see it disappear. But, as every reader of A Man In Full knows, it’s time to live off the land. “…like the Viet Cong”.

MDG wins, and the son also rises

krusty the clown

Earlier this year, Mini Danger Girl drove from 17th place to the overall win at Waterford Hills in weather conditions best described as “Biblical”. It was a tremendous achievement for a rookie, but it was also possible to suggest that she’d been helped a bit. After all, I called her tire and setup strategy both correctly and early, so she was in grid and mentally ready to go while most of her competition was either panicking or, ahem, directing their crew to put rain tires on their car instead of the cars driven by their sons in the same race. And she also had me to help her make other choices across the weekend, from line to passing behavior. It’s ridiculous vanity for me to say that I’m a full class of driver ahead of the Spec Racer Ford crowd — but it’s also arguably borne out by the fact that I’ve led every SRF lap I ever completed with a working car. So yeah, maybe having me in her corner helped. Who’s to say.

This win on Sunday, however, was all hers beyond any shadow of a suggestion otherwise. In the dry. At the fastest track East of the Mississippi. Against a former class champion and a karting prodigy, with other fast cars in the mix as well. And in order to do it, she had to win it twice, because one of her competitors, Brian Post, chose to retake first place around a safety vehicle. Do we have the video? Yes we do:

A few non-impartial reactions:

• That’s my girl!!!! Talk about ice water in the veins. I can’t say I would take that mid-corner hit, or push someone to the outside at 100-plus mph, with any more certainty or vigor than she did. I remind the reader that 18 months ago she could not drive a stick shift and had never operated anything besides a Ford Flex or Chevy Avalanche.

• Brian Post is a remarkable clown. He is a bigger clown than Krusty or even my favorite, Flippo. If you find yourself in a position where you need to swerve around a safety vehicle to pass a barely post-teenaged female rookie, you should either go to therapy or switch to iRacing, where nobody ever has to tell a child that “Mommy didn’t come home from driving the tow truck today, she got hit by a narcisssist at 85mph.”

Did I mention that he’d passed MDG for the lead under a yellow flag the day before? I had advised MDG not to protest, since it’s one thing for me to have bad blood in the paddock but quite another for her to have it. She didn’t want to protest this move, either, but her mother did. In the end, Brian was found at fault — but because Boomer SCCA stewards were involved, it was also suggested that MDG slowed down too much for the safety vehicle.

I don’t think it’s possible to slow down “too much” to preserve the lives of volunteers and medical personnel. I’ll cheerfully put someone on the LifeFlight for a plastic trophy, and I’ve done exactly that, but I will never endanger a volunteer or safety crew. That’s despicable.

It’s been a brilliant season for my bonus daughter. She is already the equal of nearly anyone in club racing, both fearless and measured in her approach. When she moves to FE2 or (please God, let me find money) F4, I will have active pity for anyone who chooses to test her into a corner.

However, MDG did not win both a half marathon and an SCCA Time Trial in consecutive days, so she’s not that great. The Commander, on the other hand... On Saturday he won his age group in a 13.1-mile run. On Sunday, he took his (formerly my) all-season-shod Accord around Nelson Ledges in 1:23.8 seconds. He was alone in Sport 6 class, which is the absolute bottom of SCCA Time Trials reserved for street slugs like dead-stock Honda Accords, but he was also faster than the multiple competitors in the 5 and 4 classes, taking the scalps off three BMWs, a BR-Z, and some other stuff. We had to bleed the brakes twice, but the Honda held fast through five timed sessions.

The frustrating part, from his perspective, was that he was 6th of 44 competitors overall early in the day before temperatures warmed and the Corvettes could put power down.

if you think the bimmer was faster, you are wrong

After the fourth session, he nonchalantly reported that he’d put two wheels off the outside of Turn 1 at 90-plus mph. “Car was wiggly in the grass,” he said, with all the emotion of a man describing his wife’s favorite TV show, “but, really, it’s not as bad as correcting a spin in a Piper.”

“Why in God’s name were you even pushing that hard in T1 to begin with?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t have a timer or anything, so I just had to keep going faster each lap until something happened.” Needless to say, I’m going to get him a lap timer for Christmas.

“You can use my Garmin Catalyst,” MDG suggested. “It will talk to you and tell you to go faster.”

“Why don’t you use it?” The Commander asked.

“I don’t like being told what to do.”

Meanwhile, on the adult side of things, Danger Girl set a personal best of 1:15.2 on the way to two second-place finishes in STU. Both she and MDG also avoided a literal exploding car in the pursuit race on Saturday; the incident took place between them on track. (See above.) I snagged two overall wins in a very small GTX/prototype/formula group that did include the 1994 and 1995 Daytona-winning Spice WSC. My 1:03.8 on Saturday on last year’s Hankooks made me think I could set a 1:01 on Sunday, using my new Goodyears… but my left front tire went down to 15psi on the out lap and it was all I could do to hold on against Allen Franzolino’s prototype for 12 difficult laps. I crossed the line just 0.6 seconds ahead to win, with a best lap of 1:04.1.

Goodyear, to their credit, has already taken the tires and wheels from me for evaluation. If they can do what they think they can do, then only my own cowardice can keep me from setting the fastest prototype time in Nelson Ledges history next year. (I’m currently #2 all-time, at 1:02.5, since you didn’t ask.)

