Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: Lance Smashes, The Author Crashes, FTC Bashes, Seriousness

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*record scratches* yep, that’s me

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Justice for… Sir Lewis?

What a fascinating F1 weekend! If you’ve been reading ACF for a while, you know that most of my limited animosity for the current driver pool centers on Sir Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricciardo, both of whom defied me by shining brightly in the Sprint race before falling apart for the Grand Prix. Ironically enough, it was Fernando Alonso who made Lewis’s sprint possible, blocking mightily on his behalf for the majority of the race before falling out with a puncture. Otherwise, Lewis was surely easy meat for at least Perez and the Ferraris. The next day, the other Aston Martin put an end to Ricciardo’s nice run shortly before a Haas ended Yuki’s day as well. For “VCARB” it was the proverbial weekend to forget.

Other thoughts, in no particular order:

• The gloves appear to be largely off at Ferrari, don’t they? And with McLaren about to debut a new package at the next race, maybe it’s time for some team orders to preserve the Constructors position.

• I wish I could sit in a cryogenic chamber until the year 2060 to see what posterity thinks about Alonso vs. Lewis. The former is burnishing his reputation with every weekend, while the latter seems determined to do the reverse. One thing I think it’s probably safe to say: neither is going to add another WDC to the trophy room before they retire. Alonso doesn’t have the car, while Lewis is surely going to get toasted like bread by the younger and sharper Leclerc.

• Does Lance Stroll really deserve all the hatred he’s getting? The whole incident was initiated by his teammate. Lance was thinking ahead to the start, and had very little warning. There are only so many places you can look in that situation. The high-percentage move is to plan your restart, not watch the conga line for an unexpected stoppage.

• Rumor is that Logan Sergeant has finally worn out his welcome. I’m sorry for him.

• I was touched by Zhou’s special ceremony at the end of the race. It’s easy to think of China as these global bullies and specialists in making things as badly as possible — but he’s not his country, he’s just a young man who has given his life to this dream, and now he’s living it. And those fans! Can you imagine Logan Sergeant getting this kind of support in America? Of course you can’t. Also, the last Chinese dude to have this many chances to get laid just based on competitive fame… was probably Genghis Khan.

• Speaking of getting laid, I guess all the “Christian Horny” business has reached its shelf life, because Red Bull’s Master Of WhatsApp Cringe now feels free to publicly taunt Toto about his drivers and his car. He’s also looking chummier with Helmut Marko. What happened? One theory: this might be the first time in recorded human history where everybody got together and decided not to kill their golden-egg-laying goose.

• Gosh, it’s hard not to admire Max for the way he’s driving that car. Remember that Barrichello had to be team-ordered behind Michael sometimes, and Lewis has never had a teammate who didn’t pull his pants down on a semi-regular basis. By contrast, there’s no circumstance short of mechanical failure where you need to worry about Max getting the most out of the situation. He’s the most complete open-wheel racer in human history. The good old days are right now.

NASA: Not Even Once

if you’re not the lead dog, the scenery never *bang* oh god

It’s no surprise to me — I am my own worst enemy. Last week, I made the prideful decision to run at Mid-Ohio with Nasa Great Lakes, in the “Super Unlimited” Group. I did this because my wife and stepdaughter were racing and doing driver training at the event, respectively, and I figured I could wipe the floor with Super Unlimited then kick back to admire myself for having done so. Yes, I knew that this region has a reputation for playing very rough against protoypes and sports racers (what’s the difference? Nobody knows) but I figured I would be so far ahead it wouldn’t matter.

We had some problems with the clutch on Saturday morning but I was able to get a short qualifying session and absolutely paste the rest of the grid by a full two seconds (full results here) despite the fact that the 42-degree weather penalized “grip” cars like my SR8 while helping the GT3 Cups and the two 9-liter Prefix-engined, paddle-shifted Viper Comp Coupes behind me.

Other than a Viper outbraking itself and nearly LifeFlighting me at the start, the race proceeded as I expected — so much so that I’d turned my GoPro backwards on the car knowing that the view ahead would be entirely empty. Here’s the first three laps, where I dismiss the rest of the pack then immediately lap the Camaro-Mustang-Challenge cars that started at the back of this 40-car grid:

By the eighth lap I was a half-lap ahead of the competition. Unfortunately for me, I chanced upon two Spec Iron Mustangs having a go at each other at the end of the back straight. Rather than follow them all the way through the next 6 corners, I pulled out, made sure the lead car could see me, then prepared to drive the inside line next to him… at which point he drove his car into my nose and over the apex curb.

This broke my nose, bent my splitter, twisted my left front suspension so I couldn’t really steer the car, and ended my race. I was so far ahead that I was able to trundle around half the track at 30mph without seeing the Viper in second place behind me. So maybe I should have been more patient.

In SCCA, and everywhere else in the world, lapped traffic has to yield. In NASA Great Lakes, as was explained to me by the director, lapped cars have the right to contest the corner. “It’s a racing incident.” The driver of the Mustang told me, “I saw you but I figgered you was gonna tuck in and follow me around a bit.” Why I would do that when I was 15 seconds a lap faster than him is a mystery for the ages. He scratched his back bumper, but it rubbed out, I think. I’m rebuilding my car.

(The video is on my Instagram, but there’s been some drama about publicly sharing NASA crash videos in the past, so it’s not here, I apologize).

Really, I should know better. NASA does a lot of great things to train and entertain drivers, but there’s something about the sanction that attracts some of the lowest-quality racers you can imagine in addition to some really great ones. Also, unlike the SCCA they simply don’t have the ability to facilitate really quick amateur cars like Radicals and Stohrs, let alone open-wheelers. Next time I sign up for NASA, I’ll be running my Neon, which is much better-suited for this environment.

