Wednesday ORT: Yuki Returns, Fake Poll, Tribute To A Friend, The Drive’s Stupid Hammer, SS Appreciation Thread

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Good afternoon, friends.

There’s no noda like Tsunoda

Is Liam Lawson the Tonya Harding of Formula 1? Three years ago, after Danny Ricciardo injured his wrist at the Dutch Grand Prix, Lawson was promoted to Red Bull’s second team. Now Isack Hadjar has injured his wrist, which will give Lawson another shot at a first-team seat.

Like most sane race fans, however, I do not care if Liam Lawson lives or dies. The important thing is that Lawson’s seat at Racing Bulls will be filled by Red Bull reserve driver Yuki Tsunoda. Prediction: Yuki will do pretty well, but Liam will struggle in Hadjar’s car. My approximate estimation of Red Bull driver talent goes something like

Verstappen → Hadjar → Tsunoda → Lawson → Lindblad

and I think Max’s ability to extract performance from the awful Red Bull kind of overshadows just how effective Isack has been.

Fanduel won’t let me bet on Yuki at the moment, so I’ve bet my meager weekly budget on a Lando Norris win in the Sprint.

You people will believe anything!

why indeed

“Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” the company posted on its website. “Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls.”

Was it a LARP, was it an experiment in twisting elections via false election, or was it an attempt to do something else entirely? “Median Strategies” predicted big leads for DSA gubernatorial candidate Francesa Hong and LA incumbent mayor Karen Bass, but as of yesterday their website is down and observers have to be content with a cryptic series of messages.

The California Post, a newly launched West Coast counterpart to the famous NYC tabloid, published Median Strategies data, as did the Karen Bass campaign. Most media sources declined to use the numbers, however. Not because they were suspicious of “Median Strategies”, but because they were dissatisfied with the polling methodolgy reported by the firm. Which suggests that a more detailed fake could have gotten past the AP, the NYT, and others.

There is something fundamentally amusing about this. The only reason “fake news” has the traction it so often does is because a significant percentage of Americans have turned away from the legacy media due to a perception of overwhelming political bias. Had our newspapers and TV networks been less openly partisan, they wouldn’t have lost so much of the public’s attention in the first place. Now we have filter-bubble news sources for everyone, no matter how deranged their viewpoint might be.

I’d like to think that the Median Strategies people were trying to make a point about bad data and possibly force the media to tighten up their reporting game — but let’s face it, the whole deal was probably designed to manipulate something on one of the prediction markets.

I would hammer in the morning, I would hammer on the Camry

Many years ago, I worked at a bagel company whose media honchos were nakedly infatuated with “The Drive”. Two of our most senior leaders had sort of male-crush-fixated on Andrew Perlman, the owner of “Recurrent Media”, and his supposed genius. “The whole idea is to get SEO by linking to products sold on Amazon!” one of them gushed at dinner. “It’s complete genius!”

“I kind of think you have it backwards,” I suggested, but I might as well have been speaking Latin at that point. All the Recurrent sites, including their first acquisition, The Drive, have in common a sort of loose approach to facts and reporting, amplified fivefold by hysterical and often flat-out incorrect social-media posts. Last week, they breathlessly gushed that a Mustang GTD used “street-legal tires” to beat the ZR1X around the Nurburgring. “The Drive can confirm the Ford Mustang GTD Competition that obliterated the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X’s Nurburgring lap record was in fact rolling on street-legal tires,” Joel Feder ‘reported’. “The tires are Michelin Pilot Sport Cup FR. Not slicks.” Their social media went even harder:

The Internet armchair critics crying foul and other automakers squinting real hard can all stop wondering, questioning, and doubting whether the Ford Mustang GTD Competition achieved the unthinkable on street-legal tires.

This is probably legally correct… but let’s take a look at the tires, shall we?

These are “slicks” to any normal person, or indeed any normal car enthusiast, but legally they are probably “DOT-R” tires. The difference between “slicks” and “R-comps” usually boils down to the internal belt package, which has to be heavier and stiffer in a street-legal tire for purposes of preventing intrusion, and a “rain groove” around the tire to make it legally treaded. A good example is the Hoosier R8:

Anyway, I know why Feder was able to “confirm” these street-legal tires: someone at Ford PR told him they were street-legal and he never bothered to look at the tires.

