Wednesday Racing/Open Thread

Open to all subscribers, focusing on F1 but anything goes including the Nelson Ledges Halloween Divisional and a hockey homicide

looks like there is so much ground clearance until you try to get it to go over a god-dammed 2x4

Race report, and a note of thanks

After repairing a remarkably expensive issue with the transmission that we apparently caused ourselves by mis-indexing the shift barrel during the spring rebuild, I knew I’d have just two chances to get the SR8 on track this year. The OVR Autumn Classic at Mid-O on Oct 14-15 was rained out, so to speak, since Hankook was sold out of Radical rain tires and I had to run the Hoosier-shod PR6 instead. That left the NeOhio Halloween Divisional at Nelson Ledges… but the weather forecast kept getting worse throughout the week. I missed morning qualifying on Saturday due to heavy rain. The qualifying race was tolerable — I set the fastest time of any car in any group up to that point but it was just a 1:18 due to weather. (The Miatas were running 1:26, if that gives you an idea, but Danger Girl has run an easy 1:16 in there in the dry.)

We had just four “wings and slicks” cars show up for the feature race. I led it flag to flag, but I was continually harassed by Allan Franzolino’s Beasley P2:

With half the power but twice the grip, Franzolino pressed the issue for every one of our 13 laps. The big Radical wouldn’t turn for shit on the green track, especially since I was on old C52 scrubs, so Allan could drive up and almost around me every time in the Carousel and the final turn. That being said, to quote Rudyard Kipling:

Whatever happens / I have got

The RPE-V8 / and he has not

I conserved my front tires and faked weakness through the last three laps, repeatedly letting Franzolino sneak to the inside as I took heat out of the left front sidewall, then at the white flag I opened the taps and set the GTX class record with a 1:04.045 final lap that had Franzolino more than six-tenths of a second back at the checker. He was all smiles regardless, because thanks to the 145-mph hole I’d punched in the air down the back straight he’d been able to set the P2 class record as well, at 1:04.239.

Next year I’ll put tires on the car, get some clear air, and look for a 1:02. Nelson Ledges is not an SR8-friendly track, because this is about the worst-cornering sports prototype racer money can buy. Still. Here’s the lap, for what it’s worth. Doesn’t look particularly exciting unless you’re a Ledges local who knows how fast the average car is there.

Also of note: my wife was the overall winner of both the Group 2 qualifying race and the Saturday evening endurance race. We skipped Sunday’s event due to weather and time pressure — and that was the end of my 2023 season. Not a bad way to wrap up. I am also this year’s SCCA Great Lakes Divisional Champion in Prototype 2. It was mostly due to me finishing more races than everyone else, but in a Radical that takes a lot of effort on the crew’s part and a little bit of common sense on mine, so I’m not indifferent to the accomplishment.

A note of thanks: I run “Mike O Racing” on the back of my Radicals in explicit thanks to MikeO, an ACF reader and supporter, but I am also personally grateful to each and every one of you. Even those of you who are free readers and are only reading in the hope you’ll find something that can get me arrested or executed or something. You inspire me to get off the keyboard and out to the track. Thanks.

Meanwhile, in the world of real racing

this image is definitely artificial, not sure it’s intelligent

“He did a me in Qatar!” Sir Lewis Hamilton’s assessment of the Mexico City Grand Prix’s first ten seconds was both self-aware and cruelly correct. Checo Perez was under an astounding amount of pressure, everywhere from the “Mexico Expects” desires of a capacity crowd to the near certainty of losing his seat should he fail to finish second in the WDC.

(A side note: The various Jalops and Redditors who pissed their pants in agitation over Marko’s casual dismissal of Perez as “South American” should try being smarter; Marko wasn’t displaying ignorance of geography so much as he was displaying knowledge of power. His apologies were tame enough that Checo felt compelled to go out and apologize further on his behalf, another explicit demonstration of said puissance.)

