Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: The inEVitable Ring-Kissing, Lando So Close, The Framers' Intent

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May 22, 2024

nobody involved with this has any idea why the font would look like that, really

A Very Quick Race Report

Your humble author’s dreams of Hoosier Super Tour victory came to an abrupt end when my smaller Radical’s left driveshaft broke on the second lap of Friday qualifying and the spare could not be found, even after having eight people search the 3600 square feet of my shop from tip to tail. I then watched another five P2 cars fail during the Saturday race. What can I say — if you want to race a reliable car, don’t get a British space-frame experiment. Danger Girl had no such issues and reliably advanced in both of her races, but the real Avoidable Contact laurels went to rookie E-Production racer Dannyp who kept his RX-7 running well enough on Sunday to score a podium! People really win on ACF! (Just not me, lately.)

The End Of The Affair

A few of you clued me in to the appearance of my former boss, McKeel Hagerty, on Motor Trend’s “inEVitable” podcast last week. I’m not going to listen to it, being in the luxurious position of no longer having to feign attention when “MOH” talks about anything — but I can’t help but frown a bit at what the appearance represents.

There was a brief, shining, Camelot-esque moment when a lot of us thought that Hagerty Media might become the authentic standard-bearer for automotive journalism. All the signs were in our favor, from reliable independent funding to a CEO who was loquacious on the subjects of “thought leadership” and “brave choices” and whatnot. By contrast, Motor Trend was a sinking ship with rats jumping off left and right.

It didn’t turn out that way. Our leadership became enamored of MT’s style and content, which bewildered me both then and now; it would be like Kelly Johnson secretly studying engineering drawings of the star-crossed XP-75 Eagle when he had the A-12 team in the office. They hired a flotilla of Motor Trend people and endeavored to ape that publication’s house style in both video and print. Next up was a series of collaborations with MT itself, culminating in this ring-kissing moment where Mr. Hagerty attempts to ingratiate himself with Messrs. Loh and Lieberman.

My former employer currently straddles an odd space where he rails against “Self-driving cars” while eagerly advocating for EVs. Which makes little sense to me. The former are nothing but fantasies of the tech-besotted-but-illiterate midwit class, while the latter are very real things that are sucking the funding, production capacity, and legal standing out of driving as it exists today. It would be like President Biden constantly assuring us that he will protect against the threat from Betelgeuse while simultaneously inviting the People’s Liberation Army to conduct exercises on the Eastern Seaboard.

(Alternately, it’s like endlessly yodeling about a possible Russian invasion while ignoring a Mexican one, but…)

With all of that said, I continue to admire McKeel for at least trying to chart his own course in automedia, however briefly. It should not be too strongly counted against him that he gave up and returned to courting the Motor Trend crowd. As Ingersoll once said: “Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.” To which I will add: even fewer can stand the grating, dirgelike oppression of not being liked.

Seven (-tenths of a) second in heaven

Lando almost had Max! Or maybe he never had Max! Maybe he never even had his car! He was certainly mystified by pace issues in the middle of the race, a reminder that Formula 1 is much more complicated than any other motorsport currently on offer. In any event, it was a majestic drive by Lando, who was clearly driving the wheels (meaning the tires) off the McLaren while Verstappen struggled ahead with a depleted battery. No doubt they both enjoyed the race for once.

Other thoughts:

The forcible Russell-for-Hamilton swap makes sense from a team perspective, giving them 16 points instead of 15 via the fastest lap from Russell, but the fair play thing to do would have been to have Lewis give back the place that he was gifted by the team. They didn’t ask. Princess George was relatively magnanimous about it afterwards, perhaps because he has now out-qualified his $100-million-man teammate six to one while also being effortlessly superior throughout the race. What, exactly, are Ferrari getting for their money again?
Justice For Yuki is still the catchphrase of the season. Tsunoda is all but single-handedly carrying the team and is also six to one against his much-ballyhooed and race-winning teammate. He, too, is driving the hell out of the car, and maturing almost in real time before our eyes.
Meanwhile, Sergio Perez is doing his best to ensure that he never drives in Formula One again, no matter how much personal sponsorship he brings to the team. Much of the early part of the race was Perez trying, and failing, to get around Tsunoda, who wasn’t even trying to defend.
Without checking — who is #2 in the driver standings right now? It’s Leclerc. Yeah, I was surprised too.
I’m not sure the fourth Verstappen championship is absolutely set in stone here, even if Max has managed to equal Senna’s qualifying record. Even less certain: the constructors’ championship, because both Ferrari and McLaren reliably bring two drivers to the races.
Speaking of Senna: Are we totally sure that Sebastian Vettel is entirely okay, mentally speaking? He comes off now as a slightly doddering fan of the sport who can also get in and drive the historics from time to time. His Senna/Ratzenberger tribute was heartfelt, but it’s also like the zillionth time that he’s asked the whole grid to do something for him. Has he considered either returning to the sport in earnest — it’s easy to forget, but he’s only a month older than Nico Hulkenberg — or, alternately, just leaving it be? Back when I was racing the Vet Pro class in BMX, and badly I might add, it was rare for a National event to pass without attracting a few dudes in their late twenties or early thirties who would do everything at the race but race. I pitied them, honestly. Either race, or volunteer, or go home.
Who had “Ocon stomps Gasly” on their list of predictions for 2024? I didn’t.

