Wednesday Racing And Moronic New Por-sha 911 Thread

Open to all readers, focusing on F1, SCCA, and that dorky-ass 911 S/T

it gets worse from here

Busy Wednesday, largely because I literally slept through getting the Sunday Night Open Thread done. Lots to cover! Without further ado:

Formula 1 rants and raves

Every weekend in 2023 is a weekend for Max Verstappen to shine, but this one was particularly so. Let us review. On Saturday, Sergio Perez was given the preferred strategy of a first-lap pit stop. Everybody else who took that choice finished up front… except for the race winner. On Sunday, Max made a five-place penalty vanish almost immediately. You can’t say he’s not driving hard; just look at that right-and-left-steering-lock trip up Eau Rouge in the rain. I continue to suspect that this RB19 is immensely difficult to drive correctly, which is why Perez is alternately brilliant and despondent while Max simply succeeds.

Other thoughts:

• Vindication for Yuki! Everything went wrong for the “little lion” in the Sprint, but his Sunday race was masterful and made him look like a veteran compared to Ricciardo, who has had problems with track limits, race pace, and defending. ACF contributor and gadly “Sherman McCoy” believes that Danny Ric will “mentally destroy” Yuki. Maybe - on Opposite Day!

• Princess George Needs Consistency: Either Lewis is getting better, or George is getting worse. Or maybe Toto is just turning the wick up in Lewis’s car a bit to make sure the handsomely-compensated Briton doesn’t go to… Ferrari? The LIV league? Death Row Records? Seriously. Lewis has literally zero other career choices at this point besides driving the Mercedes next year. And why should he consider anything else? Mr. Russell, who often looked positively Rosbergian, or Button-esque, against Sir Lewis in the past 18 months, is now starting to smell of Bottas.

• How long is Logan’s run going to last? Nobody thinks Alex Albon is a first-rate F1 driver, but he is putting a LOT of air between him and his rookie teammate. Surely there’s a wealthy F2 podium finisher out there who could do better.

• Place your bets: who will be the next person to win who is NOT Max? Red Bull has transparently moved their development resources to the 2024 car, so at some point the rest of the field will catch up. Someone will beat Max this year, and it won’t be Perez unless an engine blows up. In a perfect world it would be Alonso, but given the development pace on display I’d say it’s Lewis with a chance of Lando.

Mid-Ohio, the white-trash Spa-Francorchamps

I have fewer than 100 laps of Spa under my belt, but I am captivated by the track and its surroundings, which are stunning and unforgettable. I think the three most beautiful tracks in the world are probably Spa, Laguna Seca, and VIR.

Mid-Ohio is not as gorgeous as the above courses but it does typically make for better racing at sub-F1 speeds. I ran with the Cincinnati Region of the SCCA this weekend in a fascinating pair of races marked by mixed conditions and all sorts of incidents. I set a personal best in the small Radical of 1:29.710. My pace was better than all but one of the 7 P1 and P2 class entrants, and I finished second both days.

The frustrating part is that I started having exhaust issues on Saturday that took about 4mph off my top speed; without that, I’d have run at least a 1:29.2. On Sunday, the exhaust snapped off at the #4 flange when cold rain spray came up under the car and hit the hot pipes. Without that, I might have been able to win the whole thing, because shit went crazy once it started raining. Here’s the two-minute low-light video:

The driver in the blue FE2 who re-enters the track right in front of us and basically gives me a chance to kill her is Amy Hollowell, a highly-credentialed WKA karting winner and the subject of a fawning documentary called “Chinese Dragon Racing”. I contacted her after the fact regarding this unsafe re-entry and basically got a “lol it was rain race” in response. I am starting to hate the FE2 cars and almost everyone who drives them. They should be 4-5 seconds a lap faster than my Radical, and in the hands of people like Jim Libecco they are, but they are also frequently under-driven to the point where I come into contact with them. Amy cost me a chance to take the P2 lead on Sunday when she decided to weave around the track at the start then short-stop us into Turn 1. Oh well. She wasn’t the only person out there who couldn’t handle the conditions on-track, just the one with whom I was most frequently in contact.