While I was feeling sorry for myself, my wife, the infamous Danger Girl, set an all-time personal best of 1:40.270 en route to two second-place finishes in Super Touring 5. It was not accomplished without drama… check out this video from the start where she starts catching the BMWs in the previous race group, with predictable drama.

She also soundly beat a… J30-swapped Porsche 944! “I had no motor for him,” she complained. Well, duh. The rather surprised driver came over to congratulate her after the fact. Plenty of nice people in NASA. But it only takes one idiot to ruin a season. Just glad it happened to me and not her.

how cool is this? quite cool indeed

Out of further malicious pride, I’ve determined that I won’t miss a single race because of this incident. Even if, like Daniel Ricciardo, my damage is covered entirely by… VISA. The nose is already being repaired, and I’m immediately sourcing all parts including $3,900 worth of billet uprights for the front end. I’d like to thank Mike O for his help as our team’s primary sponsor, and also all of the paying subscribers out there who make it possible. Without you, I don’t make the grid, let alone…

…ahem…

put on the kind of God-dammed clinic you see in that video! Also, my Saturday qualifying time remained the fastest time set by anyone in Super Unlimited all weekend, by a full 1.9 seconds, and it was also good enough to beat every single car in the very competent Time Trial Unlimited class. With 100-plus laps to try, nobody put a glove on my 7th lap of the weekend. Isn’t that great? Hee hee. Oh my. That’s the thing about pride. It’s harder to beat than any mere nine-liter Viper, and in the end it always wins. If you let it.

In which we pause to praise the Biden Administration, for once

I’ve been fairly pessimistic about the current leadership of this country lately — but ACF is not a “politics blog”, nor should it be. At least not in the sense of trying to convince you to vote one way or another. Blind partisanship is a greater enemy of this country than any Russian or Chinese politician could ever manage.

So let’s take a moment to recognize the current regime for doing something genuinely anti-lizard, namely: eliminating the legitimacy of corporate non-compete agreements. As Matt Stoller notes:

Since 2000, the use of non-competes at all levels of society has exploded. Eight years ago, one in five employees in the United States was bound by one of these contracts, or 35-40 million people. It’s no longer just high-level employees who have them, but sandwich shop workers and janitors. For instance, 30% of hair stylists works under a non-compete, as do 45% of family physicians. Non-competes facilitate consolidation, especially in health care, where doctors are trapped into practices bought by private equity groups.

This hits home for me because I have personal experience with it. In addition to getting a mild amount of bullying from a recent employer on this subject, I had a serious non-compete throwdown back in 2003. I’d been working for a tech contractor in Columbus, Ohio as a senior engineer in a subgroup that dealt with a bunch of small business clients. Most of our people were the absolute worst and our business declined to the point where the subgroup was closed and everyone was let go. Two of the clients contacted me upon hearing of the news and offered me work, which I gratefully accepted.

Well, almost immediately I got a call from the general counsel of my old employer, saying they were going to take me to court over my non-compete.

“You fired me,” I pointed out, “and closed the division. You don’t even have any offerings for these clients.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the attorney laughed. “You can’t afford to go to court against us. So you’re gonna do what we say.” He had a point. So I went to the clients and told them I would have to quit. One of those clients was a beautiful and whip-smart young mother who was already notable on the Columbus charitable circuit. She called up the CEO of my former employer and delivered the equivalent of a Hellfire missile through the earpiece, at which point they backed off. It was a real lesson for me in how power works; both she and the CEO were somebody and I was nobody. Thanks to her, I went on to build a thriving consulting business of my own and worked for her for another decade-plus.

Two years ago, she also sold my house in four hours for $30,000 more than we’d asked. So, you know, God bless her. Which he has. You should see her house. It’s like Scarface’s house.

Back to the non-compete stuff. This is the sort of the stuff we hope against hope that Democrats will do, namely: lift the corporate boot off the necks of normal people. Even if those people are — gasp! — white men. Well done to the FTC. I hope that this decision will be defended in court as vigorously as say, some of the Administration’s wacky ideas about Title IX.

Seriousness, the dwindling resource

It’s exceptionally stupid of me to link to a pair of genuinely excellent Substacks in a month where I desperately need your subscription money for myself, but nobody ever said I was smart. Just brilliant. Which ain’t the same thing.

From “The Ruffian” we have 27 Takes On What It Means To Be A Serious Person. This is something we’ve handled to a very small extent here on ACF, but Ian Leslie has some original thinking. I want to excerpt two of his points.

The cruellest trick that twenty-first century societies are playing on young adults is to make it harder for them to be, or feel, serious. By allowing the price of having a family and owning a home to rise so steeply, we’ve blocked the most popular route to a serious life. It’s harder to feel that you’re serious when you live with your parents.

Perhaps this mocking tendency is projection on the part of Boomers and Gen X. You can read Succession as exposing the fundamental frivolity of the super-rich, if you want to feel better about yourself. But I think the power of that scene, and of the series, comes from the way it forces a certain self-recognition. Compared to our ancestors, we - at least those of us who are middle-class and live in peaceful societies - are the super-rich; the coddled and comfortable. We therefore have a nagging suspicion that previous generations have a gravitas that we’ll never acquire.

If you’ve been to a First Principles meeting, you know that we approach it with a lot of humor — but there’s also the fundamental seriousness that we are all grown men here to talk about real issues. We all need more of that. Let’s try, individually and together, to make it so.

Commercial message, part two

It’s a true joy to write for the Washington Examiner and this week I took aim at a pair of truly unpleasant books: White Rural Rage and The Rural Voter. The review is free to read and if you enjoy reading about “both kinds of Levi-Strauss” I think you’ll enjoy it.

We have a “Flashback” coming on Friday, and a “Harambe” on Saturday. See you then!