Wednesday Racing/Open Thread

Open to all subscribers, focusing on this week's competition results, the ridiculous "lease scheme" on the 911 S/T, two fallen justice-reform leaders, and recent Countach purchases

this is fine

No F1 race last week — this week is Qatar, where Super Max can win the drivers’ championship if he likes. Let’s say that happens. In his shoes, would you chase the records that can be broken or extended this year, or do you fall back and try to help Checo stay ahead of Lewis in the championship? Feel free to discuss this, or any other racing-related topics, below. Aside from that, we have a full plate for today, and it goes a little something like this:

Porsche addresses a stupid market with additional stupidity

this is exactly how i would spec them! just kidding. as a man with a functional dick i would spend the money on a season of lmp2

Someone should write a book about all the ways in which the market for exotic cars has changed since the days of the Testarossa. I guess maybe I could do a bunch of tweets about it and then it could be made into a book by Alanis King and Elizabeth Blackstock. This is what I can come with with offhand, just in case they need something to pitch their publisher:

• The nature of wealthy people has changed a lot since Woodstock. They are now generally more frivolous creatures whose money is tied not to land or production but to a combination of amorphous concepts and rent-seeking behavior.

• There are more wealthy people than ever before, thanks to vampire-squid behavior that drains the middle class of meaningless shit like home ownership and medical coverage so the 0.1% can live, laugh, and love.

• Consequently there are a lot more customers for these high-priced vehicles.

• And the cars themselves are FAR more luxurious, reliable, safe, and usable.

• Social media has made the ownership of a desirable car more valuable, because you can show it off to more people than just your neighbors and everyone else at the country club.

• The Internet has gone a long way to connect buyers and sellers, making the actual purchase and sale of vehicles a source of entertainment in and of itself via auctions and whatnot.

• Money printer go brrrrrrrrrr and brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Call it a demand-side explosion that can’t be matched on the supply side. The same thing has happened with other upper-middle-class talismans, from the Rolex GMT-Master to the Hermes Birkin. As a result, stuff that you could just wake up one day and decide to buy from a store in 1992, like a sought-after watch or a 964 RS America, is now supply-controlled through a bizarre gauntlet of markups, trade-ins, customer relationships, and manufacturer decisions.

This puts the manufacturers in a pickle, and the stupid 911 S/T is the latest stupid example. The market value of the car is probably twice the sticker. But if Porsche actually prices it that way, they are vulnerable to a situation where people lose interest for some reason and then they have to issue highly embarrassing six-figure rebates. So they have to sit back and watch the secondary market get rich…

…or they can take a page from Ferrari’s book and start directly controlling who gets access to the product. I know people who went through the “application process” for the LaFerrari. It’s a ridiculous thing, almost like a fraternity rush on paper, where you try to convince someone to let you give them money by assuring them that you’ll do exactly what Ferrari wants you to do with the car.

Done right (and exhaustively), this can cut down a bit on speculation — but it creates a bizarre secondary market of influence and favor that demeans everyone involved. And what’s the point? There’s no way to ensure that the 911 S/T will only be sold to “enthusiasts”. What would that even mean, anyway, in the context of a 250k car that can’t keep up with a Corvette? Do you select and reward the customers who go to the most PCA events? Club racers? People who already own a 944S2? And a year from now, when some people take the S/T out of the bubble wrap and sell it for big bucks, what are you supposed to do as a result? Put them on a naughty list?

As is always the case, I have the correct answer. Porsche should auction off 5,000 “special slots” every year. Getting a special slot allows you to order anything off the special menu at MSRP, whether it is an S/T or a Touring or a GT2RS or whatever other dorky-ass variant of these dorky-ass cars spins your propeller. Let’s say the slots sell for an average of $50,000. That puts $250M in the hopper. I kind of think they’d go for more than that, but who knows. When Porsche has enough money in that hopper, they should use it to make a $35,000 Miata competitor that will build the brand and might possibly be purchased by people besides old folks and toad-looking people from various unaccountably rich categories of toad-looking people.

This program would go a long way towards reconnecting Porsche with actual car enthusiasts, while also adding a veneer of acceptability to the ridiculous process by which the limited-edition cars are produced. It would foster community within PCA by giving people with the new 914T a reason to like the toad person with the 911 S/T.

Or they could, you know, make the Boxster an EV and focus on selling minivans. Which is what they’re gonna do.

