Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: It's You Who Brought Me Here

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With the exception of the World Racing League coverage, everything you’ll read below is either directly from, or comes from discussions with, the ACF readers, who are disturbingly good at holding me to account when I’m intellectually sloppy or overly reliant on an appeal to emotion. So, in the words of Christine McVie when she was hoovering her way across a foot-long line of Bolivian marching powder… don’t stop.

Justice For Yuki, And So On

The increasingly intergalactic power of this Substack now extends to foreign correspondence. Reader Ricky went to Suzuka, took a few photos, and offers commentary:

I had an absolute blast watching the Ferrari Challenge support races during the weekend. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire 30 min race time, with constant unprovoked offs and yellow flags. There was also a couple optimistic divebombs ending in a competitor being punted off at the hairpin, one with terminal damage, and one being able to continue running. There was also a t1 torpedo divebomb reminiscent of Senna vs Prost in '90. (With one minute remaining: https://www.youtube.com/live/px970BkyWpM?si=cslqf9wTQYk_zpm )One anomaly was the back marker of the run group. Who was consistently down nearly 45 seconds a lap. I guess there isn't even a 130% rule here.. He ended up being lapped 3-4 laps in. 

There was also a Porsche support race, which did not have the same level of excitement. The drivers must have been either more skilled, or less skilled, I wasn't able to tell the difference. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the hometown hero was able to not only out qualify, but also not damage his car, and outscore his teammate once again! The atmosphere was electrifying, and the vast support (primarily for Honda powered vehicles) was prevalent. 

Verstappen was absolutely unflappable. Lap after lap, his lead increases by a noticeable amount. I'm sure it was obvious from the timing, but in person, it was enjoyable to watch the unrelenting pace, the consistent lengthening of the physical distance between the two Red Bulls, and eventually to the back marker Alpines!

Another consideration is the financial outlay from the perspective of a fan. For Japan, a grand stand ticket costs around $230 USD for a reasonable grandstand ticket. The reasonable grandstand ticket a Vegas is nearly $1800. For that price, the flight to Japan is covered, while not even considering the flights to Vegas. Cost of living in Japan is also very reasonable, where I assume accommodations for Vegas can average $300-400 USD a night, while something similar in Japan is less than half that most likely. What is the financial case one can make to attend the Vegas GP, instead of flying to Japan to attend one of the most storied venues in F1?

You’re not alone, Ricky! Noted corporate accountant Danger Girl (she’s not really an accountant, please don’t think she is, we’ve had discussions about this, that’s, like, a legal title that she does not have) was doing similar math in her head this weekend, and for similar reasons. Why not see the race at Suzuka instead of Vegas, indeed?

My thoughts on the weekend:

• L-to-the-OG makes it hard to love him. All he had to do was not crash the car this weekend, and it would have given the pathetic hordes of Sergeant fans, such as your humble author, a reason to carpet-bomb the Internet with praise. Just don’t crash. But of course, he crashed. At this point, you have to wonder if perhaps IndyCar, or IMSA, wouldn’t be a better place for him to take his sponsorship money.

• Yuki, on the other hand… A fourth brilliant weekend in a row for Yuki Tsunoda, who is statistically speaking the only driver on the team and who is beating Ricciardo in qualifying by an even larger margin than he laid on the hapless Nyck de Vries. I’ll say it again: if he were five foot ten and European, he’d have five teams bidding for his services. If F1 wants to END RACISM as much as they say they do, maybe it’s not a matter of further praising Lewis Hamilton for having been born biracial. Maybe it’s a matter of not dismissing a driver just because he’s Asian. I’ve run his performance through my Atari 800 computer, and it concludes that, were he in Checo’s seat this year, Yuki would have three much closer 2nd places and one astounding crash.

• Gosh, it’s a good thing they fired Carlos Sainz. Put aside for the fact that Ferrari race strategy is so poor that you regularly have both drivers trying to make strategy calls during the race themselves — they can’t even pick the right people to sit in the cars! I understand that their Hamilton hire is perfectly in line with previous decisions to bring in Alonso and Vettel near the twilight of their careers (although God knows Alonso is both eternal and, on the evidence of Suzuka, brilliant), but it looks particularly stupid in light of how Carlos is doing. Or are we supposed to believe that Sir Lewis, who can’t even fight off Princess George nowadays, is a better qualifier than Charles Leclerc?

• It’s the car, but it’s also Max. The Red Bull is clearly the fastest vehicle on the grid, but if you had two Sergio Perezes driving it, Carlos Sainz might be a championship leader in his lame-duck year. It’s possible that Verstappen, in his adult prime, is the most mistake-free driver in F1 history. He makes Schumacher The Elder look inconsistent. Go back and watch Vettel bumble his way through 2010-2013 if you want the proper context. Seb used to hit backmarkers, walls, his own teammate, you name it. Even though the Red Bulls of that era certainly had more pace to spare over the competition than the current car. Let’s assemble a difficult to swallow, but completely logical, equation: (Driver training has never been better) + (Verstappen is the fastest driver in this era, by far) = Max Verstappen is the objectively best F1 driver of all time. I’m not saying he has the “heart” of Senna, or the complete team-building mentality of Schumacher, or the, uh, ability to drive the overdog car with total FIA immunity that Lewis had in his prime, but Max is the fastest man of all time. Deal with it.

Meanwhile, in the World Racing League

No doubt this is going to earn me some angry emails, but… If you’re competing in the World Racing League on any consistent basis, especially in the GTO/GT4 class, you need to rethink your priorities in life. This weekend’s event at Mid-Ohio was a disgrace, especially the Saturday race where they’d had five full course yellows and a red flag before the halfway mark.

