Wednesday Racing/Open Thread: Yuki, Palou, GuntherDorks, Sobotka's Sorrow

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married to the mob(bin)

Welcome to the middle of a five-day content cavalcade! (As opposed to a Suzuki Cavalcade, which would almost as cool as a voyager who ventured on the wings of love.) We had two great races and two unpleasant but highly avoidable events. Let’s get started.

Another smooth operation

What a terrible time to be Lewis Hamilton. You’re being comprehensively out-driven by the disaster-prone “Princess” George Russell. This is the fourth year in a row that you haven’t had the fastest car on the grid — which even some of your most fervent advocates admit that you need in order to win. Hell, it doesn’t even finish races now. Yes, you have a nine-figure escape plan at Ferrari… but you’re going to replace someone who has become near and dear to the hearts of the tifosi and who appears quite capable of winning without the best car.

Tinfoil-hat types like me will immediately assign Max Verstappen’s brake-duct problem to some sort of internal Red Bull politics — maybe Christian kicked it during a trip through the garage, just to express his displeasure at getting played like a fiddle by Jos Verstappen’s side bitch. The truth is probably more prosaic: not even this team is perfect every single time. Shame, really, because the car itself doesn’t look much faster than the competition, especially in the hands of Senor Perez.

Other thoughts:

• Justice For Yuki! Isn’t it now obvious what a terrible idea it was not to let Liam Lawson stay in the “VCARB”? Maybe the team would have ten points now, instead of six. Danny Ric is toast. Let’s all accept it and move on. He doesn’t need our pity. He has a house in Dubai and a Monaco win. That’s enough.

• Justice For Fernando! You can’t tell me that George’s crash was Alonso’s fault. Far from it. Once again, the young British driver wasn’t paying complete attention to what was happening around him. It’s shameful that the FIA upheld the complaint.

• Justice For Logan! Intellectually, I can understand why Alex Albon was allowed to steal his teammate’s car after crashing his own. Emotionally, I think it’s a disastrous move.

• Haas Without Gunther Is… better.

Let me suggest something between heretical and outright stupid: nothing about this season should be considered to be set in stone. Not a fourth Max championship, not an RB constructors’ championship, not even Ferrari coming in for 2nd place. There’s a lot of potential for mayhem. It’s even possible that Sir Lewis might get a better car before he turns in the keys.

Hot In California

Give credit where credit was due: the “Million Dollar Challenge” at Thermal Club was compelling racing done in remarkably competent fashion by everybody except for Scott Dixon, who caused the single pile-up of the whole day when he underbraked into Romain Grosjean. It was a real joy seeing cars of this capability run around Thermal Club and there was a remarkable amount of action happening… behind Alex Palou, who looked positively Verstappen-esque in his serene domination of both qualifying heat and money race.

As an American club racer and patriot, I’m a little depressed that IndyCar is small-time enough to make a million-dollar non-points payout a big deal — but I’m going to look on the bright side, because maybe the relatively low stakes of such an event means we’ll get more of them.

Stupid idea of the day: The current IndyCar is fairly close to the F2 car in road course performance. Why not explicitly equalize them, and invite F2 teams to compete? Doing so might eventually get you an American F2 team, which suggests we’d eventually have a second American F1 team.

The only surprising thing is that it took this long to happen

if you have to crash one…

If the Internet can be completely believed, one of the carbon-fiber Guntherwerks cars got its shit pushed in when LoofaCult impresario and token-American Porsche racer Patrick Long crashed it at Laguna Seca. Supposedly he was chasing Sean Edwards at the time. Make of that rumor what you will.

For the record, I’ve never had anything but contempt for these stupid little cars, which strike me as basically Porsche 993s minus every possible reason you’d drive or own a Porsche 993. That being said, it didn’t occur to me that the roof would simply collapse if you crashed it. But wait, as they say, there’s more. From the Guntherwerks response to Motor1.com:

nor was it equipped with a roll cage, as we do not fit them to customer commissions, with the emphasis on the cars being road-going and not race cars. A chassis stiffening bar was installed in the rear cabin, in addition to a harness bar with harnesses and an FIA-rated seat used during the test.

This is the worst possible setup, and I’ll explain why. In a street car, the roof might collapse during a rollover, but the 3-point belt will let your head and neck get out of the way. In a real race car, the harness will hold your neck steady, but the rollcage will prevent the roof from crushing your spine. In the Guntherwerks, there’s a harness bar that makes sure your body will be upright when the roof caves in.

This particular setup used to be common in autocross and time trials but it has been banned from nearly everywhere, and rightly so. Why isn’t Patrick Long in a casket, or a wheelchair, right now? I assume the harness bar was as shoddy as the roof, and gave way during impact.