(The other female racer at our event, the infamous Danger Girl, put on a bit of a clinic on Sunday to beat two ex-World Challenge cars and two other highly-prepped K-swap Hondas, taking 2nd place in STU behind the HART Koni Challenge car of John Schmitt. Somehow her group avoided the rain entirely.)

Assuming we can get an exhaust on the car and solve a few issues with ride height and tire rubbing under aero conditions, I’ll be racing the little Radical again in two weekends. After that, I’m hoping to have the SR8 back out to finish the season and reach for a new personal fast lap of Mid-Ohio, with maybe an overall group win or two thrown in for good measure.

Porsche sails beyond the event horizon of cool

Just in case you’ve been nursing a 1989 Camry along for the past three and a half decades of your prole-esque driving life, allow me to inform you: light-up under-car logos are now very popular among “luxury cars”. They call it “stealth wealth” because you only see the logos when you’re at the nightclub or when your car is being repossessed.

Usually you just get the Lincoln Star or Mercedes Star or whatever, but now we have the Heritage Pack Porsche 911 S/T, which defaces the ground with an “icons of cooool” logo whenever a valet pulls its ancient owner out of the drivers seat at a full-nude strip club or assisted-living facility.

I’m told that the new 911 S/T is a “GT3 RS in a GT3 Touring body”, which sounds exactly like the kind of thing that will appeal to people who do not appeal to me. I’ll also admit that the stupid ground-light thing is kind of triggering, as the kids say. Many, uh, years ago, I worked for a, uh, lifestyle luxury brand with a deranged queen bee executive who loved to make up dorky logos for merch and events. Ninety-nine percent of her shit looked like what your grandmother would do in Office 97 using the “Clip Art Wizard”. The remaining one percent looked like she’d gone on “Fiverr” and given the contract to the lowest available bidder.

My literal response to the “icons of cool” logo was, “Haven’t I already seen that on a handbag?”

The 911 S/T car itself is immensely stupid and, in the initial photos, appears to have random numbers on the door:

All of this is embarrassing, but in the same dorky and tolerable way you see with enthusiasts of mechanical keyboards, 8-bit computers, or off-brand watches. The 911 S/T will probably have an actual transaction price close to that of an LMP2 or Rolls-Royce Wraith, two vehicles that I would actually enjoy being seen in, but your mileage will vary.

The introductory video for the car, on the other hand, has a few issues that go deeper than just building and selling another dork-mobile to sit idle on a garage;

It starts with the usual romanticized Bauhaus-Is-Our-House re-enactment of the late Sixties. Every trope of The Early 911 appears here. We’ve seen it all before. What happens next is interesting: we get a ret-con Hot Rich Hippie Girl driver of a Carrera 3.0. There was never anybody like this who owned and drove that car, of course. The next transition is am ambiguously gay duo going to a nightclub, followed by a Gordon Gekko lookalike in the passenger seat of a 993 being driven by a hot secretary for some reason. The next car is a Boomer in a 911 Turbo, which tracks, but it’s set up for camping.

Then you get some Estelle look-alike, a black woman in a sequin top, who gets in an orange 997 GT3RS and powerslides out of a parking spot. This is pure fantasy. After that: a Mary Sue Gen X tech nerd in a 911R. Back to reality, except the actor can probably bench 150 pounds. The final scene is Mary Sue Millennial Tech Nerd Who Might Actually Be “Christian Grey” shifting into 4th at full throttle on what I think is the coastal road above San Francisco. So… 115 mph. As the kids say, he was mobbin’.

Then Tech Nerd gets home, to a Cali pad that is reminiscent of the Bauhaus-in-Germany home, and… his daughter comes out to see the car!

