Note: I changed the photograph that heads this article at the request of the fellow discussed below — jb
This afternoon, our friend Stef Schrader managed to end a LeMons race on her roof after stalling out and being hit by a Miata that was then hit by a 944. It’s another one of those LeMons incidents where three cars get totaled for no reason whatsoever. She’s fundamentally fine, but that didn’t stop some wannabe motoring writer and “Porsche guru”, pictured above with his lovely bride, from writing “ZOMG LOL BARUTH IZ PROBABLY GONNA RITE SOMETHING THAT HURTZ MA BUTT” in response to the post in which Stef discussed the incident. Nothing like using a friend’s injury as an excuse to pursue a personal vendetta.
Well, I haven’t seen the video of Stef’s crash and I have no idea what happened and I have no way of knowing if the incident was anything like the famous Ferkel Nein-11 ramming-from-DEW-range-incident. Nor would I use an injury to a friend of mine to attempt to hammer any sense into people who have already decided they don’t give a shit about racing in a safe and predictable fashion. If someone else wants to write about it, they can go ahead and do it, but I’m not going to.
Turns out this dude is actually obsessed with me and Tweets about me all the time. I don’t know what I did to get him upset. It doesn’t really matter. If he were a well-known writer or a respected driver I’d get into some drama with him just for the lulz and the clicks but I have my hands full right now and, ah, so does he, I’m thinking. This dude’s like Captain Ahab, grabbing his spear with both hands and chasing a white whale for no reason. By that, of course, I mean that his obsession with me is unlikely to result in anything positive.
Alright, let’s get to business.
Bark was on fire this week, dispensing advice and recalling the glory days of Scion and helping a fellow new father navigate the automotive waters.
I’m shifting to more of a behind-the-scenes role at TTAC, so all I had was a news story and an opinion piece about how the economy killed Scion. The fact is that millennials are learning to deal with lowered expectations in the Obama era.
Haha. Lowered Expectations. You remember that skit?
Anyway.
Over at R&T, I took a week off from controversy, telling drivers to look ahead on the freeway like they would on a racetrack and humbly requesting the return of the Toyota Celica.
That’s all for this week… but in the upcoming week I hope to share my McLaren 675LT test with you. If you want to come up to speed on my McLaren history, you’re welcome to read about my drives of the 650S and the K-PAX World Challenge GT car and my drives and rides in the MP4-12C street car.
I’ll also keep you posted on Stef. She’s been banned from LeMons for a year under their no-fault punishment rules. I think she’s probably better off as a result. We’ll see.
Wow - so Stef got the ban stick for putting a car on its roof despite the fact that it was not moving under its own power at the time? WTF. I was aware of that rule, but figured that it only applied to drivers that were, uh, actually driving at the time of said incident.
I eagerly await video of this incident, as well as any information about the behavior of corner workers immediately prior to the crash.
Well, I literally watched this happen in my mirror. The GRM Miata was chasing me for a few laps while I traded places with the 2 broke 2 car Mustang. The Mustange saw the Nash stalled at the top of the hill into the back corner complex.
The Mustang went to the inside, I followed and as I cleared my rear to return to the line, I saw the hit.
I’ll spare you the graphic details, but I have never seen anything scarier. I screamed into my radio “ROLL THE EMTS NOW!! THE NASH IS ON ITS ROOF!”
My team owner began sprinting to the officials but they were already on it. In 2 turns, about 7 seconds, the course was red flagged and response vehicles were en route. Barber is a Indycar track and their course workers are easily some of the best in the business.
The fallout from this aside, the gear did its job. The course workers responded professionally with a speed and precision of roughly twice the speed of light.
As soon as they had word, the loudspeakers assured everyone the drivers were OK.
Damn ;
I hope she’s O.K. ! .
-Nate
She’s fine… I hear she’s drinking the pain away
That line about Tuesday is by far my favorite part of that movie.
Had to reread supercars to go. Would the 488 you reviewed in R&T have toppled the Mclaren for 1st?
I forced myself to learn looking as far ahead as possible as a teenager when I moved from cross country to competing in downhill and dual/bsx. I’s a skill that has proven to be invaluable while behind the wheel.
Mad TV had some real gems in there for a while. like most ensemble shows, they had trouble keeping a good cast together and it just kind of slid downhill, just like SNL has been doing since 1976.
My absolute favorite had to have been their skit showing the “PAX TV Presentation” of The Sopranos. “Wednesdays, from 9:00 p.m. to 9:03 p.m.” Will Sasso just nails his impression of James Gandolfini.
Everyone remembers Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford sketch on SNL, but few seem to remember the prophetic performance when Dan Akroyd played Jimmy Carter, declaring the result of runaway inflation to result in the following statement: “I believe the watchwords for the 80’s should be ‘Let’s Party!'”
Forty years is a long while to be sliding downhill. The longer you’ve been sliding downhill, the longer you have until you hit the bottom (Lindy effect corollary).
Why doesn’t Dahilsim have any fire in the Street Fighter movie? They needed all of it for that burn.
Re: Scion and why the millennial base who can’t afford them:
It’s not just thieving 65,000-annually-admitted 3rd World H-1B’s that have robbed millennials out of prosperity. It’s the lack of employment-ready college (or high school) graduates. Why? Obama and his liberal ilk, that’s why.
Today, standards at Democrat-teachers’-union run public (*coughgovernmentcough*) schools have degraded to the point that some districts’ graduates are functionally illiterate – anything to make those hardworking, un-fire-able “educators’” jobs easier.
Tuition has far outpaced inflation, from colleges hiring and paying armies of advisors and counselors, who, to justify their bloated sinecures, invent imagined offenses, deploy Orwellian speech codes and have coined the execrable “trigger warnings”. Tenured professorial positions at state universities with supporting “women’s studies” departments exist, to spit out solipsistic, solecistic “graduates” without the vocational wherewithal to live outside their moms’ basements, let alone afford used Scions after their student loan installments garnish their hipster barista mcjobs. Oh, and to those hipsters: buy a disposable razor; you may only grow a beard after you’ve earned it.
Riddle me this: should STEM universities have to include humanities as part of mandated course-load to graduate? I think not; limit that to a combined one-semester course on rhetoric, rigorous training on detecting and handling logical fallacies, and English Common Law. Humanities should be limited to high school and for further exploration of culture and Americana, refer to public domain Roman/Greek classics, associated Cliff’s notes, and Car and Driver issues (from before they went down the drain). In less developed countries, it’s not easy (or possible even) to get a student loan for a non-STEM degree.
A friend of mine says that things would change if companies were to begin hiring people with EdX or Khan Academy credits…