Wednesday Racing/Open Thread

Available to all subscribers, focusing on last weekend's motorsport and Honda's Motocompacto as a metaphor for The Current Year

Now that was a Formula 1 race weekend! Let’s get straight to it.

Piastri Rex

Your humble author wasn’t terribly impressed by Oscar Piastri’s first half-year in Formula One. He seemed to be an incipient Bottas to Lando’s Hamilton — in a world where Lewis never wins a race, of course. There was also just a hint of Jarno Trulli to him, in the sense that his qualifying pace was much better than his race pace.

The latter problem is still very real — note Lando’s catty comments near the end of the Sunday race — but they weren’t enough to keep him from beating Lando to a race win and then picking up a team-ordered 2nd place on Sunday.

The choice of McLaren over Alpine now looks quite savvy, as well. Though you’d have to be a deranged optimist to think that Renault/Alpine has the capability to win a race now or in the future. McLaren was only ever going to be temporarily down on their luck.

Meanwhile, at Mercedes

There was no reason for Lewis to make that move in Turn 1. Had he gotten ahead of Verstappen, the one driver on the grid who has ZERO respect for him, he just would have gotten his pants pulled down when DRS was enabled. Had he stayed behind George, the team would have given him a strategy to get around — as they have several times this year.

Instead, Lewis decided to prove to the world that Russell’s recent string of outperformance wasn’t real. In the end he got a free ticket to watch the race, in which George Russell worked back to fourth place in a manner eerily reminiscent of Lewis Hamilton from years ago.

Clearly George is in Hamilton’s head, and bad. And we are once again seeing how Hamilton struggles against any teammate who doesn’t have team orders. It’s hard not to conclude that Lewis should have retired after 2021. At that point he had the sympathy of the English-speaking world and a spotless driving record.

Hamilton’s Big Move also put his chances for 2nd in the WDC at risk, because any points by Perez at all would make the gap that much harder to close. But haven’t we discussed how lucky Lewis often is?

The Checo Implosion

“You can just… feel Checo and Red Bull drifting apart,” Jolyon Palmer said during the race. Well, it doesn’t help when you repeatedly fail to score points in the championship-winning car. Will this lead to Danny Ric once again appearing in the seat he was too good to occupy years ago? Or will Red Bull do the right thing and put Liam Lawson in there with Max?

There is something almost majestic about Sergio Perez’s failure to drive the car properly. It has the qualities of genuine tragedy. He knows what to do. The car is the best one, in most circumstances anyway. And yet he keeps getting worse. A few months ago, people — idiots, maybe, but still human beings — were openly discussing his chances of beating Max to the championship. Now the biggest concern is whether or not he can hold onto second place.

Meanwhile, at Honda

you wouldn’t believe the tuition at state university now

Let it be known that Avoidable Contact Forever will pay real money — not much of it, but definitely real — for an early review of this silly-assed Honda “Motocompacto”. I hate it the same way midwit women love science.

weighs less than your mom. we’re talking about the car

To review: The original Honda Motocompo was a triumph of design and packaging that fit neatly into the Honda City sub-sub-compact, itself a similar triumph. It was also a really interesting way to handle parking issues, real or imagined, in urban environments. It’s not really compatible with a low-trust society, unless your place of employment would let you bring it into your office, so it’s best suited for Japan. Still. Super cool.

astounding

That was the Motocompo. Like Honda at the time, it was engineering-centric, fit-for-purpose, and characterful to a fault. This thing you see above you is the Motocompacto. Like Honda at this current time, it is derivative, not particularly class-competitive, and almost certain to be either made in China or heavily sourced from there. Supposedly it yielded 32 (thirty-two) patents. Looking at the design… what could they possibly have been for? This is basically a Chinese e-scooter like millions of others.

There’s a great story about how Dan Armstrong brought the prototype for the Lucite-bodied Ampeg guitar to an industry trade show way back in 1969. There was one fellow who insisted on posing for several photos with the guitar. He was wearing an odd checkerboard-pattern suit, but it was the Woodstock era so nobody said anything about it — except for Dan, who noticed that the squares were exactly one inch by one inch. A few later, before the Ampeg guitar made it to distributors, the perfect Japanese copy was on sale in America.

It’s easy to imagine some Chinese outfit with a name like LUCKWOW or CTHULUNERD putting a “Motocompacto” before the Honda dealers get the real thing. And that’s just what Honda would deserve. There’s nothing innovative or interesting about the Motocompacto. It is a tame and timid product with little interest to anyone. We should expect, and receive, better from Honda.

Alright, readers, over to you!