The extended sloppy blowjobs given to these lashed-up plastic turds by every yahoo on YouTube should, I hope, make you more careful about how much you trust the “influencers” going forward. I’m not saying you have to make crash safety your whole focus in vehicle selection — I refuse to fit a halo to my Radical SR8 because I hate the way it looks, and that might cost me a lot some day — but if you’re going to cut the weight out of a 911 Turbo while almost doubling the power, take some thought as to the consequences.

The spice stops flowing

all the containers were empty, at least

Surely it will be a while before the full story of this container-ship catastrophe in Baltimore is told — if, indeed, it ever is. Up front, however, it appears to be an almost deliberate synecdoche to our Current Year:

• The ship was built by Hyundai in South Korea…

• At the request of its owners, who are Greek…

• And chartered by Maersk, a Danish company…

• But operated by Synergy Marine Group, a low-cost provider from India…

• Sailing under a flag of convenience from Singapore…

• And also operating under an adverse mechanical report from Chile…

• With an Indian crew…

• Who warned authorities and therefore saved lives, but nevertheless…

• Six of eight workers on-site were killed, none of whom were American-born…

• It was, of course, bringing us about 9,900 containers of things that used to be made here before some consultant or CEO realized there was a bonus to be earned by sending the manufacture of each item overseas…

• And the entire cost of the disaster, from soup to nuts, will be borne by the American taxpayer, thanks to President Biden, whose amnesia regarding East Palestine was entirely absent from his response to this crisis.

I doubt there was any “terrorism” involved. What we are seeing here is the natural consequence of a globalist, just-in-time, “flat world”, system that has ruthlessly engineered every last penny out of pretty much every process imaginable.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge was completed in 1977, when ships of this size simply did not exist; the largest cargo ship of the Seventies had less than one-third the capacity of the MV Dali, perhaps because there was no need for it in a world where the United States handled its own business. Preparing the bridge to shrug off a strike from such a ship, in perspective, would have been like preparing the World Trade Center for a strike from an airplane the size of the “pocket battleship” Scharnhorst; how could such a thing even be possible?

This massive ship had just 22 crewmembers on board, none of whom could likely fix it if something were to go amiss — and who would likely have been punished for raising any concerns about the state of the ship. Everything about this situation was designed to squeeze the pennies out, because if Maersk couldn’t figure out the cheapest way to get the containers to the chumps in the USA, someone else would.

Every news report stresses the immense inertia of such a ship, and how helpless it would be with a loss of power. So why do such ships exist, and why are they permitted to sail under bridges under their own power, even if, as appears to be the case here, there was a harbor pilot on board?

You know the answer, of course. The spice must continue to flow. The hollowing-out of the United States must continue at maximum speed. Nothing can be made here. Labor must be sourced from a devil’s carousel of countries competing for the lowest human cost. Ownership must be diffuse and diverse, lest it be held to account. I mean, really — who’s gonna pay for this? Which of all the entities above is responsible?

In the weeks to come, you’ll hear the pundits talking about this like it was an act of God, rather than the logical end of a thousand selfish, mendacious little decisions. You will be made intimately aware of the struggles to be endured by the Frank Sobotkas of Baltimore, the forty thousand or so people who won’t work when the port is out of commission. Nothing will be said about the forty million people whose jobs disappeared so the Dali could sail here full and sail home empty. Hell, they couldn’t even let native-born American citizens fix the fuckin’ bridge before it collapsed! Everything, everything, must be optimized for lowest cost…

…except the bonuses, and the deferred compensation, and the dividends, and the jizya given to the investor class. Those can soar. Those can be tied directly to decisions that lead to situations like this.

I’m not a Communist, and that’s putting it lightly, but can you imagine what the average Soviet or East German kommissar would do when faced with a tragedy like this? How many people would die in Siberia for their crimes against The People? We hear a lot about accountability nowadays. People need to be held accountable for what they say online. For their microaggressions, conscious or otherwise. For their racism, sexism, what have you. Well, what kind of accountability do you think will be handed out for a multi-billion-dollar mistake that killed six people and could have killed a thousand times that, had it occurred at a different time?

Let me give you a preview: when the total amount of jail time is added up, it will be seven months less than what “Ricky Vaughn” got for making an election joke on Twitter.

This country was never meant to be operated by idiots and the uninvolved. Railroads, waterways, bridge-and-tunnel systems, air traffic control. It all depends on a network of competent, intelligent, public-minded, serious people. Yes, it’s true that every once in a while one of those people is paid more than the global market possible minimum (gasp!) for their job, and they might go out and buy a Bayliner or a Polaris ATV or something else that disgusts their betters. I’m convinced that much of this “race to the bottom” in everything that matters is driven by hatred as much as it is by parsimony. Hatred of dingy-collar people who earn as much as assistant professors without ever kissing the ideological ring.

Well, you want those people to watch your planes and uh, fix your boat engines, and whatnot. Without them, the country will collapse. And quickly. From East Palestine to Baltimore, the alarm bells are starting to ring. Who will be willing to hear them?