Wednesday Racing/State Of The Stack Thread

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my son will never love me this much, and who can blame him

In a sense, it was a lovely racing weekend for your humble author. My three-man crew of Canadian-American degenerates spent the weekend in the barn getting my Radical SR8 ready for the last few races of the season. Back in April we pulled the transmission for the usual every six hour service (ugh) and were confronted with a few things that weren’t quite right, from serious engine leaks to a bend in the left rear corner of the space frame. So everything came out, a new corner went on, and I began the painful process of buying Approved Radical Spare Parts(tm). As an example: The SR8 has eight intake boots, unsurprisingly. They are rubber. They don’t last. They are eighty-two dollars each.

I was too busy with the car to pay too much attention to this weekend’s racing, so throw in your observations and discussion below. I did see the thing with Bryan and Colton Herta. Looking back, those Nineties Indycars are just gorgeous. The current chassis, which as Sherman McCoy has often pointed out is a legitimate vintage-racing candidate in 2023, just doesn’t have the same beauty to it.

State Of The Stack and Your Feedback

We are now 14 months into this experiment and the response has been better than I could have possibly expected. ACF has approximately 2,600 subscribers, almost a third of whom are paid members. About 92 percent of the people who signed up as annual members in the first rush of July 2022 re-upped for 2023. Thank you.

Commenting volume is off the charts; as of this morning we have 716 comments for Sunday’s post and 689 for last Wednesday’s. I have had to edit precisely one commenter, and it wasn’t so much for what he said as the fact that he posted the identical response a few dozen times in different places. Not that I’m big on censorship here. There’s a commenter who has repeatedly stated that I deliberately allowed my Town Car to get hit broadside in 2014 because I was trying to kill my wife and son. It’s not a kind thing to say, but the fact that he thinks I could hit black ice at 60mph in a curve and then precisely place the B-pillar of a 220-inch Lincoln in front of another car doing more than 70mph two curves later is such a massive testament to his faith in my driving skills that I’m leaving it up out of sheer vanity. That’s like the scene in Fast 9 where Vin Diesel catches a flying car or something.

When all is said and done and everybody’s “vig” is taken off the top, this job pays about as well as being an assistant manager at Wendy’s, minus the free meals but also minus the part where I cook food and serve it to people who are in a hurry and who let their windshield wipers splash rain in my face, not that I’m talking from bitter personal experience of my youth or anything like that.

This is an expensive product; you could subscribe to all three remaining color rags plus the “driver’s club” at the insurance company for less than what I charge at Substack. So it’s important to me that what I write is worth your money and time. If you are happy just the way things are, don’t feel like you have to get on here and say so. I might be a narcissist but I’m not that much of a narcissist. For everyone else, I have a few questions, if you’re willing to answer them:

• What would you like to see more of?

• What would you like to see less of?

• If you’re currently a free subscriber, what could I possibly do to put my hand in your pocket and steal money from your family on a monthly or annual subscription basis?

• Got any ideas for guest contributors?

With regards to the last: Tom Klockau is here now, doing the Lord’s work. Sometimes I think you all like him more than you like me; my original website is still clicking off about 24,000 unique readers a month just on Tom’s work! The legendary Robert Farago and I are working on a crossover of sorts where we’ll each post on each other’s Substacks. If any of my fellow writers are interested in doing something similar, let me know.

Thank you for reading, for commenting, for building this community. Many of us have met in person now, and there is more of that to come. Substack isn’t big on usable statistics but even from what I can see it’s obvious that many of you spend most of your time on site interacting with each other, rather than just reading that I have to say.

One last thing: Trackday Club update

I’m doing a guided tour of the old Car and Driver loops in Ohio’s Hocking Hills at the beginning of October. Existing Trackday Club members who want to jump in, or would-be members who have an interest in a day of driving these roads and telling stories, should comment or contact me. The primary difference between this and the “drive events” organized by Road&Track is that it won't cost you four grand and you won’t fall asleep on the drive route. That’s all, folks!