It’s been a great season. I am the divisional champion in P2 and GTX. DG is divisional champion in STU. MDG is 2nd place in SRF, behind the aforementioned Brian Post. Don’t expect that order to hold up in 2026. (Another divisional winner: ACF’s own dpadden, in E Production!) This weekend, however, was the best of all. It’s one thing to win a race, which I’ve done something like 100-plus times in my life with various bikes and cars. It’s another to see your children and spouse succeed, doing something you love as a family. Surely this is all the happiness a man like me could ever deserve…

…but I surely wouldn’t mind also getting some really nice Goodyear tires for next year.

The Gooneral, the Goonicide, the sorrow of it all

I haven’t even gotten my copy of the new Harper’s yet, but the intelligentsia are already fluttering their hands over an astounding piece detailing the rise of “gooning” among young men. For lack of a better word, gooning is a culture of fetishized, life-changing masturbation. I was vaguely aware that it existed — a few female friends over the past few years have griped to me about dating “gooners” or ex-gooners — but my understanding of it was far milder, and far more naive, than the reality of the situation.

It’s probably not possible to overstate the degree to while online pornography has warped the minds of our young men. Long before online video games and social media mastered the dopamine-parceling tactics of addiction, Internet pornography was rewiring brains en masse. You’d think that beating-off-as-lifestyle would be restricted to the omega males, the worst of the losers, but that’s no more true of pornography than it is true of video gaming now. A decade or so back, John Mayer — the John Mayer, the man who seduced then dumped Jennifer Aniston, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Jessica Simpson, and Jennifer Love Hewitt in addition to reportedly having sex with dozens of teenaged female fans — talked about how he would fast-forward through different pornography in search of the perfect image, to the point that he would have to close a hundred or more browser tabs when the deed of self-stimulation was complete.

If John Mayer can’t, uh, beat this problem, what chance do mortal men have?

The saddest thing about gooning is that it appears to be a valid, functional, and very large community for young men. They exchange and customize pornography. They organize meetings on Discord where they masturbate together, critiquing the media provided by each participant. They make lifelong friends. Gooners become their support group in times of grief or loss. And they have reasons for their behavior:

Spishak gave me a few stated reasons for his pornosexuality. One is a fear of STDs; another is standard-issue performance anxiety. These both make a degree of sense: gooning compilations can’t give you chlamydia; a zip file can’t impugn your virility. But what a zip file also can’t do is lie to you—and it is this element of Spishak’s pornosexual philosophy that seems to me most striking, and most emblematic of the Gen Z gooner mindset writ large. It turns out that what most frightens Spishak about sex is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s (or anyone else’s) head. What if she’s bored by what Spishak’s doing but too polite to tell him? Worse: What if she’s uncomfortable with the entire situation? How could Spishak possibly know? “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” he says. “For both parties.”

The feedback loop is clear to see. You watch pornography. Which means you’re comparing yourself to male porn stars all day. So you’re terrified at the idea of approaching a woman with whatever equipment you have. Which makes you retreat further into pornography. Which further convinces you that you’re inferior. And so on.

Also fascinating: the idea that gooners are voluntarily celibate because they worry about not totally satisfying women. I don’t recall that being a concern among any of my teenaged or 20-something friends. In my thirties, when I would occasionally (meaning constantly, sorry to say) date married women, I heard chapter and verse about the “three-minute husbands” out there. I probably met two dozen or more ladies who had never been satisfied by their spouses, and whose complaints on this matter were taken about as seriously as you or I might take comments about the fuel economy rating of the Bentley Mulsanne Turbo. How do you give a woman the greatest orgasm of her life? Who cares!

Ah, but that was before social media and being Extremely Online. We live in an era where your sexual failures or embarrassments are certain to be immortalized in the “group chat”. (It goes the other way as well; one ACF reader in Louisville became so famous in the hipster-bar scene for his impressive personal qualities that strange women started knocking on his door asking him for dates.)

The logic is sad but easy to see. You can get on Tinder and swipe right 1,000 times for one date, then fail to satisfy the woman involved out of terror or random chance, then you’re famous on the Internet for being a bad lay. Or you can stay at home and goon with your bros. What else are you gonna do? Go out and drive the sports car or superbike you can’t afford, can’t insure, and would be afraid to operate in any circumstance? You gonna go play basketball in a park? Join a bowling league? This is 2025!

If there is any coherent message to the sprawling folk-art practices of Goonworld, it is this: kill yourself. Not literally, but spiritually. Where mainstream porn invites the straight-male viewer to imagine himself as the man onscreen, gooner porn constantly reminds viewers that they are alone, that they are masturbating to porn because no one would ever deign to sleep with them. “Ruin your mind,” “go deeper,” “give up on life”: these are goon porn’s basic slogans, the movement’s rallying cries.

I don’t normally close out these Open Topics with a rallying call, but here it is: You need to be investigating the young men in your life regarding this gooning bullshit. Root it out by all means necessary. If that means you gotta drag someone to the racquetball court, or the boxing gym, or (God help us) CrossFit, or the racetrack… do it. I task you with doing it, I challenge you to do it. This behavior, this culture, is pure evil. We should fight it with every legal and moral means at our disposal. But it starts with taking an interest in other people.

It goes without saying that this is no time to be delicate about the proprieties either. Under the barest of pretexts, I stormed into The Commander’s room and confiscated his laptop for “maintenance” last week. Once I had it open, I used my 30 years’ of desktop-admin experience to extract the search history. I wasn’t exactly prepared for what I found among the most common search terms:

king air

how much is beech king air

how to buy used beech king air

Clearly, he and I have an uncomfortable conversation coming up, best summarized as “Your father cannot afford a King Air.” But if you have a more uncomfortable conversation ahead of you than that, you still need to pull the trigger on it. I’m right here for encouragement. You all know how to reach me. And I’m not doing much nowadays. Make the call. I’ll see you all next time.