Wednesday Racing Thread

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yeah, but you should see his wife

My F1TV subscription really paid off this weekend, as I was able to time-shift everything and not have any spoilers except for Thursday qualifying. Random thoughts, add yours:

• For now, at least, Red Bull seems disinclined to force team orders. This was very much Sergio Perez’s weekend, start to finish. Will Christian Horner regret this later in the season? Probably not; there’s nothing to suggest that Max can’t easily drop Checo for pretty much every track left on the schedule.

• If you’re Charles Leclerc, do you hold on at Ferrari or try to jump ship to whatever team might flourish in the next rule set? It can be a wonderful and comfortable living being the lead Ferrari driver, even when times are hard — but I kind of think this fellow wants to WIN.

• Poor Lewis Hamilton: this is the first weekend he’s managed to obviously outdrive Russell, but all the talking heads can discuss is how smart and thoughtful and canny old Fernando Alonso is. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that Lewis is in any way intelligent or strategic as a driver, and I don’t think racism has anything to do it. Rather, it’s glaringly obvious to the whole world that Lewis, like Liam Neeson, has a particular set of skills. Those skills include overtaking and single lap pace, but they rarely include strategy, team leadership, or Schumacher-style thoughtfulness.

• Fernando offering some paternal advice to Stroll, by the way, is sheer brilliance on the hoof. It reflects his uneasy status as the only driver in F1 whose teammate will not be fired under any circumstances, and it positions him as someone who is helping Stroll shine rather than simply beating his ass on every occasion.

• I suspect the “real” Mercedes is now a better car than the off-brand RedBull/Aston Mercedes. My prediction: George Russell will win a race this year before Fernando Alonso does.

• Yuki Tsunoda looks awfully good right now. Both on his own merits and in comparison to his frankly miserable teammate.

• Who doesn’t like seeing Williams run in the front half of the field? And Logan looks much more like the real deal than any previous American F1 driver since Michael Andretti.

• Danny Ric should stick to the Met Gala; putting him in the car would only make Sergio look brilliant in comparison.

• Carlos Sainz should be talking to Ferrari about driving a WEC Hypercar. At this point I have to think there are ten people who could fill his current seat with more authority, including Nico Hulkenberg. Now there’s an idea, but here’s a better one, at least from a business perspective: put Tsunoda in the car and watch the Ferrari dealers in Japan double their markup for a decade.

Now to more personal business. I have the SCCA Majors the weekend after next. There are three entries in my class, and they’re all Runoffs winners or front-runners in fully optimized cars. My 160hp Radical PR6 and I stand an excellent chance of being outpaced by as much as eleven or twelve seconds a lap; these cars have half again as much power, weigh a few hundred pounds less, and are vastly more effective from an aero perspective. The last time a Radical PR6 finished at the front of a Runoffs was fifteen years ago. The shit these other dudes have might as well be LMP1s in contrast.

Yet I also kind of think all three of these dudes are butter-soft rich guys. Should I enter just to lead the first lap, throw a few blocks in, then be a spectator? Or should I save the thousand bucks it will cost me to run? Keep in mind, I have to be there regardless; my wife is racing, plus I’m driving the pace car for all groups except the one in which I’m racing and the one right after.

From an ego perspective, I hate to be DFL on a run group chart. I suppose if anybody says anything I’ll send them my SCCA race for November, where I lapped everybody but the second and third place drivers.

(Why can’t I run the big Radical? Turns out Prototype X isn’t a Majors class, yet.)

I’m sure I will eventually decide to race, but I have to pay my entry fee by tomorrow night and it’s gonna be hard putting the credit card number in. Who knows. Someone could break in the race. You can’t finish first…. you know the rest!