In truth, there was a sort of cold calculus to Checo’s move; a loss to Verstappen would have been treated by the public as equivalent to DFL, so he had every incentive to throw caution to the wind. Any other choice would have had him trailing the Dutchman for ninety minutes. Let’s be additionally honest and note that a full-gonzo move like that is the only chance that anyone seems to have against Max right now. Gifted a fully armed and operational RB19 sans brake issues, he could have come from thirteenth as easily as from third, and defended against Senna himself.

my floor, let me show you it

Now for the random observations:

• Two bad cars in a row for Princess George. At the USGP they didn’t give him enough fuel, and in Mexico they gave him a car that he described as being “on ice” for 15 laps. What’s happening on the Russell side of the garage? Or maybe it’s just cascading consequences of who George is. He’s the least stoic and self-possessed driver in his team at the moment, and that’s saying something when the other guy is the famously fragile and fractious Hamilton.

• Yuki still had the better race. They made him tow Ricciardo to Q2, with the excuse that Tsunoda had a power plant penalty coming anyway. Then Yuki ran like a scalded cat up to the order to the point where there was just a fading McLaren between him and his WORLD FAMOUS SHOEY DRINKING teammate. A little more patience, and Tsunoda would have been on his diffuser. No mean feat, given the difference in their starting positions. And anything we can see on TV, Christian Horner can see with a thousand times more detail.

• Speaking of “the tow”: How long will it be until Russell is ordered to pull Hamilton around in Q3? Or will it be Sainz ahead of Leclerc? Will F1 evolve in a hurry to a sport where you need a draft partner to start on pole? This could very well be a genuine Achilles’ heel for Red Bull, whose would-be draft bitch seems allergic to the third (and, occasionally, the second) qualifying session.

• Lando continues to beat Oscar over the long runs. No amount of asleep-at-the-wheel starts and restarts could keep Norris behind Piastri. Ideally, McLaren could combine the two and have a driver who shines over short races and long races. In the real world, Oscar might spend the rest of his rookie season moving over. His panicky lockup into Turn One directly after being told to turn up the wick suggests that although he’s a more polished rookie than the average, he’s not yet on the level of a young Hamilton or Schumacher.

• Aston’s collapse proceeds apace. What was the bigger act of willful self-deception this past April: the hope that Perez could win the WDC, or the certainty that Aston Martin wouldn’t be circling the drain by October? McLaren is making them look terrible simply by having two drivers with functioning frontal lobes.

• Can anyone else really win this year? With Sir Lewis openly predicting “18 or 19” victories for Max, who could possibly beat him to the top spot in the final three races? It will have to be a mechanical failure or something like that. Even if Lewis can catch him, who in the sport’s history has proven to be as adept at both blocking and passing The Chosen One as The Dutchman Who Doesn’t Respect The Chosen One?

Death on the ice, with complications

Is this blade to the neck a deliberate act? I don’t know enough about hockey to say. Surely everyone agrees that Matt Petgrave wasn’t trying to kill his opponent, but when you have the most penalty minutes in the league and have been ejected from two of your last four games, it’s hard to demand the benefit of the doubt. Still: murder, or even manslaughter, on the ice? It’s more likely that Petgrave was just playing hard and dirty, as appears to be his general practice.

Much of the discussion has focused on the race issue — if a white player cut the throat of a black one, would we still get the “tragic accident” narrative? — but I want to sidestep it and talk about the difference between intent to harm and willingness to harm.

Your humble author has deep roots in two sports (BMX racing and auto racing) where competitors frequently cause harm to each other and said harm occasionally escalates to serious or even fatal incidents. In 2007 I had a bad start at the NASA National Championship, found myself stuck in third behind a slower driver, and eventually forced my way past. Eight months later, that driver tried to return the favor, totaling my Neon and putting himself on the LifeFlight as a consequence. The video is here, if you want to see it. I will admit to squeezing him down but come on, he’s trying to PIT me so hard he almost ends up dead.