If it isn’t the consequences of my actions!

It’s been a big week for people getting murdered by their pets — and I mean that in the sense of “white saviors” who think they know what’s best for everyone finding out that the targets of their superiority have no interest in playing their game.

First up: Pava LaPere, who was the “tech CEO” of a valueless grift-o-matic company in Baltimore. She was a big advocate for return-to-work and the use of ChatGPT. She was a passionate anti-racist. Last week she held the door to her building open for someone whom she did not know and had no business assisting in that fashion. He got in the elevator with her, then beat her head in with a brick, presumably just for the lulz. That person, Jason Billingsley, had been repeatedly early-released and diversion-treated and all the other things which just mean “let out of jail” over the past decade.

The Internet is sure that LaPere let Billingsley in the building because she had been conditioned to be anti-cautious around dangerous-looking people. This conditioning is widespread among city dwellers, but it’s also extremely color-based, to wit: one struggles to imagine LaPere letting a toothless white Deliverance meth freak from West Virginia into her building. Regardless, she was violently killed.

Next up: Josh Kruger.

https://twitter.com/JoshKrugerPHL/status/1682014154918428674

Kruger, a journalist and local government gadfly who frequently mocked Philadephia residents for being worried about violent crime, was shot to death in his house earlier this week. The cops say they have a person of interest. If this person turns out to be well-known to Kruger, then that will perhaps strengthen Kruger’s case regarding street violence. If it doesn’t, then… it hardly matters to him now.

Finally, Ryan Carson.

clearly the best thing to do here is run away and let the broad take the hit

Acadia Cutschall, 32 — who attended school with Carson, volunteered with him, and called him her “best friend” — went to his stoop to mourn his death Monday. 

“I was present once when he literally talked a guy out of mugging him,” Cutschall said. “He gave him some money.” 

That’s not talking someone out of mugging you — that’s being a mugging enabler. This time, it didn’t go Carson’s way. He was sitting on a bus bench in Bud-Stuy at 4am, dressed up for a wedding and looking like a very soft target. Yet another example of this willful blindness to danger discussed above. He and his girlfriend were accosted. (Did I mention it was 4am in Bed-Stuy?) Amazingly, Carson chose to engage with the person, who pulled a knife. He then tried to reason with the person who wanted to stab him in the dead of night, but when things looked bad he did the sensible thing and ran away, based on the “slowest gazelle” principle; his girlfriend was wearing heels and he wasn’t. Unfortunately for Carson, the same bench on which he’d been sitting got in his way, landing him on the ground.

Possibly out of disgust, Carson’s assailant bent down and stabbed him to death, at which point his girlfriend and another woman who had just appeared on the scene stood around and watched Carson die.

It’s easy to Wednesday-afternoon-quarterback incidents like this but I’m struck by the fact that Carson was clearly more focused on conversing with his assailant than he was with protecting his girlfriend. I can’t imagine a situation where I run away from a crazy knife-wielding person and just let my female companion take the hit. Had something like this started happening to me, I would have told my girlfriend to vacate the scene ASAP and then I would have occupied the crazy person for as long as I could. Perhaps the rules are different when you’re just playing NYC Musical Bedbugs. Why get stabbed for someone who was banging some other activist before you and will choose another activist after you’re dead?

Carson’s body language, as Rob Henderson noted, made it absolutely apparent that he’d never been in so much as a playground scuffle. He neither puts distance between him and the person holding the knife nor closes to a distance where it’s difficult to swing said knife. And when he runs he trips over a bench, which basically renders him defenseless.

There’s a great scene in Miami Vice, the movie, where Colin Farrell tells Gong Li, “Probability is like gravity; you cannot negotiate with gravity.” My father often talks like this when he is discussing things like me racing open-cockpit cars or enjoying literbikes or riding “Rainmaker” at the Trestle Bike Park, but it also applies to deliberately ignoring danger on two legs. White, black, or zebra, anyone who confronts you in the dead of night for no reason is someone of whom you should be cautious. Just like you should be cautious about any stranger who tries to tailgate you into an apartment.

