Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: Porsche Goes Prius, Monaco Parade, Decoding The Omnicause

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new burgerkingring champion in the hotly contested $160k-$170k segment

Thanks, I hate it

“2025 Porsche 911 GTS Hybrid Is Nothing Like A Prius”, bleats Car and Driver. “The 2025 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS Hybrid Won’t Ruin The 911”, Motor Trend assures us. With this kind of early narrative-boosting, one can only assume the 992.2 GTS is a total piece of shit. For $166,895, a price that probably includes vinyl seats and omits floormats, you get a genuine Rube Goldberg engine layout. Let’s cover the highlights:

• The turbo is now driven by a 27-hp electric motor. At high revs, it turns into a generator to reclaim battery power, which is then put into the hybrid transmission.

• Fuel mixture is held at the most efficient ratio throughout, so at high speeds and temperatures they just retard the ignition to cut power. This decreases emissions by approximately 1/100th of what the average scooter in Thailand is putting out as we speak. (Figures are approximate.)

• The long-awaited (by nobody, maybe “long-dreaded” is better) sandwich electric-motor-and-8-speed-PDK can provide 54 horsepower whenever necessary, drawing on a 60-pound lithium-ion battery

• Weight rises to 3,536 pounds, a full 236 pounds below a 383 Super Bee but a quarter-ton above what the early 991 weighed without any of this crap.

• Burgerkingring time drops to 7 minutes and 16.9 seconds. C/D expects a quarter-mile in the high tens after all their correction.

• Oh, and the water pump is now inside the engine. That’s a great idea.

There’s something legitimately pathetic about this car. It’s a staggering misappropriation of resources — imagine what the impoverished and desperate engineers who dragged the 944 out of the 924 shell and the 928 parts bin could have done with this level of funding — and it’s also a fairly blunt repudiation of what the “GTS” badge has come to mean on a 911 over the past 14 years. Furthermore, they might as well have “SERVICE AT DEALER ONLY” contrast-color stitched into the dashboard. It’s as if the lesson Porsche took from rising 993 values was “The new cars need to be planned-obsolescent junk with impossible servicing needs”.

Yes, it will be quick in a straight line, but Porsche would be unwise to stake any portion of the 911’s reputation on that in the Plaid and Lucid era. Their obsession with trivialities like “smog at full throttle” will end up killing these cars stone dead, both in the “does anybody want to buy one” sense and the “it’s 61 months old, can anyone fix this daughterboard failure?” sense.

I hate it, but I’m not the customer. The person who buys this car will be primarily interested in idling it up and down some 25mph city street for the purpose of getting as much envy-based validation as possible until a Ferrari shows up.

Justice For Yuki, yet again

Not a great race, which is par for Monaco but was even more the case in an unique situation where everybody just preserved their tires. A few brief points:

• Perez should be out of a job as soon as practically possible. He’s fifth in the standings now. That crash was 75% K-Mag’s fault IMO but let’s face it: when you qualify near the Haas, you’re at risk from the Haas.

• Danny Ric can join Perez in the unemployment line. The ass-whipping he’s getting from Yuki is significantly worse than what Alonso is handing to Stroll, just to put things in perspective.

• Speaking of Stroll… isn’t it obvious to everyone that his dad doesn’t have the temperament to win a constructors’ championship? Lawrence Stroll made his money the easy way, by relentlessly cutting costs in trash-level fast-fashion. That mindset has zero record of success in Formula One.

• Congratulations to Charles Leclerc, but I’m a bit too much of a "player hater” to get all weepy when Jolyon Palmer or whoever starts banging on about “HE GREW UP IN THESE STREETS THAT NOW RISE FOR HIM.” That being said, compared to Norris, Piastri, Stroll, or several other drivers on the grid he was kind of poor growing up. His mother cut hair to make ends meet, while his dad struggled through Formula 3. That’s still Ohio rich, so my player-hating remains intact.

• Lewis Hamilton is continuing to disintegrate, to my nontrivial satisfaction. He publicly blamed his qualifying performance on not having “the new wing”, but today it was disclosed that he chose not to take the new wing, “giving” it to George because it was a one-of-one piece and any damage during qualifying would have been a “change in wing”, thus requiring him to start from the pitlane. On the other hand, George Russell got bad strategy advice, to the point where even Ralf Schumacher and Timo Glock felt compelled to speak out about the lack of need for Princess George to moderate his pace until the end.

What should we expect for the Canadian Grand Prix? One suspects Verstappen will wish to make a point of reclaiming pole position. History suggests that he won’t fail.

itty-bitty formula cars

It’s my own fault I was in this position; having chosen to qualify Saturday morning on rain tires only to have the track dry up halfway through the session, I qualified 13th of 23 cars against my true approximate pace of 5th-6th as shown by the final Sunday race result. We’d also made changes to the car in the past year, meaning that my first lap on slicks at Waterford Hills in 11 months was also the opening lap of Saturday’s race. Oh, and my GoPro died, something it continued to do at the most annoying times. Still, for those of you who are thinking about racing a “real” car in the future, instead of a converted street car, maybe the 1:50 of footage will encourage you. We see all sorts of stuff here, including Honda-engined Formula F open-wheelers, Formula Mazdas, Formula Continentals of “FC” and “CFC” variety, plus F500 “snowmobile cars” that are wickedly fast around Waterford Hills.

