PLEASE TAKE THIS RUBBISH DOWN AND NEVER PUT ANYTHING LIKE IT IN PRINT AGAIN.
Mr. Johnson, Professional Race Car Driver, is referring to this week’s R&T column on merging. I wrote it to get people thinking about courtesy and shared responsibility on the road, but a few people have taken it really personally. Including Mr. Johnson.
As someone with precisely two “professional” sports car racing starts in his life and a total career win amount of, I think, $800, I was particularly chastened to be criticized by Michael Johnson, an Indy Lights driver who has battled through paralysis to be the first differently-abled person to receive an IndyCar license.
No, wait, that’s a different Michael Johnson. The guy who wants me to retract my column is this guy:
Okay, begging for money to run at the last minute is part of every pro driver’s life…
Okay, begging for a seat in LeMons isn’t normally what you’d see Mark Webber or Nico Hulkenberg doing, but given Mr. Johnson’s professional race record, which is…
uh…
…not anywhere I can find it…
maybe he’d be a good fit for a LeMons team. Just make sure you can afford his meals.
Oh, wait, here’s his pro record. One race in Continental Tire.
Hey… I ALSO HAVE ONE RACE IN CONTINENTAL TIRE. With, I might add, a much better team.
So from now on, I’m going to call myself Jack Baruth, Professional Race Car Driver. Here’s my pitch for more professional opportunities:
Hey, LeMons teams! Are you looking for a REAL PRO RACE DRIVER WHO RACES PRO RACES PROFESSIONALLY to race with you? For the limited-time price of FREE, I will do it! No, wait! I’ll pay you! Fuck it! What? You don’t have any room in your diesel-powered GMC Sonoma? Is it okay if I just come and watch? Is there any food left in the cooler? I’m hungry. Do they let people sleep on the bleachers at night? Do you have any extra socks?
What do you think?
Alright, maybe I’m breaking a butterfly upon a wheel here, but it’s worth remembering: Very few people earn a living racing cars. Very few. And of those, the number of people who earn real money racing would all fit on half of a basketball court, shoulder-to-shoulder.
I actually like Mr. Johnson’s hustle. Racing is his life. Which is also what Senna said. I wish I could say that racing was my life. I wish I could say, like Steve McQueen in LeMans, that everything else is just… waiting. But in reality racing is a small part of my life. So when a co-worker of mine, a fellow from West Africa who rolls a Benz he bought with his stock options from his last contract, said to me, “You are a father! Why do you continue this racing when your son depends on you?” I couldn’t disagree with him. The most I could say was,
“I don’t want to be the kind of person who quits racing, and I don’t want my son to have a father who quits, either.”
So there you go.
“So from now on, I’m going to call myself Jack Baruth, Professional Race Car Driver. ”
I assumed you already did this.
Only on Tinder.
No, that name will never do. Needs to be something like “Speed Rockgroin, Professional Race Car Driver.”
This guy is a total jerkoff ! .
I bet he expects you to buy him a LARGE fries too ! .
-Nate
I read the article twice to make sure I didn’t read past it, but I think you missed an opportunity to remind people about the golden rule of highway onramps: The entering driver should accelerate fully to highway speeds as soon as possible, preferably BEFORE the dotted line of the merging area. The Department Of Made-Up Statistics reports that ninety percent of merging frustrations occur because the oncoming driver is going below the speed limit.
Hogie roll: amateur race car driver. I’m starting a new promotion where I will pay you to come a drive your car, poorly. I am also a fine mechanic, but if your car breaks I will only help diagnose it. Must have a cool suit setup. Also, I will drink all of your Gatorade.
I’ll be a professional race team manager for food. Maybe even a free shirt or hat. I can stand around, issue mission statements, and generally bug all the worker bees by continually asking what they’re doing and why are we so far behind? That’s basically what I do at work most of the time anyway.
As far as merging, my thought is that the driver in the freeway lane should avoid large changes in speed or direction in order to be the consistent partner in the arrangement. The person doing the merging shouldn’t have to guess what your motives are, just basically assume you’re going continue at the same speed and direction, then adjust accordingly. When someone in the freeway lane starts slowing to “help”, they tend to confuse the process. You end up with one person almost stopped, waving the other over, and the other person sitting on the shoulder not merging.
