Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: F1, StupidCat, K-Dot and Drake, Influencers Go Extinct?

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May 08, 2024

Twenty-eight years ago, while I was touring Welsh Enterprises in Steubenville, Ohio looking for a Vanden Plas to call my very own, Bill Welsh walked me into his showroom to stand face to face with a silver Jaguar XJR-S coupe. Six liters. Useful aero add-ons. Just four years old. “Yours,” he said, “for fifteen grand.” Well, I was ten grand away from fifteen grand. But I never forgot that moment. The mid-Nineties were the reputational nadir of the the XJ-S; it was an ancient, troublesome car that sold, when it sold at all, as a six-cylinder convertible for Palm Beach divorcees. Good ones sold for eight grand used, bad ones were free.

History has been kind to the aerodynamic cat and it’s once again properly viewed as the subtle, desirable, and massively capable grand tourer it truly is, rather than as an “ugly XJ6” or “failed sports car”. Unfortunately, that means it has fallen into the hands of idiots.

The new “TWR” XJ-S has been “designed” by Magnus Walker, about whom the less said the better, and “The Kyza”. My first exposure to “The Kyza” came when he was hired by one of my co-workers at the insurance company. We already had a digital illustrator, the remarkable Abimelec Arellano, who was doing our “What If?” stories, but my counterpart had an unfailing instinct for making the worst of all possible choices so instead he went and found this untalented mook to be the subject of a video series. Looking back, I wonder if it was because Abimelec was Mexican, because Mr. Video Producer loved “upscale” illusions even more than he loved pretending to not be bald via a series of profoundly unconvincing hats.

Anyway, these two people have “designed” an XJ-S that will now be sold to the rare Venn overlap of “recent lottery winner” and “lobotomy patient”. It makes me shed a tear for the donor cars. Imagine being someone’s survivor XJ-S. You’ve made it through more than four decades of rust, neglect, global trauma, but you’re sleeping soundly in a garage, reflecting on your good fortune, when suddenlt your $99 car cover is whipped off you and you realize you are staring into the soulless, empty eyes of “The Kyza”.

Shhhh… no more tears, only dreams now.

Mr. Sunday

They called Reggie Jackson “Mr. October” for the way he stepped up in the baseball post-season. When Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was feuding with his expensive but often disappointing right fielder, Dave Winfield, he called him “Mr. May”. Someone who delivers when it doesn’t matter.

Well, Danny Ric had a brilliant Sprint race in his new chassis, even as the team was making the incomprehensible decision to prevent his teammate from qualifying until it was down to a single lap. Come the GP, however, it was obvious that DR3 is still “Mr. Saturday” at VCARB, as Yuki Tsunoda pulled another 7th place that probably would have been an 8th without the Safety Car intervention. Yuki is now 10th in the standing, the only minor-team driver above 13th. Listen, we all know he’s not going to get the Red Bull seat — but it would be nice. Call him “Mr. Sunday”.

Other thoughts:

Lewis looks like the old Lewis, both good (strong pace on Sunday) and bad (idiotically optimistic choices during the sprint). One ACFer texted me that he’s lost respect for Lewis based on the sprint race, which is harsh but understandable.
Up and down weekend for Logan Sergeant, the American Eagle, who finds himself playing Latifi to Lando’s Abu Dhabi Verstappen. Surely he’s out of a job.
Speaking of: I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a universally positive reaction to a victory as we saw with Lando’s win. From Fred Vasseur’s joyful donning of a McLaren cap to Verstappen’s delighted and gracious reaction after the race, it was a delightful and heartfelt moment all around. If the upgraded McLaren wins again at Imola, of course, that goodwill is gonna fade.
Adrian Newey’s departure from Red Bull has everyone salivating. They all know that a Newey car can win championships almost regardless of who’s occupying the center seat. Surely Lewis Hamilton is on the phone to him regarding Ferrari, even if the most likely outcome is a Leclerc WDC.
Instead of threatening K-Mag with a race ban, they should give him a Netflix series. Who else out there is willing to drive an open-wheel car like it has fenders? The sheer disrespect he showed Hamilton in their back-and-forth warms my heart.