I would suggest that willingness to harm is almost omnipresent in closed-wheel auto racing. Sometimes you need to bump someone a bit, often at high speed, and that carries risk for both of you. The goal is not to hurt the other driver. It’s to make the pass, or defend the position. And yet. It’s impossible to control, or even predict, all the possible consequences of that move.

When I was racing BMX, there was a lot more contact than there is now. We weren’t going as fast, there weren’t as many yawning chasms to clear, that sort of thing. I still remember Nate Strieby breaking my ribs in an absolutely meaningless junior-class pro moto somewhere near Morristown, Tennessee at the end of the 1999 season. Both of us wanted the middle lane for the first jump. Strieby was about half a bike ahead. BMX is the opposite of car racing; the bike in front has the advantage, because under pressure the front wheel and handlebars of the bike behind will flop 90 degrees and send the rider head over heels. Which is what happened to me, except I managed to put the handlebar end through my right side instead of going over clean. It was a long drive with a stick-shift Land Rover back to Ohio, I’ll tell ya.

Nate meant no harm and I’d have done the same to him, had I been ahead. Three years later I ended another rider’s career by putting his head through a barn wall during an indoor race; he wasn’t seriously injured but neither did he ever take another gate. I wasn’t trying to hurt him but there was $200 on the line for first place. (I didn’t get it.) Then, in 2008, Nate apparently killed another rider at a skatepark in a freak accident where his handlebar went through that rider’s chest. These things happen.

They happen in auto racing as well. People die. I’ve seen it happen a few times. There was a death at Mid-Ohio this year at a kart event I’d attended as a spectator just the day before. There are two kinds of people who shouldn’t be part of a car race: people with an overpowering fear of death — and people with no fear of death. They’re both dangerous to others. The rest of us are in the middle and we have to make choices.

My father came to visit me a few weeks ago, in the middle of a rain-soaked SCCA weekend. There had been more than the usual amount of bent metal and ambulance lights up to that point. “How fucking stupid can you be,” he inquired, making sure I knew he didn’t mean the generic “you” in this case, “to keep doing this?” I didn’t have much of an answer at the time. Not sure I do now. Besides this: we’re all going to die, and I’d rather die in a race car than on the toilet. If I get killed in a race car, I hope my son can forgive me. He already has a sense of risk and reward. Last month I paid for him to learn loops and rolls in a two-seat Extra acrobatic plane. I sat at the FBO and shook with fear for twenty-eight minutes. I have never been that scared in my life. Refreshing FlightAware every thirty seconds. When he dropped 4000 feet in a minute and touched down at 140 knots, I was certain he had crashed. His mother started texting me ten seconds after the aforementioned dive started. I completely understood why.

Turns out I needn’t have worried; he did great and didn’t even require an intervention from the instructor. He’s probably going to spend his life in planes, just like I’ve spent twenty-plus years on the track. I could derail it now. Point him back at the PlayStation or something. Do my best to make him a housecat, instead of a 14-year-old who laughed all the way out of what they call a “hammerhead stall”.

“Dad, you have thousands of vertical feet to regain control authority,” he said after the fact, and scowled like he’d caught me crying at the end of “August Rush”.

(It would have been the second time that happened.)

I don’t think Matt Petgrave meant to kill anyone. I think he meant to hurt someone. And I think Adam Johnson went out on the ice that night with the expectation that he could be hurt. That’s part of hockey. Part of BMX. Part of racing. Hell, it’s part of soccer — my brother’s son is now playing at a level where people collapse and die on a non-trivial basis. I think it’s a good thing, somehow. The risk of death humbles you a bit. There’s a reason that people end a Call of Duty game spitting venom at each other but most club races, even the most fractious, finish in forgiveness or at least acceptance. You’re my adversary, and you should expect little kindness — but Fate waits for us both, and offers none.