In just two and a half minutes, you get at least the following tropes:

• Idealized Germany From The Past, always placed at a comfortable distance from both 1945 and 2023, where the most popular boy’s name is… Mohamed.

• Chick-Washing, Part One. How many beautiful blonde women drove a Carrera 3.0 in period? Was it zero, or none?

• Nod To The Friends Of Dorothy, but it’s a cowardly one. Why not show an openly gay man doing to a gay club, or — shock! — just enjoying a normal day in his car? Instead you have this wink-and-nod, which degrades everyone involved.

• Imaginary Porno Situation, I guarantee you that no 1995 suspenders-and-stripes executive had a Robert Palmer video star just, uh, driving him around.

• Wealth Means Contact With Nature, but in reality nobody started camping out in 996 Turbos until they dipped below twenty-five grand.

• Chick-Washing, Part Two, Diversity Edition, but the black woman in question is styled like a British or Continental elite so nobody accidentally gets the impression that 250-pound “ATLiens” are allowed to own a Porsche.

The final trope of the video, which I like to call What Were Once Sons Are Now Daughters, is the most annoying to me. On one hand, it’s a reflection of a medical fact: lower testosterone levels in fathers (and mothers) skew sex selection toward daughters. And that’s age-related. Even my grandfather, a man who had absolutely no bitch in him by any measure yet devised and who was somewhere between 10 and 100 times as masculine as is your humble author, finally had a daughter instead of a son on the fifth go-round, when he was in his mid-forties. The longer we wait to have children, and the more things we do to lower our free testosterone, from the contemptible (smoking weed every day) to the admirable (running ultra-marathons) the more likely we are to have daughters. So it’s not unlikely that Millennial Tech Bro has a Porsche-fanatic daughter instead of a Porsche-fanatic son. The Gen X Tech Bros who will actually buy this dopey car? Even more so.

But even the most outrageous drops in free T can’t result in an all-female-fetus world, the same way that you see professional bodybuilders who have daughters. We’re talking about broad statistical shifts. So I’d suggest instead that Porsche is simply doing the most fashionable thing possible, which is to pitch in on the general societal messaging that young men are completely worthless, and young boys are even more so.

The contrast between the father/son in Idealized Past Germany and the father/daughter in Idealized Present America is not an accident. Sons, particularly white sons, are dangerous now. They’re 4chan, they’re Anon, they’re school shooters in training, they’re vectors of racism and sexism and pure evil. We ask them to take personal responsibility for every one of their ancestors’ transgressions while reaping none of the benefits from those transgressions. We expect them to step aside for everyone else.

Daughters, on the other hand, are much cleaner and less problematic. When you encourage them to race cars or shoot guns or fight at the local MMA gym, you are smashing the patriarchy, not enabling it. And it’s okay if they’re white, because white women are still minorities, still victims, still eligible for executive roles. So we love daughters the way we hate sons. I mean, we don’t love them enough to let them find their own hobbies and desires naturally, because they might want to be “tradwifes” or some deranged shit like that. But we love them more than our sons.

This was the case six and a half years ago, with the infamous Audi Super Bowl ad. Nothing’s changed. Better to have a daughter than a son. You’ll never get a call from the police.

Which is why I am pleased, in my usual contrarian fashion, to announce that my son was promoted last night to Cadet Master Sergeant and Cadet First Sergeant of his Civil Air Patrol squadron, immediately after earning his marksman ribbon. He takes his leadership responsibilities very seriously. I’m proud of him. Porsche may not be interested in having him as a future customer, but that’s okay. If we had 911 S/T money, we’d buy another race car with it. Or a plane, maybe. Like a Mooney Acclaim. 300mph, no questions asked. I don’t know what happens when you open the doors at night time. I’m guessing nothing. Unless you’re in the air, of course. Maybe at 15,000 feet. You would immediately become an “icon of cool”.