Wednesday Racing/Open Thread

All subscribers welcome, with a focus on Singapore GP and Russell Brand's recent issues

not pictured: the old man they don’t particularly like who finished third

Well, that was a race, wasn’t it?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Formula One is all about the car — it is a constructors’ championship first and foremost, after all — but every once in a while something extraordinary happens for a driver, and this was one of those times. No longer young by anyone’s standards and with nearly a decade of F1 competition under his belt, Carlos Sainz has long endured a reputation as a mere “solid driver” despite often out-performing highly-regarded teammates.

This year Sainz has been able to more or less equal Charles Leclerc in qualifying, which is a considerable achievement, and he’s started up front for the last two races. At Monza he was hassled by his teammate and under-served by Ferrari’s notoriously inept race strategy. So this time he did it himself. At the end, the Mercedes-AMGs of Princess George and The Chosen One were a lot faster, so Carlos backed up to Lando Norris, which allowed Lando to use the DRS system to avoid being overtaken. That, in turn, protected Sainz from two much faster cars.

It didn’t hurt that both Norris and Russell brushed the wall behind him in the final lap, of course.

Random thoughts, add to them as you will.

• The importance of luck - I have long believed that Lewis Hamilton is the luckiest driver to have ever competed in F1. Ahead of him, engines explode, tires puncture, and collisions happen as if by magic. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t make his own luck, because he does — but Fate just seems to deal him a better hand. The FIA also deals him a better hand, of course. Rarely will you see a driver simply elect to skip multiple corners in a race without penalty, something that happened for Lewis on Sunday. Yes, he gave the first two positions back, after the race had already been spread out and affected by his move. Mercedes also helped him out, making a strategy call that put him and Russell nose-to-tail instead of in second and fourth. Still, it was an unlikely podium. His teammate, meanwhile, now leads Lewis on the qualifying scorecard but has been astonishingly unable to convert that to better race finishes. George Russell is proving to be an excellent example of the difference between a fast driver and a great driver. He is clearly faster than Lewis over one lap, but things just happen to him! If he can’t shake his lack of luck between now and the end of 2025, he’ll wind up somewhere adjacent to Nico Hulkenberg’s reputation as someone who can drive but not win.

• Liam! This has been a strong debut and then some for Liam Lawson. First he knocks Max Verstappen out of Q3. Then he scores points. In any sane world, he would get Danny Ric’s seat. Because this is a business and not merely a sport, expect him to take Tsunoda’s seat instead so Red Bull can continue to take financial and merch advantage of Ricciardo’s clownish public persona.

• The Aston v. Mercedes battle. The change in fortunes between Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG so far this season has been a good lesson in why it pays to be a big team with what they call “best practices”. Every weekend the black car gets better and the green one gets worse. Surely the Strolls are some, if not all, of the problem, as they are both highly demotivating to everyone around them.

• Conspiracy theory time: Because F1 is a business as much as it is a sport, it wasn’t a “good look” for Red Bull to have a perfect season. Were the issues with the RB19 at Singapore legitimate? Has the R&D focus on next year’s car cost the team pace this year? Or was it simply a matter of not pursuing a perfect setup, knowing that a win for another team would turn down the regulatory heat a bit? It’s almost not mathematically possible for Red Bull to lose this year, and Verstappen has more points than any competing pair of drivers, so…

Meanwhile, in Brand Management

So, it turned out that Get Him To The Greek star Russell Brand, like, totally raped and molested a lot of women. Four of them, in fact. Not any time recently, mind you. Between 2006 and 2013. Supposedly “everyone” knew about it. Since then he’s been in a dozen films and TV shows. Oddly enough, nobody seemed particularly worried about these sexual assaults until right now.

Usually, in a situation like this, there’s a new assault or rape or molestation that leads to uncovering the old charges, or — as was the case with Harvey Weinstein — there is a long-term investigation on the part of a person or institution that finally comes to a conclusion. Not this time. The flurry of 10-to-17-year-old allegations just appeared all at once, courtesy of a brief piece done in collaboration by the Times (UK) and Channel 4 (BBC).

The only thing that has happened lately, as far as I can tell, is that Brand has built a 6.6-million-subscriber YouTube channel where he, in the words of noted bootlicking state media dickweeds MSNBC, “peddles conspiracy theories”. You can watch the videos and judge for yourself. They appear to be a mix of insane UFO stuff and entirely reasonable thoughts on populist behavior, mixed with an unacceptably (in 2023) peacenik attitude towards stuff like using cluster bombs and nuclear weapons against Russia.

Brand claims to have had sex with more than a thousand women, which sounds outrageous until you consider that your humble author has spent more than four hundred days of his life driving around a road course and it’s a lot harder for me to get out to the track than it is for Russell Brand to get laid. Given how frequently “Aldous Snow” and his partners engaged in heavy drug use, I have no trouble believing that four of those thousand-plus encounters went spectacularly bad. I’ve never so much as seen heroin or fentanyl or any of the really good stuff in real life and yet I can think of a few nights back in the day when a woman and I spent a nauseated, foggy-headed morning trying to piece together what happened, and to whom, and why. At least I almost always knew the name of the other person and she knew mine, as opposed to hearing or making up some unbelievable alias like “Bark Maruth”.

I think the issue here is that Russell Brand is uniquely designed to “redpill” a lot of fence-sitter/Gray Tribe/casual-tankie types who wouldn’t deign to waste five seconds of their lives listening to Vox Day or Charlie Kirk or the late Rush Limbaugh but who will eagerly consume media created by someone who is both an acknowledged degenerate and talented communicator. Worse yet, he’s neither a conservative nor a liberal — just someone who is convinced that much of what you hear in public is a deliberate lie.

Therefore, something had to be done. They’re talking about criminal charges out of this — for zero-proof-possible incidents that supposedly occurred during the Bush Administration. And the Uniparty really only has two playbooks here. One is called “You’re a Racist”, and the other is called “You’re A Rapist”. They just drag out whichever one feels more likely. Most people would laugh at the idea of Brand being a racist, so…

A quick scan of Reddit shows that the “You’re A Rapist” tack is succeeding among the Extremely Online crowd, most of whom have never had a casual-sex encounter that didn’t include a “poly clade” or a custom fursuit and therefore have zero idea of the kind of shit that goes down between adult men and women in the real world. I recall reading Fat Brad Brownell going on about Elon Musk being a rapist and thinking, “This sweat-caked, Cheeto-dusted elephant seal literally cannot comprehend the kind of action that is available to 35-year-old, McLaren-F1-owning, six-foot-one billionaires. Hell, he can’t comprehend the kind of action that is available to 45-year-old, Honda-Accord-owning, six-foot-two thousandaires.” When you spend your whole life begging for totally consensual and temporally ephemeral vanilla sex from something that looks like it was just conjured from the sand outside Sietch Tabr by Paul-Muad’Dib with his first thumper, the idea of having actresses and models and singers throw themselves at you probably sounds more improbable than the abiotic oil formation theory. Eppur si muove, mothafokkas.

In any event, it will be interesting to see how Mr. Brand survives this “investigation”. He doesn’t strike me as the sort of person to just lie down and give up.