Wednesday Racing Open Thread

🅱️ono my plank is gone edition -- also, Bari's Awakening and foolishness among Extremely Online autowriters. Open to all subscribers

you about to get planked

I’ve made some terrible predictions in my life — probably the worst one was my dead certainty eight years ago that there would never be a Jeep Wrangler pickup, so when I’m correct I think it’s important to broadcast my accuracy to the world. Let’s see how my predictions from last week for the USGP fared:

• Tsunoda is gonna smoke Danny Ric: check. Seven (7) places ahead, plus when AlphaTauri had Danny put on the softs for a cheap point, Yuki went to the pits and out-did Ric without losing a place! Ross Bentley gave Danny a C+ grade for the weekend — by that standard, Yuki was at least a A-.

• Checo, who is almost certainly retiring ASAP, will perform above expectations - I think that’s fair to say as well. He occasionally looked feckless during overtakes but the pace was good.

• Williams will shine - Ladies and gentlemen, the American Eagle, Logan Sergeant, taking the first points for the US in this century! The moment when he passed Ricciardo was authentically thrilling.

• Lewis will close the gap to George on a track that has been good to him - this turned out to be correct as well, and let’s face it: there’s no indication that George’s plank was in any better shape than Hamilton’s. Truthfully, Lewis looked like a revitalized person this weekend. Jolyon Palmer thought that Mercedes had dialed in some extra oversteer for pace, betting on Lewis to control it, which he did admirably… but perhaps not realizing what all those excursions over the curbs might do to the compliance plank.

• Max will win! — well yeah, but it wasn’t as clear-cut as one might think. Verstappen apparently had a brake issue all day on Sunday, causing his normally terse interactions with his race engineer to be even more so.

Look at me, being 100% correct. These will be my last predictions, ever.

Is the Red Bull really the best car on the grid at this point? I don’t think so. I think it’s either the Mercedes or the McLaren, depending on the track and the weather. It’s obvious to me that Max is performing at an inhuman level right now — and the spin he had earlier in the weekend suggests he’s at the limit.

How many of the final four grands prix can Max win? I’d bet on two.

First they came for the crackers, and I said nothing, because I was definitely not a cracker

swipe left

Your humble author was initially reluctant to assign too much importance to the Hamas attacks, and I’m still not sure there will be any genuine change in the region’s balance of power as a result — but there’s been one fascinating side effect over here in the Land Of The Feebs.

Centrist and center-leaning progressive Jews are experiencing a “Leopards Ate My Face” moment right now. After decades of supporting a media machine that deliberately dehumanizes the creatures alternately known as “white americans”, “heritage americans”, “euro-americans”, or “no-seasoning americans”, relatively sane people like Bari Weiss (pictured above) are

shocked

shocked,

shocked

to find the same machine being used against Israeli Jews and, just maybe, Jews in general. The best the Biden Administration can do on this subject, via statement or via KJP’s response to questions, is a hilarious take on “all lives matter”:

I have asked members of my team, including Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas and Attorney General Garland, to prioritize the prevention and disruption of any emerging threats that could harm Jewish, Muslim, Arab American, or any other communities during this time. My Administration will continue to fight Antisemitism and Islamophobia.  

Is this the moment when the impenetrable facade of the Uniparty cracks wide open and all the special-interest groups start spilling out to do battle over the spoils? There’s some precedent here. My young readers won’t remember it, but by 1995 we had some genuinely powerful and effective anti-government sentiment in this country, to the point where Bill Clinton was reportedly considering declining the nomination just to avoid the inevitable ass-whipping coming his way.

The Oklahoma City bombing changed that, irrevocably, almost as if it had been designed to via Tim McVeigh being programmed in the Army to strike the most sympathetic government office humanly possible. All of a sudden the monolithic movement that included everyone from Newt Gingrich to G. Gordon Liddy shattered into a thousand fragments, Clinton was re-elected, and we got sixteen years of globalist puppets after him.

The right wing in America disintegrated when the abstract concept of “resistance” was crystalized into a bunch of dead Oklahomans. Will the same thing happen now that we all understand what “decolonization” and “empowerment” truly mean? Oh, and there’s this tidbit: Northwestern University’s president once defended the school’s nine-figure partnership with Qatar in the language of leftism:

The ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression, and counts among its allies several oppressive regimes or groups. In addition, countries that produce enormous amounts of oil and natural gas that increase global CO2, and generate in equal abundance social and racial inequality, justly offend many. But those characteristics describe the United States no less than Qatar and don’t prevent Northwestern from maintaining campuses in Evanston and Chicago.

Oh gosh. Who could have predicted that when you pretend the United States is an apartheid Nazi nightmare for the purposes of furthering your political goals, someone will use that rhetoric to justify a partnership with Qatar, which in turn will pay the lunch tab for Hamas and paraglider into your rave for a spot of the ol’ ultraviolence.

pictured: a blue-haired fatty’s idea of what paragliders look like

Expect a lot of fallout and reshuffling in the months to come, but there’s one benefit to all of this: I think some people who have been remarkably indifferent to how normal Americans are treated by the power apparatus in this country are experiencing an empathetic awakening.

Speaking of leopards and faces

and now this is a murder scene

Who could have predicted this? I wish I had a video review channel. I’d do a review in the same outfit, just to make a point via the hateful things people would say about me. Not the same outfit, mind you. My shorts aren’t that wide.

Leopards and faces, again

then they fingered my ass! i wasn’t pushing back that hard!

Some of you get annoyed when I pick on Fat Brad but I want to make a serious point here, namely: If you can’t buy a new car without having a public emotional breakdown, you don’t have the chops to write about cars. A few people have noted that this is the same Fat Brad who was ALL-ELECTRIC a few years ago, and who moaned about his stepfather’s F-150, yet he’s shopping for a truck now. Who cares? He’s never been consistent. I’m still waiting for him to travel around the country in that Scamp trailer.

More important is that the vast majority of automotive content in the United States is written by people who can’t even handle a trip to the dealership. It’s not that they never worked in a dealership, like I did, or worked for finance arms, like I did, or worked in a factory, like I did. I’m not setting the bar all the way up to “understands the business”. Not trying to slot it into “has participated in the business”. I’ve got the bar down at the limbo level of “can walk into a dealership without sobbing” — and people can’t clear it.

Now, as someone who has bought three dozen new cars without taking a bad deal, and that includes when I negotiated my Fox down to invoice and base money factor at the age of eighteen, let me explain what happened here. The Last Psychiatrist once wrote something along the lines of, “If someone comes up to you and tries to pull a three-card monte scam on you, give them your wallet anyway because you’ve learned something useful about how people see you.” When a car salesman treats you like an idiot, that’s because he can see how weak and stupid you are. I watched that happen for years.

“THEY PRESSURED US!” No, you’re a grown man and therefore you should be absolutely immune to pressure from another grown man in a situation like this. Nobody’s putting a gun to your face. You’re not negotiating end of life care on a budget for a family member. You’re just truck shopping. Fat Brad can’t handle it, so he’s going online. Which is in character for him. For the rest of you, who want to live in the real world: truck inventories are back up and it’s a decent time to buy something. Probably the best time in three years.

This will be a slow week

Speaking of the real world: I have a few non-online tasks to accomplish, and a friend to help out, so there will not be a third piece up this week. I apologize for this. If I can get time, I’ll edit a guest post and get that up. Thank you for your patience. Next week we will have two off-cycle long-forms to make up for it.