I blame WRL’s decision to morph from “pretty decent AER/Chump competitor” to “grift factory with pro cars and idiot drivers.” There is no, none, zero reason for their GTO class to exist. It’s filled with ultra-quick (by sedan standards, mind you; my Radicals are nontrivially faster) GT4 cars driven by unqualified people who have no business behind the wheel of those cars and who would be booted from IMSA with extreme prejudice — and that is saying something, trust me. There are some sharp outfits involved — Lyle Hitt and his people, Toyota R&D, Palomar in the slow cars, a few others — but too much of the series appears to be an absolutely cynical attempt on the part of predatory teams to extract cash from HPDE jerkoffs.

Some of these teams are on round three of milking big cheddar out of bald simps and their pet executives. I was told that it’s common to charge a minimum of $20,000 per weekend to sit in one of the GT4 cars. That’s a fuck-ton of money to watch five caution periods in a row. Yeah, a real IMSA GT4 race costs about twice that. Maybe three times that, if you want to run up front. But you’re surrounded by people who have at least a faint clue what they’re doing, and you don’t have to explain to your co-workers why the “World” racing league only basically covers the “World” from New Jersey to Texas. So go do that. Or race SRO. Hell, you might even get decent weather for your race, because the real race leagues get the good dates at Mid-Ohio, not the “I can’t believe we sold this weekend to someone beside the Ohio Highway Patrol” ones.

(Full disclosure: Your humble author has a WRL podium in his only race with the series, obtained by a teammate who kept driving and maintained position after I said “this whole thing sucks balls” and caught a flight home.)

IQ, you Q

In response to an offhand comment I made on Sunday about the Chinese having an IQ advantage over the people with whom they’ll be dealing via the Belt and Road plan, user GAJ2000 hit me up with this anti-IQ piece by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Like most of Taleb’s stuff, it’s often too information-dense for me to quote it in a way that conveys his intent, so let me try to summarize as well where quoting doesn’t work. Taleb argues against the very concept of the IQ test, with the following as his main gripes:

• It’s not scientific. Far from measuring generalized intelligence, IQ is basically a measure of how well you can take a clerical test.

• It’s not linear. Taleb characterizes it as “stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent (with a lot of noise), a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects — how good someone is at taking some type of exams designed by unsophisticated nerds.”

• It’s immoral, because it’s used to deny opportunities to people who should have them. It’s also used to prop up race-based theories of intelligence, ranging from straight white-or-Asian-supremacy to offhand comments like my Sunday one, when in plain fact we don’t know if there’s any significant difference between groups of people at all.

Reading his article, I was immediately reminded of TLP’s Marshmallow article:

This means that the marshmallows are not the only motivators.  There is a value to obedience, that exists in four year olds but not in pumas.  This value may be less than the marshmallows, but it isn't negligible, it isn't even small… In many discussions about behavior and economics, we do not account for obedience and social pressure.

I have no trouble believing that IQ doesn’t measure total intelligence. Your humble author, and his brother, and our mom, can/could all positively wallop an IQ test. When I was six years old, I took the WISC and got all the questions right, so they gave me the WAIS and I scored a 155. There’s no test of “general” or “spatial” intelligence that I can’t handle, even after dozens of head injuries.

On the other hand, I once lost an autocross because I simply forgot to put lug nuts on my left rear wheel. I can’t draw anything. The other day, in a conversation with my father, he mentioned a state in which we lived; I had forgotten we ever lived there. Much of music theory is completely opaque to me. I am frightfully proficient in Perl but I can’t get through “Hello World” in Python without reading the book yet again. You get the idea. You can have a high IQ without being Max Zorin.

It seems obvious that these tests… mostly measure the ability to take tests. And/or our willingness to please the system, because the sane response of any 6-year-old who is asked to take two full-scale intelligence tests in a row should be to throw a tantrum and demand a chocolate bar, not to complete them both with alacrity. I have no patience with Mensa or Prometheus people who think their IQ makes them better human beings than anyone else.

All of that being said, I also believe that the basic measure of intelligence is pattern recognition, a facility in which can be discerned by the IQ test. And while so much of the world is not a clerical test, much of what drives said world is, whether we’re talking about “pls fix” Excel spreadsheets in high finance, or the effective design and usage of weapons systems. Example: Artillery is the king of battle, accounting for more fatalities than anything else most of the time. Here’s the Army artillery manual. It’s 664 pages. I call your attention to “Construction of Azimuth Indexes,” beginning at page 143. We’re looking at math and paperwork here. It’s basically the old ACT. Do it right, and you kill thousands of the enemy. Do it wrong, and you kill nobody. Do it extra wrong, and you kill the kid who bunked next to you in Basic.

Tell me that the person with a 120 IQ doesn’t have an advantage over the person with a 75 IQ when it comes to doing artillery. And this points out the aspect of Taleb’s argument with which I most agree: IQ tests can easily discern unintelligent people. Put a “130 IQ” and “140 IQ” person in the same room, talk to them, and you won’t be able to tell the difference. Do the same with a “100 IQ” and a “75 IQ” person, and you will.

The sad irony is that IQ, as flawed a measurement as it may be, is far more relevant in 2024 than it was at its conception, because so much more of the world is essentially clerical or test-like in nature. Is there room for a better IQ test? Absolutely — and I have an idea. Make people “sit in” for ChatGPT, and record their thumbs-up-and-down scores. Forget that old show Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? Today’s measurement might be: Are You Smarter Than A Stupid Computer?