“…if you can keep it.”

From always-thought-provoking ACFer Alan we have

I’ve been pulling the thread back on a lot of my long held “conservative” viewpoints over the past couple of years, and I’m increasingly finding I can’t justify any of it. The originalism thing is a perfect example. Why exactly is the framer’s intent behind a 235 year old, flawed document so unimpeachable, anyway?

Let’s start with a nod of respect. Most of here are grown men, which means we should be periodically re-evaluating our long-held beliefs. Whether Alan ends up with any “conservative” mindset at all is much less important than the process he uses to get there. Your humble author has little interest in being “conservative”, a label which I associate with various corporate-owned swamp creatures, talking heads, and videos where Ben Shapiro “destroys” 105-IQ college students in ad-hoc conversations. “Conservative” does nothing for me. I’m personally from the “Torquemada” wing of the “sword-carrying Jesuit” party myself — that is, when I’m not busy trying to get Bernie Sanders elected.

So let’s look at Alan’s question with fresh eyes. I’ll offer two theories in favor of “originalism” and two against, then we’ll reconvene.

Theory One: Shadows of our fathers. The men who authored and implemented the Constitution were educated beyond not just our current reality, but almost our current imagination. Many of them were deeply read in the classics, and had been for a long time. Others, like Washington, were Renaissance men who could plant a field and direct a regiment in the field. Any of us would quickly fall to pieces in a debate with the least of them, simply because we are using our memories and brains for different things. So it’s best to think of the Founders as men who were hyper-educated in statesmanship to a level unattainable today. Which means that if you have to choose between what John Adams wanted and what Lindsey Graham or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants, you choose the former, because the latter are mental children. No, they wouldn’t be able to do so much as turn on a television without instruction. Which is good, because they used their brains to build a nation.
Theory Two: Demonstrated effectiveness. Since about the time of the six frigates, the United States has been a power in world events, occasionally the power. It has been a leader in innovation of all sorts, a trend-setter in civil liberties and personal freedom, a beacon for morality and decency in a world that is, by contrast, often brutish and capricious. You can either attribute this singular nature to the genetic and religious nature of the men who built the USA, which would be dangerous to publicly attest, or you can attribute it to the “operating system” of the Constitution. Taking a generally conservative — that word! — approach to our founding documents has allowed this country to beat everyone from the Barbary pirates to Admiral Yamamoto. In fact, the more we stray from those documents and their intent, the weaker and more vulnerable we become. Does anybody think the United States is “stronger” now than it was in 1960? 1940? 1920?

Alright, let’s try the other side.

Theory One: Continuous improvement. With enough eyes, programmers say, all bugs are shallow. We have a lot of bright people in America looking at our founding documents. We know that those documents were occasionally vague or incomplete on crucial matters, such as slavery. Who is to say they are not also incorrect in other areas? The Constitution should reflect the 200-plus years of thoughtful reflection by great minds from Brandeis to, ahem, Judge Clarence Thomas, that have passed since its creation.
Theory Two: No dead hand. The Founders could not have envisioned the world as it exists today. Hell, Richard Nixon couldn’t have done it, and he had a heck of a head start, so to speak. Why let a bunch of people who didn’t understand electricity determine how we regulate the Internet, or permit comparatively ignorant people to “own” the basis of how we approach everything from drone strikes to gender transition? The world is changing. The rules should change as well. Otherwise we’d all be dragging plows with oxen.

Feel free to debate the merits of these approaches in the comments. My personal thought on the matter, sad though it might be: Humanity as a whole, and America in particular, and the men of America in extra-particular, have never been as pathetic, mendacious, perverse, soulless, and worthless as they — as we! — are today. I’m not throwing out some Iron Age of Hesiod shit here, alright? Every generation feels an inferiority to their ancestors, coupled with a determination to undo the practices that supposedly assisted said ancestors in said superiority. What’s happening in 2024 is more than that. We have two forces — the smartphone and pornography/media — which have utterly and completely reshaped the American mindset. By and large, we are nothing but degenerate morons when compared to even the average farmer or tradesman of post-war America, unable to resist dopamine hits or designer drugs or the flickering screen of Prime Video.

We should no more be given the ability to steer this ship than should the inmates of an insane asylum. The sole virtue our generations provide the United States of America is the possibility that we might reproduce just enough to keep the enterprise alive for the young men who will revitalize it. History suggests that there is a generation of “Victorians” coming. The decision to change the Constitution, should it be made, should be made by then. Letting us do it now would be tantamount to having the crowd at Coachella or Burning Man write our foreign policy. This is possibly the most degraded age in recorded history. At the very least it’s the worst since the final stages of Rome. Much like a drunk with the keys to a Testarossa, the safest thing to do would be to simply take no action until a responsible adult arrives. In this case, the responsible adult will be a child or grandchild of ours. If we are lucky.

Alright. Enough ranting. Over to you!