This is one my big pet peeves. I took several out of town trips recently, and almost every single person I saw merging never bothered turning their head.
When I find myself driving in the merging lane, I usually move over. On Detroit area expressways during high traffic times, on ramps usually mean traffic will slow down to a crawl in the right lanes so it makes sense to get over anyhow. If I am in the merging lane and adjusting my speed by a few mph will make it easier for someone else to merge, I’ll do that, thinking that traffic flow is the important thing. I also believe in waving thanks to people who let me merge or change lanes.
Teaching my oldest how to drive, the hardest thing was getting her to understand that as scary as merging onto a freeway is, you have to be at least a little bit aggressive and willing to accelerate.
I try to move to the other lane too.
Throttle is applied with gusto when merging. From 1/2 to WOT and usually no more than 3/4, depending on the situation.
I’ve never been able to figure out why traffic reports (especially WWJ) always say 696 is slow from e.g. 75 to Southfield rd. when it’s actually that short on-off ramp at Evergreen which is the problem.
I live near 696 and Greenfield. My mom lives in an assisted living apartment in the JCC complex near Maple & Drake. If it’s between 2PM and 6:30PM, I avoid 696 and take 11 Mile Rd out to Farmington. However, when traffic on the freeway isn’t messed up, the fastest way to or from mom’s place is via 696 and the M5 extension and come in the back way. It’s a bit longer but it’s almost all expressway, 3 fewer miles on surface streets and maybe a half dozen fewer traffic lights. Also, it lets me drive on the very lightly traveled private ring road on the west side of the complex, which makes a nice little road course. When I do reviews I sometimes shoot video there. You can still see the tire tracks I put down with the Scat Pack Challenger over the “SLOW 15 MPH” painted on the road.
Was pissed off last week and merged like it was a rental car .Wait it was a rental car ! I pissed a guy in some boxy car so bad he burnt a gallon of gas just getting back around.If I ever run into you at a race I would provide a case of beer or a quart of my shine and just hang out.Generally I have learnt more by watching and listening than talking.It s a big world out there and it takes all kinds but sometimes I think that some of these people were extra parts in another grand scheme.
Sometimes a bit of highway courtesy goes a long way. Reducing a couple kays/hour to provide extra space to someone else to join is not an issue. Now if the person merging is 20 below, good luck.
Regarding the other guy… LOL. The sole mention of the incident is a waste of your time. End of the day, you will continue to be published in R&T and he will continue to be Mr Nobody.
Wait a second, this guy’s comment did get published on R&T, ***and*** he is now published on Riverside Green. He is a Mr Somebody. And a profesh racecar driver.
Hey Jack! This guy is a serious student of BS…you can’t just dismiss him like that. He’s all about using efficiency to gain speed, or something like that…something we should scrape off our shoes if we found it there.
But he said he wants you to stay off his lawn, too.
But since he isn’t the famous Johnson, would that make him the little Johnson, as opposed to the big Johnson?
He certainly sounds like a guy with Johnson issues.
Kind of reminds me of my (least) favorite snark artist on TTAC, pch, who will gladly tell you what to do and/or who you are in his opinion, without one shred of evidence to support his contention. Kind of wish they could team up for a race,
I’m not familiar with racing points calculations though. What did the 15 in the COTA column for him signify in terms of his lifetime achievement?
Have you given any consideration to challenging him to a head to head race in identical cars at someplace like VIR, complete with lap times and videos? That would be too rich…especially if you could have him end up watching you come up to lap him, followed by the kind of of closing scene you showed when that guy went too hard into a turn ahead of you and I think it was your brother with you.
I’m begging you, Jack. Let him try to give you a driving lesson. Just be sure to give me an opportunity to get some money down on you first. THEN show him what he doesn’t know…please? But be sure to get it all on your GoPro.
Yes, PCh is a giant tool.
I wish I was on that half-basketball court. Then I could rub up against *Danica.*
Hey if I promise never to shift higher than 4th gear, can I be a professional race car driver too??