To put things into perspective: these lazy first few laps, with me lifting throttle to avoid smacking much more vulnerable competitors, are still faster than you’d manage in your finest moments driving a “hypercar” of any type. At Waterford, there’s no substitute for being able to turn.

What’s it all about?

In the months since October 7, you’ve probably seen banners with slogans that don’t make a whole lot of sense. Slogans like “Free Palestine Is a Climate Justice Issue.” Or “Reproductive Justice Means Free Palestine.” Or “Queers for Palestine.” All of these are examples of what the writer Alysia Ames dubbed the “omnicause” back in October. 

“It seems like where ‘intersectionality’ went wrong was assuming that anyone with any claim to oppression must be part of one omnicause + global warming for some reason,” she tweeted. 

In other words, either you back all our causes or you back none of them. 

If the omnicause has an avatar, it’s Greta Thunberg wearing a keffiyeh. These days, the 21-year-old ecowarrior now spends her time protesting Israel’s participation in Eurovision. Why? Because we can’t fight climate change until we have “crushed Zionism,” of course! 

You’re no doubt sick of me ranting about the “Uniparty” already, but here’s another term — “The Omnicause” — with some genuine validity. Or so I think, anyway. I’m looking to our left-leaning ACFers to chime in with some corrections here, but this is what I can discern of it at first attempt:

• The Omnicause is not economic, at least not in the working-class sense. The Eugene Debs kind of leftism, where you fight for better wages and safer working conditions, appears to be essentially absent here, possibly because the Omnicause antipathy for traditional white (and “sellout” black) lower-to-middle-class workers outweighs any thought of fidelity to conventional Marxism. Is that because the money printer has so completely disconnected work from reward as to render the concept obscure to young leftists?

• The Omnicause is accidentally(?) pro-Disapora. I’ve always been fascinated by Jews who hate Israel — there are many such cases. It could be because their deep empathy with oppressed people outweighs their desire for a Jewish homeland, or it could be because they see the existence of a strong Israel as undermining the diaspora. As long as Israel is around, someone might make them go there. In any event, the Omnicause largely runs on Jews who hate Israel.

• The Omnicause is anti-white by design, meaning “anti-poor”. I realize that calling anything “anti-white” is socially unacceptable in 2024, but what else can you call a group of sentiments that are pro-migrant when the migrants aren’t white and pro-nativist when the migrants are white? Naturally, all this anti-white sentiment never manages to attach itself to the aforementioned Thunberg or Jamie Dimon. It’s always about low-income, low-education whites, the closest thing modern society has to fairytale monsters.

• The Omnicause is inherently slacktivist. Go read Peter Kemp about the Spanish Civil War, and you’ll see that foreign-born True Believers made up major percentages of both armies. You had Americans who felt strongly enough about the virtues of Communism to carry a rifle in Spain, and Brits who were anti-Commie (we’d call them “fascists” now) enough to die in the cause of resisting. You can’t tell me that the arrival in Rafah of 100,000 or even 10,000 American college students willing to pick up an AK-74 (or, as they say in the rental game, similar) and fight for Hamas wouldn’t end this struggle right now, likely via the Outside Context Problem of the Marine Corps immediately occupying Gaza before anybody with a Gender Studies degree accidentally gets trench foot. The Omnicause activists aren’t built that way. They’ll ride a bus somewhere to protest, as long as they get snacks afterwards. Their “fire-y but mostly peaceful” behavior would reach a hard stop if they did it anywhere it wasn’t tacitly supported by the locals; in this case, at least, Jason Aldean is probably correct.

• The Omnicause doesn’t really understand religion, or take it seriously. The idea of “Queers for Palestine” is proof positive that this generation of activists views religious brown people as simply suffering from a curable delusion. Why, just expose them to a few drag shows and they’ll stop killing us! Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it doesn’t really matter to Omnicausers, because:

• At its heart, the Omnicause is united by hate for the Western middle class. The sole common characteristic I can discern for Omnicause concerns is: each of their goals, should it be realized, would drastically shrink the size of European and American people enjoying a middle-class lifestyle. The climate stuff is all about reducing per capita consumption to Calcutta standards. The migrant stuff is a wealth transfer from Westerners to Third Worlders. The sex stuff privileges short-term ecstasy and individual enjoyment over long-term wealth-building and family creation. And so on. If I’m wrong, show me how, because I’d rather believe there’s something else at the bottom of the turtle stack.

Understanding the Omnicause is important, because I have the feeling that, with one important exception, “they” will largely get what they want in the next 20 years. That exception, of course, is “unless it damages the ability of multinational corporations to profit”. Sadly for my Palestine-centric friends, the presence of major chip fabs in Israel, and the additional fabs being planned as we speak, strongly suggests that the “Zionists” are gonna win. If I had any power in the progressive causes, I’d spend 95% of my time trying to put together a team of people who could safely operate those fabs in the event of a power transfer — and I’d make sure we sat down with Intel to make that well-known to them. Otherwise, the armies of, ahem, inevitable river-to-sea freedom are gonna meet a dissenting opinion about ten klicks outside the Intel front gate. And by “dissenting opinion”, I mean:

So, with that in mind, feel free to give me your Omnicause opinions, up to and including “This isn’t a real thing, you idiot.” God knows I’ve been wrong before!