When we talk about RACISM in America, we almost always use examples of people who form a negative opinion of someone based solely on physical or cultural characteristics. You can easily make the argument that someone who crosses the street just because there is a Black person coming towards him is racist. But the reverse is true. If you ignore clear and present danger simply because the person in front of you is Black, then that’s also making a judgment based on race. And in my experience, the real emotion behind it is never

$MINORITY people are kind and decent, just like everyone else

but rather it’s something along the lines of

$MINORITY people are dangerous human garbage but I have special skills and powers and tolerance that let me get close to them, just like how people who stick their heads in the mouths of tigers have special powers over the tigers, and that means I’m better than them PLUS I’m better than all those racists out there who can’t magically tame tigers in human form

This is a deeply racist and slightly mentally ill way to feel. But there are tangible rewards for feeling this way. In a society packed to bursting with money, Ivy League degrees, and access to resources, it takes a little somethin’ extra to climb the social ladder. Too often, the price of climbing that ladder, of being a Somebody, is the earnest and total espousal of an insane counter-reality dogma. Call it “luxury beliefs”, call it “21stC novenas”, call it “being on the right side of history” if you like.

Pava LaPere, Josh Kruger, and Ryan Carson were all somebodies in a way that your humble author and most of my readers will never approach. Not necessarily because they were anything special. More like they were simply more fervent in embracing The Current Thing than any of us. Call it calculated risk. You have a half-decent chance of becoming the next Elizabeth Holmes or Bob Woodward or Abbie Hoffman. You also have a half-decent chance of being killed. It’s a stupid game. With stupid prizes. Whether you win or lose.

A Periscopo To The Past

balboni wept

About a dozen friends and correspondents have reached out to me about OMG DOUG DEMURO BOUGHT A COUNTACH. “What do you think about that?” they ask. He’s like the third person recently to do it, after “Hoovie” and Matt Farah.

Well, good for all three of them. That’s what I think. I hope it makes them happy. There’s no possible path in life that would put me in possession of the $500k to $900k required nowadays to be a Countach owner, but if I were to come into that kind of money and somehow I couldn’t use it to buy my son an L-39, I sure as hell wouldn’t buy a raggy-ass old Lamborghini that runs 13s after $50k of scheduled service. I would buy this:

because I’m personally here to race until it kills me or I can’t get into the car, not to buck-and-grind at 5mph past coffee shops in the hope that people will look at me and want to be my friend. Alternately, I’d buy a new Revuelto or left over Aventador, because those are modern Lamborghinis in which to do modern Lamborghini things, like bang the rev limiter in seventh on Venice Boulevard at 2am.

Owning a Countach is like owning any other old car that has been superseded in performance and appeal: you’re basically hovering somewhere between cosplay and the Society for Creative Anachronism. You’re paying tribute to the people who owned one in period and used it to snort coke and escape cops and bang models and whatever else some Escobar lieutenant or zillionaire Eurotrash thrill-seeker would have done. You’re not doing that stuff yourself. Buying a Senna helmet doesn’t make you Senna, wearing a TAG Monaco doesn’t make you McQueen, and buying a white Testarossa doesn’t make you Sonny Crockett.

There’s nothing wrong with selecting an old exotic for Memory Lane points, just like there’s nothing wrong with me owning both a Marquis Coupe and a Fox because those were the cars I drove as a kid. Even at the ripe old age of 51, however, I try to spend most of my time looking forward, not back. Last week my Radical SR8 chewed through $2,970 of transmission parts during a warmup session, thanks to a misalignment in the gearbox. That’s serious money for me. But I put the new gears on my Visa because I’m here to race, not sit around and pretend.

In Doug’s shoes, with his resources, I’d be racing LMP2. I’d be on the top floor of some five-star hotel with the Fleetwood Mac mountain of cocaine and enough Wilhelmina B-listers to make it disappear in an hour. My son and I would be engaging full military power in a pair of supersonic-capable F-5A refurbs on the way to my condo at the base of Winter Mountain in Colorado. I know all of this to be true because this is essentially how I have lived the last two decades of my life, just with less money. It is not reasonable for me to have owned the things I’ve had and done the things I’ve done. I don’t see why being successful or wealthy would make me any more reasonable.

Doug and his friends are reasonable people, doing reasonable things. Good for them. Those Countaches will still be worth real money when my Radicals are being pulled out of a tire wall with every fiberglass panel fire-scorched to junk. And at the end of “The Game Of Life,” we will see that Doug wins, because he has half a billion dollars and I’m dead in a gutter somewhere.

Unless that’s not how it works, of course. Who knows?