Alright. Next up: the Toyota hammer. My old pal Byron Hurd wrote a cynical-sounding article about Toyota’s newest technique to diagnose potential faults in their troubled twin-turbo V-6 engines:

hat do you do when you’ve got a malfunctioning part that won’t quite cooperate? If your answer was “smack it with a hammer,” then congratulations: you might be qualified for a job in Toyota’s warranty department. Because that’s the sophisticated solution the company’s engineers have come up with to test Toyota and Lexus trucks for the potentially catastrophic engine defect that prompted a massive, ongoing recall campaign covering more than a quarter-million trucks and SUVs.

Yep, a hammer—In this case, a tiny, plastic hammer built specifically for the purpose of creating a vibration that can be measured in a controlled environment. Pickup Truck + SUV Talk shared a fairly detailed breakdown of the procedure over the weekend. Essentially, by measuring the vibrations that move through the engine when struck by the tool, Toyota can determine the health of critical components without having to tear the engine down for a costly, time-consuming physical examination.

A reader who is slightly deeper into the business than Joel Feder sent me this note:

This is a big move for Toyota service centers. I would have loved to have model response data for assessing field issues working with OEMs. I have 20+ years of doing vehicle NVH and structural vibration measurements. This approach is absolutely technically sound, and very common. As a field measurement it’s traditionally used for high dollar assets in power generation et al where downtime for a suspect bearing swap can be measured in the six or seven figure cost range.

If you have the requisite datasets you can assess a bearing without disassembly. This is because the boundaries of the crankshaft have changed. Like a guitar string with and without a finger pressed, applying pressure gets you two different resonant frequencies. This tool Toyota is using looks like a hammer, but due to the piezoelectric load cell you can measure, absolutely, the force that the hammer is applying. These hammers can cost three grand; next time you read about the government spending $3,000 on a hammer, keep that in mind.

The other OEMs should take note because this gives Toyota a tremendous source of engine health data from the field.

Other things I’ve “hit with a hammer”: Nuclear reactors, countless aircraft, satellites, two spaceships, various buildings, development cars, CPAP blowers, wind turbines, trains, dishwashers, hard discs…

Many thanks to this reader. He, and you, are collectively the reason that we are a better site than The Drive. Maybe Andrew Perlman would like to buy me out and use the eyeballs to sell Watchdives “dupes” of Patek Aquanauts!

You’re alive until the last man who remembers you dies

Three years ago, I lost a mentor and friend, Ron L. Pogue. Ever since then, I’ve had a small but nagging desire to memorialize the man in some manner beyond a mere post on a website. The problem is that he deserves more in the way of tribute than I can afford, which makes the things I could do seem petty and meaningless.

Last month, however, I was struck by an idea. I was in the process of buying a leftover Daniel Marshall humidor at a very steep discount — it’s a “scratch and dent” version of their $3,000 Arturo Fuente piece in macassar ebony. In the process of ordering it, their rep asked me if I wanted anything engraved on the inside. I am allergic to that sort of thing because my sense of irony is too highly developed to have something like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” or “SCCA 4x Divisional Champion” on a plaque. But before I could tell the guy no, I had an idea. So, without further ado…

Rest in peace, old friend. And, as always, I invite my readers to come see me for an afternoon or evening of stories and conversation, in which you will have the chance to smoke a non-Sherman-Mc-Coy-approved-cigar out of Ron’s humidor.

Honestly, I still don’t care for them

One of my readers has asked that we periodically talk about auctions in this weekly post, so I did the obvious thing and gave him the legwork of finding a good discussion candidate. Today it is a 2017 Chevrolet “SS” six-speed. It closes in an hour, and is at $36,000 now; I predict a sale price below 40k.

(Edit: dead wrong! $43k)

I had a chance to buy several of these brand-new for about ten grand off the $47,720 MSRP at the time. They were showroom poison, just like the G8 GXP had been before it, and they ran a 13.0@111 for Car and Driver. Out in the real world they are easy meat for 392 Chryslers and the like — and while they are not unsatisfying to drive, neither are they the poor-man’s E39 M5 like they were advertised and promoted at the time.

There are compelling reasons not to buy these cars, and the primary one is that GM has little to no interest in making parts available. You will make friends in Australia if you buy a Chevy SS, and you will need them to get you suspension parts, especially control arms.

Our reader calls it a “four-door Camaro”, and while I think that’s apt, I would much rather have a two-door Camaro. You can buy a nice stick-shift Camaro SS or LT1 for considerably less than you’ll pay here. I recommend you do exactly that!