Wednesday's ORT: McFluttering Hearts, TMI about TMI, Adventures in SRF, Tissot PRX-FC As Bellwether

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not showing you the front of the helmet because it upsets me too much

This will be a bit more of a Racing Thread than usual — but remember that it’s also an Open Thread, so anything interesting to the general audience will be pinned.

Second place is, probably, the 4th championship

Daniel Ricciardo’s final race, if indeed it was that, serves as synecdoche for much of his career. There was plenty of emotion, plenty of charming connection with the fans and media, plus what appears to be the all-time fast lap of Singapore in his final trip around — yet he started Sunday eight places behind his not-exactly-legendary teammate. Yuki’s record against Daniel in qualifying is slightly better than Alonso’s against Lance Stroll.

Now, it wouldn’t be a VCARB race if they didn’t figure out a way to free-fall Yuki down the order with moronic strategy choices — but DR3 still finished his “last” F1 race too far in arrears from Tsunoda to see him. He’s had one race this year where he looked like a champion. The rest of the time he’s strongly resembled the fiercely unexceptional seat-filler who bumbled through Renault and McLaren rather than accept a formal second-driver designation against Max Verstappen, a driver whose talent against his is akin to Lee Ritenour’s mastery of jazz chords compared to mine.

And yet… his fastest lap helped torpedo Lando’s championship hopes. Zak Brown made a big deal of this “B-team” strategic choice on VCARB’s point before walking his rhetoric back in a friendly Instagram selfie with Christian Horny.

This wasn’t as memorable or interesting a race as the previous one, but here are some notes:

• Alex Albon is falling apart right in front of us, whining to James Vowles on the radio about being toasted at the start by Colapinto. Looks like he is about to enter the Daniel Ricciardo Home For Mentally Broken Former Teammates Of Max Verstappen Who Are Eventually Taken To Pound Town By F3 Journeymen.

• If it was Sir Lewis Hamilton’s decision to start on soft tires, he deserves what happened to him. If it wasn’t… the team should be more thoughtful on his behalf. Meanwhile, Princess George drove a smart and thoughtful race to erase a little more of the gap between him and Lewis in the standings.

• Another smart, disciplined effort: Oscar Piastri salvaging a less than perfect qualifying session up to third place. It’s enough to set your heart, or at least your wings, fluttering. He remains the most successful driver since the break.

• If Perez represents the true pace of the Red Bull, then Max deserves to win this championship just based on sheer effort. Speaking of Perez: I wonder how much he is being pressured to retire at the end of the year. He’s cost the team the Constructors’ championship, which is real money, and real prestige, for Red Bull.

• Logan Sergeant is getting an IndyCar test for Meyer Shank. Care to guess how he’ll do?

It’s ACFer vs. ACFer, Mazda vs. Mazda, at Nelson Ledges

Ah, to be a 21-year-old girl with your own race car and a half-completed novice-racer permit! Such is the case for Mini Danger Girl, aka MDG, as of last Thursday. She now owns a Spec Racer Ford that is way older than she is; it started life as a Sports Renault in 1986 before being upgraded to SRF2 spec twenty-five years ago. She led the first half of a soaking-wet 8-car qualifying session but faded as the track dried. In Saturday’s race she was trying to close the one-second laptime gap between her and the leaders… by going faster in Turn 1, which she promptly exited, backwards, at something like 90mph. She re-joined the race and made decent time. The record will show that she was dead last for both days, but she was in eyesight of the car ahead and I expect great things.

In the smallbore group, it was Danger Girl against our cherished ACF reader dannyp. She was on her backup engine, about 40 horses down, while Danny was trying to preserve a newly-installed transmission, so it wasn’t supposed to be a hard-fought race. Except it was!. On Day One, DG stole Danny’s place in the first corner of the first lap then blocked vigorously for half the race before waving him by. There was method to her madness; the two of them ran nose to tail up to 2nd and 3rd overall, something she didn’t have enough motor to do on her own. On Sunday, DG had a clutch failure on the way to grid for qualifying, so she started dead last and worked up to 5th place, setting a faster lap along the way than both Danny and their mutual antagonist, STL-class winner Tex Melotti. Danny had the last laugh, however, finishing second overall and first in class. He’s really driving well, and it’s great to watch him and Danger Girl challenge each other going into Turn 1. Iron sharpens iron, and all that.

As for me… We had a front tire go bad and start vibrating heavily. Rebalancing the wheel didn’t fix things. Nonetheless, on Saturday I was the fastest fendered car, finishing ahead of Al Franzolino’s P2 Beasley. On Sunday, I started from the back of the grid because I was worried the tire might pop and turn me into a 1900-pound spinning death machine for the Formula cars around me. The vibration settled down and I finished 6th of 10. My fastest lap of 1:04.8 was .75 seconds off the track record, which I set last year. With new tires and some more setup work I think we will be firmly in the 1:03 range for the last race of the year in October. Just to keep me humble, however, a lovely Formula Atlantic car showed up on Saturday and ran a 59.3-second heater, just 0.4 off the all-time, all-class Nelson Ledges lap record. It was majestic to watch.

I need something about which I can brag from an unremarkable weekend, so: On Sunday my AIM dashboard was broken, but I nonetheless turned a time between 1:05.296 and 1:05.813 for 11 of 13 running laps, digressing only to pass slower cars and yield to the Atlantic when it came through. This level of consistency and knowledge with the SR8 is something I’ve been chasing since I bought it. It’s required all sorts of weird behavior on my part, including using the “Gripzilla Punisher” on a daily basis so my hands don’t get tired of gripping the wheel without resting my palm on the rim, but I’m kinda-sorta there.