Extra neckbeard and fedora points for using the word “rubbish”
We would have fewer crashes if drivers understood that they need to play nicely with each other on the road. This shouldn’t be hard to grasp, but it certainly explains why the safest cars would be driven by computers instead of us.
Mr. Johnson is a pinhead.
Hogie,
Thanks for that. The other day he posted a vid of Obama getting hung up (his car) on a bump, with the message “happens to the best of us”. Couldn’t resist pointing out to him that the best of us know enough to consider the possibility and don’t roll over a bump to large to clear, plus I don’t consider Obama “the best of us”.
He immediately went into snark mode, and every time I tried to get him to defend why he thought it could happen to us or why he thought Obama was one of the best of us, he would just sling slurs and other ad hominem attacks.
And my luck was that either he has two or three sock puppets, or a couple of people who haven’t seen him in action, started attacking me. And unfortunately, none of the other people who attacked him for being such a snarky tool in the discussion about the Religious Freedom Act on TTAC were around to point out that ad hominem attacks plus an inability to defend his statements are the hallmark of PCH.
Chalked it up to bad timing. But it frosts me to see how many people think that calling someone out for stupid, indefensible statements and/or ad hominem attacks indicates that they are bitter and have no point, while that little tool goes on strutting like a little rooster for having done nothing but sling BS.
But thanks for the supporting words.
Pch and big truck must be trolls paid by jalopnik. They double handedly drop ttacs comment quality 50%
You pervert!
But at least you are an understandable one.
No one could accuse you of being irrational.
“safest cars” — and also the most boring.
I’ll see your computer cars and raise you a “Red Barchetta”.
And they would be safe only until either a component failure or hacking, a la the recent Jeep hack.
“This is a fully automated airplane. Nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong…”
Fully autonomous vehicles with no operator over-ride only make sense if you have infinite confidence in the engineers who design such devices, and contempt for the average person who has skin in the game, and therefore has incentives to “do the right thing” whether the mechanism is functioning or not.
BART once had trains with no operator over-ride, and a failure led to one hell of a pileup at the end of the line. It was a literal trainwreck, depending entirely on automated controls to protect the train.
“Mr. Johnson is a pinhead.”
That is an insult to pinheads, a/k/a micro-cephalics.
Perhaps a better phrase would be “a very little Johnson”, the opposite of a big Johnson.
My pet peeve is drivers who deliberately close up in order to keep me from merging *ahead* of them. On the other hand,I drive a somewhat battered diesel 4×4, so I can usually make a merge stick if I have to. It’s a great way to make new friends.
I won a helmet and a few bottles of chain lube in a desert motorcycle race once. I need to get my “professional motorcycle racer” cards printed up.
Re: pch and bigtruck as jalopnik trolls: for some reason, big truck doesn’t get on my nerves that much, but pch is just a total ass.
And thanks for the Spanish birthday wish correction. Most of my Spanish is pretty solid, but I drew a blank on that one. Must have been one of my senior moments.
I think the next time pch posts anything that has even an inkling of his usual stupidity, instead of addressing his point with a counter, I will just make a preemptive first strike, and just flame him the way he likes to flame others. See if I can’t strike a nerve, treating him as he treats others.
I wish Mark would just ban the idiots from TTAC. They may not stoop to the level of the infamous former editor BS, but they never add anything useful.
I “loved” his latest, about the sliding limo … it “somehow managed to slide”, like gee, two bars of rectangular metal laying squarely on top of two nearly flat pieces of metal with a littlel curvature, to make it almost just point contact. What else could it do, with no other force that was, or could have been, applied.
I guess it could be worse…he could live next door to me. As much of a tool as my neighbor is, I have to remember that he is a lot less intrusive into my life and activities than pch seems to be.
Oh well…WTH.
“Hey, LeMons teams! Are you looking for a REAL PRO RACE DRIVER WHO RACES PRO RACES PROFESSIONALLY to race with you? For the limited-time price of FREE, I will do it! No, wait! I’ll pay you! Fuck it! What? You don’t have any room in your diesel-powered GMC Sonoma? Is it okay if I just come and watch? Is there any food left in the cooler? I’m hungry. Do they let people sleep on the bleachers at night? Do you have any extra socks?”
I am stealing this. Not even joking.