Men writing poetry about each other

The so-called “diss track” is a lot older than rap, featuring in the works of Greek antiquity and BritLit. It’s produced some brilliant art, whether it’s Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Arbuthnot” or Pusha T’s “The Story Of Adidon”, but this feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has been more like the trench warfare of diss tracking — prolonged, vicious, and largely charmless.

The consensus is that “K-Dot” has easily beaten Drake, both on volume and merit, but both parties have landed shots of the nastiest sort. Lamar repeatedly alleges that Drake is a pedophile and, worse than that, an absent father:

That's ho shit, I got a son to raise, but I can see you don't know nothin' 'bout that
Wakin' him up, know nothin' 'bout that
Then tell him to pray, know nothin' 'bout that
Then givin' him tools to walk through life like day by day, know nothin' 'bout that
Teachin' him morals, integrity, discipline, listen, man, you don't know nothin' 'bout that
Speakin' the truth and consider what God's considerin', you don't know nothin' 'bout that

Drake, in turn, suggested that Kendrick was raped as a child:

That's that one record where you say you got molested
Aw, fuck me, I just made the whole connection
This about to get so depressin'
This is trauma from your own confessions
This when your father leave you home alone with no protection, so neglected

We’ve come a long way from Kool Moe Dee telling Cool J, “You wanna beat me it’s gonna take a miracle / You got a lock on my jock like a pitbull”.

The most interesting part, however, was when J Cole, who will live forever in rap history for “No Role Modelz”, released an anti-Kendrick track on Drake’s behalf, then changed his mind and walked it back 48 hours later, claiming he’d been pressured into releasing it. Not very gangster of you, Cole — but to be fair, he rarely claims to be.

Drake is now basically 1-2 in these major beefs, having disposed of Meek Mill pretty easily before losing to Pusha and Kendrick, but he remains the biggest rapper, and perhaps the biggest musician, in the world. Which is upsetting to a lot of people, because he is a former child actor, he grew up in the suburbs, and he is half white. Oh, and he’s from Toronto, leading Lamar to go apoplectic at the idea that Drake owns a ring belonging to the late Tupac Shakur:

Somebody had told that me you got a ring, on God, I'm ready to double the wage
I'd rather do that than let a Canadian nigga make Pac turn in his grave

A lot of pundits are calling this “the last rap beef”, since it featured all three of the genre’s top performers (Cole, Drake, Kendrick) and since it operated at the speed of social media as opposed to the 6-month intervals of previous on-vinyl battles. In any event, the street is tired of this one — but your humble author found himself resonating with one particular K-Dot triplet bar:

Have you ever walked your enemy down like with a poker face?
Have you ever paid five-hundred thou', like to an open case?
Well, I have, and I failed at both, but I came out straight

When I mentioned this to Danger Girl, she sardonically noted “Didn’t your father pay your legal bills, not you?”

“An extinction-level event”

"This will shut tens of thousands of small businesses down. They won't get unemployment," Nord said. "There's no lattice of support for these creators."

This quote isn’t about a factory town closing, or yet another UAW plant being sent to Mexico; it’s regarding the impending forced shutdown, or sale, of TikTok in the United States. “Influencing” is apparently a $250 billion-with-a-B profession, and it’s largely TikTok-centric. NPR is calling it “an extinction-level event for influencers.”

To which I can only say: Good. Shut it down. Shut the rest of social media down, while you’re at it. Get rid of Facebook and Instagram, or neuter them beyond recognition. Stop preying on children, the poor, and the low-functioning via these dopamine-slappin’ apps. There should be just one “platform”, and it should be Substack, and everyone who joins should also subscribe to me.

Kidding, but not kidding. TikTok is just plain demonic, and that has nothing to do with whether it’s owned by the Chinese, who will presumably use it to tell would-be American soldier boys to become weak, soft, sexually confused, couch-bound, and drug-obsessed — or Silicon Valley, which will do exactly the same thing. Other than this community of overpaid influencers, who from my experiences are some of the most perverse and loathsome human beings to ever walk the earth, nobody benefits from any of it. In this case, I welcome the “asteroid” of Joe Biden’s administration. TikTok… your time is up!