Thankfully, Gil-Scott Heron isn’t here to see this

When Three Mile Island had its partial meltdown on March 28, 1979, I was living in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. My classmates couldn’t stop talking about how we’d almost all just died — or, worse yet, been mutated into weird aliens or creatures with flippers. (We weren’t all that studied on how mutation works, and thought of it in comic-book terms.)

Now they’re restarting it — to power Microsoft’s Bing AI.

While the above statement is factual, it ignores one critical point: TMI was in continuous operation until 2019, when it was shut down for economic reasons. Turns out nuclear power is expensive, relatively speaking. Microsoft doesn’t care. They want the gigawatts.

It could be worse. A shocking amount of energy, maybe as much as 1/50th of the electricity generated worldwide, is used to mine cryptocurrency. Bing won’t have that kind of impact on the globe. I prefer to look at it this way: Historically, whenever Microsoft gets really excited about something, that means the moment has already passed. If they’re gonna restart a nuclear reactor for “AI”, then presumably the era of “AI” being the next big thing is coming to a close.

Here’s what they can do with the power once Microsoft doesn’t want it: use it to replace electricity generated by burning coal. So we can send the coal to China. In the meantime, won’t this just hasten the day when there’s no more nuclear power available for things people actually need or want to do? Nah! Bill Gates, who has had one intelligent idea in his life, that idea being to buy QDOS and re-sell it to IBM, assures us that “AI” won’t lead to an energy crisis… because before that can happen, “AI” will solve the energy crisis for us.

I wish I could say I was making that up.

What’s the luxury lifespan of squashy plastic?

Eight years ago, I spent a delightful week driving a Lamborghini Huracan around Ohio. This was the quite nice RWD version with otherwise standard trim — but it had the “forged carbon fiber” interior.

Lamborghini was part of the group that originated forged CF, in which chopped carbon pieces are randomly laid into resin. Compared to traditional CF, it’s much easier to make, much easier to work with, and has more applications. However, it’s still covered by a variety of patents and copyrights so it’s not as universal as it might be. There’s also the fact that while it’s claimed to be stronger than traditional weave carbon fiber, that is really only true in certain comparisons. You probably don’t want a forged CF bicycle, for example.

How about a watch?

Tissot, the near-luxury Swiss watchmaker, just launched a version of its popular PRX in forged carbon fiber, for $995. It’s selling as fast as Tissot can crank them out. That represents a $250 markup over the standard PRX Powermatic 80. It should be noted that the watch still has a steel center block holding the movement, that block being capped front and back with forged CF, which also is used for the dial.

People are very excited about this watch. It’s not the first watch to use the material — there have been a few, and I think my brother’s friends at Venezianico have a nicer take on it, as does G-Shock — but it’s the first affordable mainline Swiss watch in forged CF.

I’ve been curious as to how long carbon fiber will remain an “upscale” choice for anything at all. I paid about a hundred bucks for a GRIP6 wallet in the material:

but it’s just not that expensive to make, or even to buy. Want proof? All the forged CF you could possibly need to make a watch, or even a few watches, can be had for $45. In the final analysis, it’s just squashy plastic. It has serious and unique industrial characteristics, but it’s not a precious metal. In that respect, it’s very similar to Bakelite, the ur-plastic that featured in many upscale cars through the Fifties. It was valuable because it was novel and pleasant to handle, but eventually it was just valued by its cost to produce, which wasn’t much.

It would be nice if the people at Radical could be bothered to make their body panels out of forged composites. They just moved to pre-preg for stuff like the splitter on the new SR10XXR:

It is so pretty, and it would fit my car, but if I’m going to spend $3,000 on my race cars we have practical needs to address first. Want to see YOUR NAME on a race-winning Radical in 2025? I’d be happy to put it on the carbon-fiber splitter you buy for us. A forged one would be even nicer.

I’d be cautious about spending any real money on a piece of jewelry, or a watch, but I repeat myself, just because it’s made from Forged CF. I don’t think it will be upscale forever. On the other hand, I was certain that "regular” carbon fiber would have fallen from grace by now. It hasn’t. There’s something depressing about that: why do people pay so much for something that is so cheap to make? Alternately, there’s something lovely about it: people are willing to value a material because it’s strong and light and futuristic, rather than just going back to the precious metals. Your mileage will vary.

Ceramic, on the other hand: I think we will eventually come to be familiar with many gradations of the material, the way people know about 18k gold and so on. The Moonswatch Bioceramic is very, very far from the material used in their Dark Side Of The Moon Speedmaster or what I have in my Tudor Black Bay. The properties of a good ceramic mesh well with a watch: light, dimensionally stable under pressure and temperature, hard to damage. Forged carbon fiber, from a watchmaking perspective, is really just plastic with some plastic chips in it.

Oh, who am I kidding? We live in a world where people pay more for a Rolex Daytona in stainless steel than they would for a two-tone or even solid-gold model, because the steel Daytona conveys an air of rugged, no-nonsense manliness, or because Paul Newman wore one. In the meantime, I can say this with absolute certainty: forged carbon makes for a decent enough wallet. If you buy the Tissot, drop me a line and let me know how you like it.